I put up a small WordPress site over the weekend. It’s on my shared-hosting package, meaning the new site resides on the same sever share that this site sits on.
After pointing people to the new site today I received a message that it couldn’t be accessed. I checked and it worked for me, but when I checked again a few minutes later I got a ‘permission denied’ page, as if the site was unavailable or under construction. Over the next ten minutes or so I was able to replicate the problem on the other site, and even on this site.
My first tech support call to Network Solutions — my site host — went well enough. They showed me how to reset the permissions on my site, and things seemed better after that. Until a couple of hours later, when the same thing happened again.
My second tech support call was less reassuring. Not only was I told that the intermittent errors were a result of total server load, but WordPress was specifically described as a ‘known issue’ in taxing server bandwidth.
Uh…no. If you’re one of the largest hosting providers in the world, and you’re having trouble feeding my WordPress pages to a small handful of visitors, that’s not a WordPress problem, that’s a YouSuck problem.
I’m now being pointed to some helpful tips on speeding up WordPress installs, and have been advised to try using WPSuperCache (a plugin I have considered before), but having one of the most widely-used blogging apps described as a known issue by my site host is a fail.
After allowing malicious code injections into my site, failing to notify me of such in a timely manner, degrading the response time of this site to +30 seconds, and now this, I can’t recommend Network Solutions to anyone else. I’ll probably play out the end of my contract, but between now and then I’ll be looking for reliable hosting without excuses.
The good news is that while I was on hold a robo-message informed me that J.D. Powers might call to ask about my tech-support experience. Please do.
— Mark Barrett
Hi Mark,
I work for Network Solutions and would first and foremost like to apologize for the difficulties you’ve described. I’d like to discuss this with you further, so please feel free to send me an email or give me a call directly.
Looking forward to talking with you.
Best Regards,
Kate Hearity
Network Solutions
Kate,
Thanks for all (and whatever) you did to help solve the problems I was having. The access-denied issues were resolved in a day, and over the intervening two weeks I’ve had no problems to speak of. (The sites have lagged at times, but I understand that that’s both a bandwidth issue and something I need to continue to address in terms of site loading times.)
My hope is that these fixes will stand the test of time.