BlogOnCloud9

The Blog Herald has been busy writing about WordPress hosts and we were featured yesterday!

We were pleased that they highly recommended our services, saying:

Although BlogOnCloud9 can’t cater to everyone’s needs, their platform is the perfect solution for small business and personal bloggers desiring to leave blog purgatory and experience WordPress in a whole new light.

Here are the top three takeaways from their review:

1. One thing that impressed me about BlogOnCloud9 is that from the moment you sign up they immediately offer to help migrate your entire blog off of your host for free.  [Migrations are always free, regardless of how many blogs, their size, and/or complexity.]
2. … BlogOnCloud9′s team will guide you through the process of setting up your new blog, and will even help you configure your DNS settings on your domain. [From the get-go, we offer assistance with setup and optimal blog configurations. Then, we’ll help our bloggers with upgrades, enhancements, and anything else they need.]
3. As far as expense goes, BlogOnCloud9′s pricing models are more expensive than the “el cheapo” hosting sites that dot the digital world, although their plans are actually competitive considering the support that they’re giving users. [We are not competing with hosts that do little more than provide a place to host your blogs.  All our packages include WordPress support, and we encourage our clients to ask us any questions they have about their install, plugins, themes, etc. ]

We thank The Blog Herald for their awesome write-up and kind things they had to say about BlogOnCloud9.

Go see what they said about us.

How does one choose a host anyway? Perhaps your criteria includes:

• The cheapest price
• The amount of mailboxes, storage, and bandwidth
• If it is compatible with your current (or planned) site’s software requirements
• What others’ have to say about their experiences with a certain host
• etc …

We also realize that switching hosts is not something that is done lightly either. Particularly when you have an existing site that needs to be migrate and a bunch of email accounts that full of messages you just can’t afford to lose.

Whether it’s your first foray into the online realm or you are considering the “big move,” you just might have questions before you sign up your for plan.

BlogOnCloud wants to ease your mind. Go ahead and click on that “Chat with us”  button you see on the left side of the site. Not in a chatty mood? We also invite you to complete a contact form or call us toll-free at (888) WP-BLOGS.

We look forward to answering any concerns you might have. We want to be your WordPress host.

Automattic has adopted a WordPress upgrade philosophy that says (in part):

After the 2.1 release, we decided to adopt a regular release schedule every 3-4 months with the features primarily driven by ideas voted on by our users.

Since version 2.9 was released in December 2009, their roadmap projects that 3.0 will be available sometime in April 2010.  This, of course,  doesn’t account for incremental updates (the 2.8 branch, after all, had 6 in between releases). And the tireless themers and plugin authors will continue to work hard to make sure their efforts work with the latest software, so that adds complexity as well.

Unfortunately, it seems to mean that every time you launch your WordPress administrative panel, that something needs to be updated. It can be quite disconcerting to keep up and we sympathize with you. Luckily, if you are using well-coded themes and plugins, the upgrade process is quite easy and it often goes smooth.

But …

• Developers do abandon their plugins and formerly good plugins can go “bad”
• Some themes might be coded for older versions of WordPress, and updating the software and plugins can mess up your back-end and the way your theme functions as well
• Some plugin updates throw a fatal error messages, potentially causing you to have to reconsider, update, and even change some functionality
• Some plugin updates chug and churn to finally display the “white screen” of death
• Some hosts are still not even allowing auto-update, which makes it exponentially harder to manage your WordPress installs

Ah, the fun never ends.

Good new for our BlogOnCloud9 clients, our services include daily backups and we can perform regularly updates for your sites on your behalf if you don’t want to.

Note: because our client’s sites are often heavily-customized, we do not blindly blast updates. When necessary, we’ll systemically and carefully upgrade the blog software and any plugins, which minimizes any downtime and allows us to react to any unexpected issues that arise.

Not a BlogOnCloud9 client yet? We’d be happy to help you migrate your site – or host your first WordPress blog with us. Let us know!

BlogOnCloud9 was born out of the desire for great WordPress hosting.

Our parent company, ContentRobot, has recommended a variety of hosts since we started our full-service blogging company four years ago. We would be happy to provide our clients with a name or two that we thought were solid services at decent prices.

Unfortunately, as we (and WordPress) evolved, we found that hosts seemed to become increasingly unable to successfully serve and support the platform. As time went on, we became reticent to suggest hosting companies that we had routinely liked in the past.

During the summer of 2009, however, we started to upgrade our clients to WordPress 2.8 and found that many sites were having trouble staying up or were now extremely sluggish. Despite fiddling with plugins like WP Super Cache and applying server tweaks, we seemed to be losing a battle with site performance. The common denominator was shared hosting plans, which were failing popular sites.

Why didn’t ContentRobot offer hosting?

Clients would often ask us if we would host their blogs and blog-powered websites, but we were unsure if we wanted to take on that responsibility. We are now ready to step up and offer a WordPress hosting environment that we had only dreamed about.

We had experience with a variety of hosts and their configurations and believe that Rackspace Cloud Sites will give our clients the best environment on which to blog and get down to business.

Going beyond the technology, we had also run into the barriers of not being able to get proper WordPress support. To most hosts, it was just a piece of software and they weren’t bothering to learn how to assist with optimal configurations or even research resolutions to any problems with the software.

How about WordPress support?

Along with hosting, we are offering our years of expertise that we have garnered at ContentRobot. Not only to help clients with installing, configuring and WordPress and its related software, but to help clients with any of their blog-related issues (support, migrations, upgrades, and more).

And finally, we love WordPress because of its generous community that provides so many solutions with plugins, widgets, and third-party add-ons. Sometimes, though, too many choices lead  to problems.

ContentRobot has taken the time to find and review the best-in-class solutions. We know what works and what doesn’t work. Also, who are the key developers are and who are actively involved in updates and enhancements.

Now, BlogOnCloud9 customers can take advantage of our custom WordPress installation which will give you blogging, security, spam, SEO, and metrics tools, designed to help you manage your blog from the get-go.

We are excited to offer cloud-based WordPress hosting. Welcome to BlogOnCloud9.