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Web Hosting Review - Why We Recommend HostGator
Posted in Web Hosting & Reviews
Is your website important to you?
Our website AskDanAndJennifer.com is a very popular Dating & Relationship advice column.
When one of our advice articles recently hit the #1 spot on the Netscape.com homepage, the traffic to our site skyrocketed. We got over 30,000 visitors that day. Wow!
Amazingly, our HostGator shared web hosting account held it’s own and we had no downtime!
Downtime would have been very expensive, as we brought in about $500 in passive blog revenue that day.
A word of warning
While trying to improve conversions, better monetize a site, etc, it’s easy to go a little overboard adding new software, WordPress plugins, and so on to your site. In short, you can shoot yourself in the foot and break your own site - like we recently did. Oops. It was expensive too.
Not long after this first incident above, we had another article featured on Netscape.com, and our site went down HARD. That day would have brought us 40,000 visitors, and we missed out on most of it.
Why? Well, we installed a very system intensive software package called OpenAds to track all our ad clicks. What we didn’t realize at the time is that running OpenAds the way we had it configured added the equivalent of 20 visitors for EACH real visitor. So it was like having 800,000 visitors that day instead of 40,000.
To their credit, the HostGator staff did quickly move us to a semi-dedicated server so we could handle that load, but we missed out on that really great prime-time traffic spike that morning.
We have since decided to move our primary site to a more powerful virtual dedicated system to handle our the increasing traffic levels and our experimentation with bizarre and often unpredictible software packages and WordPress plugins. 
Web and blog hosting decisions
Handling 30,000 visitors to our WordPress blog in a single day was not bad for a $9/month hosting account. We were pretty darn impressed. And that’s why we recommend HostGator to our friends regularly.
In short, if you want a hosting provider that is inexpensive and JUST WORKS, and you’re bringing in less than $1,000/month then we recommend you go with HostGator. That’s what we did, and that’s where we send our friends.
Can YOUR web host handle 30,000 visitors in a day? Try out HostGator yourself and let us know what YOU think.
Want MORE web hosting options?
When we first started looking for a good web host a few years ago, we asked around and got a general shoulder shrug from most of our friends. Yeah, they all had one host or another that was "OK", but nobody could tell us"the best one to go with". So after a LOT of painstaking research, we ended up with a "short list" of possible contenders. These are "the ones to choose from".
HostGator is great because it JUST WORKS, they offer a lot of great features, and you can just sign up for an inexpensive monthly plan, month by month.
BUT, if you’re really serious about your web site or blog, and are willing to sign up for a yearly plan, there are a couple of options that offer better service - and they’re worth considering seriously…
MidPhase - Reliable, Great Support, Unlimited Domains
AN Hosting - Think of this as MidPhase, same excellent service, but at a discount. In fact, use coupon code ANHOST911 when you sign up and get 2 months of free hosting.
If you’re OK with a yearly plan, AN Hosting is definitely the way to go.
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