Stand Out Blogger -

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you will know that I absolutely rave about my web hosting company HostGator.

1. 1. I featured them number one in my post ‘The Best Blog Hosts‘; and
   2. I highlighted their proactive support when my blogs got hacked by a phishing scam.

And I am back again today with another story of how the HostGator team again proved why I will not be changing hosts any time soon.

The Story Starts With A New Niche Blog – One I Bought

The last month has been basically a holiday, I’ve done a little work on my niche blogs but basically put, after the sale of my greenhouse blog I had a well deserved break.

To kick things back into action, I was browsing the DigitalPoint forums and found an interesting niche blog for sale and decided to pounce on it. Now the domain isn’t fantastic (it has a dash) and the niche isn’t huge, but for $50 (yes, only $50), I got:

• A domain that was indexed.A blog already getting search engine traffic

• An income earning (reported Adsense earnings of about $6/month)

A decent buy I thought as it saved me a lot of time in the initial set up, plus it adds another blog to the portfolio. The niche is mens Italian shoes for those playing at home and it was my first attempt at transferring a blog (and it was not fun!)

So What Happened?

Well I changed the name servers over to my hosting and usually this only takes 30 minutes to come into effect, but it took over 24 hours to update this time (which could be due to the floods over here? because I know even our ISP got hit for a bit). So I was working everything through a proxy (because everywhere else in the world could see my new site except me) and I’d just got it all installed, uploaded the plugins and imported the content and I was actually just working on adding a few Adsense units when I refreshed my page and it came up with an error saying:

“Error establishing a database connection”

Which I thought was extremely weird because I hadn’t touched my wp-config file, so after a bit of Googling a couple of people were saying that it could be a database server error, so talk to you host.

I Started Chatting With HostGator Support…

So I jumped on HostGator’s live support and started telling ‘Johnathan’ my problem.

He said that he would check it out for me, and came back to say that everything was working on his end – so it must be something on my end (ahhhh!!!)

So I promptly told him that I hadn’t touched the database connection file and it was working one minute and then not the next, so he decided to dig deeper – but couldn’t find anything on his end. He then asked if he could have a look inside my account to see if he could find the problem – which I agreed to, and within 2 minutes he asked me to refresh and see if my site was back (it was).

Turns out that my database password had changed (no idea how), so now it is back up and running.

It Wasn’t Even Their Fault… and They Still Fixed It.

After hearing so many hosting horror stories, the thing I absolutely love about HostGator is their support. If it is their fault or mine, they are always seem willing to help find a solution!

If you are having problems with your host can I recommend that you consider HostGator? Their service is incredible and they will even transfer your websites for you!

Use the code 1CENT’ to get your first month for just one cent!