Web Hosts

Primar13 · September 15, 2016

Hey Everyone.

TL;DR

I'm part of a gaming group that is in need of a new web hosting provider. We lost our Site after 5 years and are trying to rebuild. we need something that will also allow access by multiple admins from multiple continents without panicking and locking us out because "Fraud" lol.

Here's some Backstory. We had a Wordpress Website hosted with "Servage" for well over 5 years, had lots and lots of content, more photos, videos, posters, and stories than you can shake a stick at. A few months back they had a server outage which took down the websites of many of their clients. We were also overjoyed to hear that they had not been making the regular backups that they said that had been doing for that period and we were informed we had lost all our content........

A few weeks later they were able to get the server functional and they did a "Restore" of the data, except they didn't put the stuff back where they got it from, Folders were not in the right places and such which really screwed with the site and the DB's. After a lot of "Surgery" I was able to get it "Functional" long enough to actually do some WordPress backups, but with 5 years of content that took hours and hours to complete. We were having some issues with the DB's at the time and it was pretty clear this was going to be a salvage operation and this site was not going to be brought back to life. Pages were taking 90+ seconds to load, which made this the most tedious project on the planet. Eventually, we salvaged all that we could and dumped the old site so that we could do a fresh install. I also took the opportunity to Create a new Theme, and really revamp it with a layout that better matched the group, and fell in line with the official sites of the game that this community is built around.

I did a Fresh install of Wordpress with no content and found that we were still seeing 45+ second load times on pages, which was pretty ridiculous considering the site had no content. I tried uploading our Backups, which were too large to upload with the default Wordpress importer tool, and there were a LOT of posts and content on the old site.
After some difficult work, I was able to get the limit increased so that I could attempt again, but then it would run for about 2 hours uploading/importing, and then timeout and fail, having only imported about single years worth of content. I thought maybe this was a one-off thing, so I deleted all the Content, users, images and such and tried the import again and got the same result. in fact tried it about 6 times in total never getting a full restore.

We entirely sure if its an issue with the hosting system itself, or maybe an issue with the DB's or a mixture of the two, and support has been less than helpful, and to be honest, I don't trust them anymore anyways, so its time to move on.

I need suggestions for where we can setup a new Wordpress install.
Also, there are three of us, who will be doing the main bulk of the work getting this setup, I'm in the US, one is in Canada, and the third Australia, so preferably a hoster who isn't gonna lock us out when they get logins from multiple continents

I've dealt with Servage, and Gator before and have not had good results with either, so any others would be helpful.

Also, not sure if linking or suggesting hosters is gonna be a problem, but if it is, PM me. So that we don't get yelled at. lol