TommyCarey
Level X3
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When it comes to a website, you will always need hosting. But how do you pick the right hosting for what your website needs? Well it isn't always clearly explained by the hosting companies when you want to sign up for something and this is probably due to them just wanting your business. They wouldn't get many sign ups if they told you that you would be charged for overages on your account or your websites design was to complex for the hosting you set up.
Hosting plans can be pretty obscure because the companies put a little bit of information about each plan, which is understandable because they want sign ups. But don't you think it should be the other way around and they should be giving us all the info we need prior to sign up?
A good example of this is when I was helping out a friend with his photography website. I swayed him away from "custom designs" and showed him the glory of WordPress and the themes that can make his website look like a million bucks lol 
I had him look through themeforest for some themes he liked and then I looked at the final 3 he was interested in and chose the one that would work best. I got him a fully responsive theme that was already a top seller so I know it had a decent support system if anything went wrong. The theme had all the bells and whistles, which was nice, and the demo looked great.
So what could go wrong?
Well when I logged into his hostgator account I wiped his WordPress install and reinstalled it so I could start fresh. I did this because it was easier than deleting other plugins and whatever he previously had on there that could conflict with the theme and plugins I was about to be working with. So after hostgator refreshed and there was a new WordPress install, I uploaded the theme and activated it. I then did what anyone would do and I downloaded and activated all the plugins. So now he has a basic functioning website and I was about to download the demo content so that he could get a really good idea of how everything looked. He basically would just have to edit the images to something he liked better, one of his own photos, and it would be complete.
This is where I hit a snag....
When you're working with a theme and demo content, you can run into download/upload problems do to the PHP parameters not being high enough. The parameters for this hosting plan were set at 29 seconds, which means if anything takes longer than 29 seconds to perform, the script is stopped in it's tracks and fails. I got roughly 95% done uploading the demo content and hit a snag where I couldn't upload any other images because of the parameters. Not a problem, right? Wrong... I contacted Hostgator and I was explaining what I needed and what I was doing. The first guy I was chatting with said "Ok, try it now" and it still failed at the exact same point. I talked with a second person and they then told me that the hosting plan I was on didn't allow me to upload scripts that take this long to load something when it comes to images. I asked them if they could just increase the parameters slightly so that I can finish the upload, and they told me NO.... I then asked "Ok, so what's the point of having a WordPress Optimized hosting plan if I can't even upload the WordPress theme I just purchased for my Photography company?" Obviously I had to pretend I was my friend so that they would talk to me lol.
There's more...
This is when HostGator told me to change my plan to a dedicated server or a VPS because they cannot adjust the PHP parameters on the WordPress Optimized plans. I asked if they could just switch "my" plans and "I" would pay the difference, and I was told that was not a possibility. Now when I looked at my friends subscription, he had just paid them over $300 for the year to keep his website hosted. They wanted him to sign up for a new plan in order to use the demo content for his theme....
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