I wasted weeks of effort trying numerous combinations only to end up with yet another clunky solution that did not quite work right.
I FINALLY found the perfect combo. More on this later…
Then I made the 6 most common mistakes of building and owning a website.
It’s absolutely true what they say. You get what you pay for.
Seems everyone suffers through this path, as I did. You get sucked in by absurdly low prices and promises.
Then you find out, your website runs terribly, which causes a high percentage of people to simply leave.
It goes down for various reasons, and support is frustrating and worthless.
Just skim some of the recent reviews. You don’t have to look long.
Just skim some of the recent reviews. You don’t have to look long.
Companies use lucrative affiliate programs, that pay third parties when they bring in new customers.
The internet is full of professional affiliate marketers that make a living by raving about a company and earning $100,$200, or more for getting these hosting companies a new client.
I didn’t know all these reviews we’re written by people who get PAID when someone clicks on their affiliate link. No wonder they write raving reviews about them.
Like most people, I assumed my website was safe with my hosting company. Not true.
Most hosting companies do not do backups by default.
Don’t make this assumption. Sign up for daily backups, or be sure to log in and take a backup every day or week.
Your website may represent hundreds of hours of work, or more.
The majority of wordpress websites get hacked because busy people forget, or stop updating their software.
Hackers eventually find flaws in older plugins and themes, and that’s how they eventually get into your site.
Be sure you update your wordpress core every week, and your plugins and themes daily, if you really don’t want to get hacked!
– Wordfence hacked website survey (Image source: Wordfence)
Most hosting providers never bother to tell you, that you are responsible for your sites security.
Owners aware of this will typically install a bunch of security plugins, which can help sometimes.
However, they tend to be bloatware, and slow down the websites performance, which is critical to a great user experience.
Don’t get caught with your pants down. Be sure to install some kind of monitoring tool that checks your website every minute,
Better yet, set it up so it pages or texts your phone the instant your site goes down. Which is not uncommon with cheap hosting providers.
But for the ultimate solution. Tie your website monitoring to a prefessional sysadmin that can respond, and fix the problem you website goes down.
Your website is a major part of your branding. Don’t let your brand get damaged by down time.
So you are excited about the new blog you released a few weeks ago. You are pumping out great content and can’t wait for the feedback from all your readers.
One day you log into your site and you have comment notifications.
But the comments are links to p*orn sites, and there are THOUSANDS of them.
You spend the next serveral hours deleting thousands of SPAM comments. Frustrated, you turn off OPEN commenting and require approval of all comments.
The next day, you wake up to THOUSANDS of comments about pills, p*rn and other nonsense and have to spend time deleting them, while trying to avoid deleting real comments left by your readers. What a mess.
Time to go research SPAM control solutions for your wordpress site now.
