I'm happy to announce billnapier.net, and my wife's dawnsdarktreasures.com, have moved to HotDrupal. I asked around on a Drupal group on Facebook. I received a lot of great responses. I chose to jump right in to HotDrupal as they had decent prices and have the servers tweaked to run Drupal. We moved away from Smarterasp.net as a host. They had a catastrophic failure of some type. Both of our sites were completely wrecked. What was terrible about it was the fact that I was almost finished adding content to both sites. I was in the midst of learning about a back up tool for Drupal. I didn't get a chance to use it. I contacted tech support and they would fix one or two things for me on a site or two. But I felt they didn't understand the extent of the damage. Nor did they explain any fixes. We had to move.
Installing with Smarterasp.net
This was a breeze! I just followed the instructions that came with our purchased templates and viola! I really enjoyed that, and miss it.
Installing with HotDrupal:
Installing this site on HotDrupal was a real challenge. The one-click install has issues, or maybe it doesn't and I am just misunderstanding something. It strips out the install.php and really tightens up the file security. This causes the site to partially work. No CSS works out of the box when attempting to add my purchased theme. This caused a lot of headache and many re-installation attempts.
So why did I stay?
Well for one thing, I paid for four months of hosting in advance. So I was committed to making this work. I reached out and asked for help. I got Steve's attention and he was great. Not only did he fix everything, but he explained what he did. This is crucial as I need to build a second site for my wife. I needed to know what was going wrong. The short of it was files and folder permissions were way too restrictive. Steve showed me how to open them up really fast with a terminal command. I also got my first tutorial in SSH from him. He also gave me a terminal command to backup and restore my site. I've tested this and it works.
This is why I stay. This is how it's done. Thanks Steve.
I'm happy to announce billnapier.net, and my wife's dawnsdarktreasures.com, have moved to HotDrupal. I asked around on a Drupal group on Facebook. I received a lot of great responses. I chose to jump right in to HotDrupal as they had decent prices and have the servers tweaked to run Drupal. We moved away from Smarterasp.net as a host. They had a catastrophic failure of some type. Both of our sites were completely wrecked. What was terrible about it was the fact that I was almost finished adding content to both sites. I was in the midst of learning about a back up tool for Drupal. I didn't get a chance to use it. I contacted tech support and they would fix one or two things for me on a site or two. But I felt they didn't understand the extent of the damage. Nor did they explain any fixes. We had to move.
Installing with Smarterasp.net
This was a breeze! I just followed the instructions that came with our purchased templates and viola! I really enjoyed that, and miss it.
Installing with HotDrupal:
Installing this site on HotDrupal was a real challenge. The one-click install has issues, or maybe it doesn't and I am just misunderstanding something. It strips out the install.php and really tightens up the file security. This causes the site to partially work. No CSS works out of the box when attempting to add my purchased theme. This caused a lot of headache and many re-installation attempts.
So why did I stay?
Well for one thing, I paid for four months of hosting in advance. So I was committed to making this work. I reached out and asked for help. I got Steve's attention and he was great. Not only did he fix everything, but he explained what he did. This is crucial as I need to build a second site for my wife. I needed to know what was going wrong. The short of it was files and folder permissions were way too restrictive. Steve showed me how to open them up really fast with a terminal command. I also got my first tutorial in SSH from him. He also gave me a terminal command to backup and restore my site. I've tested this and it works.
This is why I stay. This is how it's done. Thanks Steve.