New Web Hosting! Jimvesting Dot Com Gets a Performance Boost & Upgrades

16 Jul 2008

New Web Hosting! Jimvesting Dot Com Gets a Performance Boost & Upgrades

Author: Jim | Filed under: Announcements, Wordpress

If you’ve been noticing some downtime over the past 24 hours… this was because I was in the process of transferring theNetFool.com over to a brand new server hosted by Host Gator. The deal that I received was really great, so if anyone else is looking for a turbo-boost of your own… shoot me an email and I’ll set you up with a deal!

I want to thank a lot of you for sending me instant messages. I know it might be annoying to get messages saying “hey, your website is down” every ten minutes… but it’s a true testament in my opinion of how well-run this site has become. User interactivity drives blogs, so I’m really stoked that you guys are so interested in the website’s performance. The comments-per-post ratio speaks for itself.

The Results
From my old hosting with LVCS.net, I really wasn’t optimized very much at all. The hosting package was unbeatable thanks to a personal relationship with the administrator, Ed Carpenter (my hero), but it was time to move on when I saw that my average load time was well over 3 seconds. After weighing my options, I decided to go with Host Gator to drop a few hundred dollars on because they offered superior customer service, already service over 1 million other websites and came at a steep discount to competition. Not only that, but they will be providing a 100mbps connection speed. That’s a heck of a lot faster than my old guys!

As you well know, loading time is one of the most important factors of your overall performance and traffic. If you have a decent web hosting account already and are just looking to speed things along, why not check out my post on how to speed up your blog or website? When it comes down to it, sometimes it pays to have a premium hosting account with an industry leader. Now that my loading time is pinned under 1 second (0.83 seconds on my test run), I’m confident that I made the right move.

Enjoy the faster loading times!

WordPress 2.6 Is Released!
As long as I was going through the painstaking process of transferring my blog from one host to another, I figured I mine as well check out the latest release of WordPress. WordPress 2.6 was released just a day or two again, so it’s fresh out of the box, and I highly recommend everyone who is running a website based on the platform to upgrade as soon as possible.

I haven’t had a chance to look through all the improvements yet, but it is all drawn out quite nicely on the official WordPress.org announcement page. From what I can see, it makes things a lot easier to organize. For example, I noticed that all of the plugins I have installed are now separated into two sections: active and inactive. This may sound ordinary, but its a great help when you are running 10, 20 or more plugins and things get crammed together. There is also now a live display of your comments and a lot more statistics.

The best feature I know of is the new word count. No more guessing on how long your posts are, or having to transfer things over to another word editor just to find out, it’s all embedded right in the editing software and updates while you go along… cool! What’s cooler is the new image uploading tool. This may have existed in 2.5, so I’m not going to claim it’s 2.6-specific, but I just noticed the sleek dynamic design and I gotta say I absolutely love it!

With some “stronger, better & faster” versions of the WYSIWYG editors, config pages and other management tools, this is actually a bigger step up from 2.5 than the one-tenth of a point would have you believe.

Now that things are all set up, I’m looking forward to some solid posts. I already have an awesome money-making technique in the books that I am working on getting out to the public, and I will be announcing the process for the quick-and-simple Flip Mino giveaway tomorrow. Three cheers to Host Gator for a successful server switch at top-notch speeds. Stay tuned for the contest post, one killer money-making scheme with no risk of loss or saturation and stay bullish on the net!

-Jimvesting