After several unhappy incidences with my hosting company, Aplus.net, I am taking langwitches.org and my other domain names to another company.

Here is the e-mail explanation I received from Aplus:

During the past month we have noticed that your account is going over
the usage limitations that you plan provides. Here are the details:

Username: langwitches,

Usage: 48min CPU time daily (198% over)

Suggested plan to upgrade: eCommerce

On shared server the limitations have to be kept because if one uses
more of the resources of the server, it is always at the expense of the
others on the same server. We can not let this happen and your account
is currently suspended. Please, check with our sales representatives and
they will help you with the upgrade.

It looked like that Langwitches was getting too many hits per day (not a bad problem), but I “had to” upgrade my account from 7.95 a month to over $30 a month for a so called e-commerce account, so I would receive my e-mails. I just happened to be out of the country when my site and account was suspended. It took several phone calls, being on hold forever, several incompetent sales representatives and 30 hours to get my site back up and running.

Since I don’t sell anything on my blog, had issues with customer service and support before, I felt that it was not the right fit anymore for me.

Bluehost.com was then recommended by several of my twitter friends.

1. I called Bluehost and was assured that they did not have such Signed up online with Bluehost.com . Pre-paid for a year $95.40 ($7.95 per month with no set up fee)
2. Signed into the control panel and created a new database
3. Made sure I noted the new database name, username and password
4. Downloaded the newest version of WordPress (2.3.3)
5. Edited the wp-config-sample.php file with the database names, renamed the file wp-config.php and uploaded all WordPress files via ftp to the new host.

The WordPress export/ import  function did not work as easily as I had anticipated, since the maximum file size that is allowed for import was for 2.0 MB and my XML file was larger (of course). I called BlueHost and they quickly pointed my to the PHP admin area in their controlpanel where I could import the WP database backup file (.sql). It looks like everything imported fine, EXCEPT all the categories assigned to each post.

So I am slowly adding categories to each blog post. I only have about 1000 more to go ;). Once I was sure that the blog transfered fine I went to my domain name registrar- Namesecure.com and edited the DNS to point to the new server from bluehost. It can take up to 96 hours for the changes to take effect.

Let’s see when this post will show up under langwitches.org/blog/?

I already noticed that a plugin PhotoDropper that did not work on my old host is already working in the new dashboard. Don’t know if that was an issue with my previous version of WP (2.3.2)  or had something to do with the host. Can’t wait to try out all the Flickr Photo Galleries that never worked with Aplus.