Over the past few days if you have been a regular visitor or discovered us for the first time, you may have noticed the website was not coming up properly, loading too slowly, things looked out of place and basically just wasn’t functioning properly. Long story short, the phenomena you were experiencing was a result of our growth and expansion to the point we had outgrown our hosting plan. You may recall back in October 2009 we had to move to a different hosting company because we had outgrown our hosting. Well, cut to the chase, it was happening again.
The good news is that we are now with NickHost. The way I found NickHost was via this Twitter post where I was lamenting the website’s slow load speeds and inconsistent rendering. Nick Host messaged me via Twitter regarding my frustration and from there the ball got rolling. It was Nick’s attention to detail and ability to listen to what I needed and not trying to sell me something I didn’t need was what sold me on making the switch to his personal web hosting. I didn’t feel like I was going to told I needed a bunch of upgrades that sound big and fancy but really were just an upsell to increase the price. Nick really listened and had the expertise to know what TailgatingIdeas.com needed and what we needed to do. I am a tailgater first who just happened to find some meager success blogging about it. So when it comes to the technical side of running a website, I am as lost as a toddler in the middle of the RV section of a parking lot. Nick understood this and never once took advantage of my technical naivete.
I am happy to say that even though we had some bumps in the road (mainly caused by me trying to “fix” things and only making them worse) in transitioning TailgatingIdeas.com to a new host server, we are back and running at full speed. You will probably notice the site loads faster, images come up quicker and things are not broken like they were before. Although we should have done this a while ago we are happy to say we are ready for the onslaught of new visitors that the impending college and NFL football season will bring.
One quick note, if you or your tailgating crew have a website and you want to take it off of Facebook or Blogger or heaven forbid, MySpace, make sure to check out NickHost.net. Nick will take care of you and his rates are very reasonable and his customer service is top notch. We’re very glad to be back up and running and would not have been able to do it without the TLC that Nick over at NickHost.net gave us.
Now let’s get back to the business of blogging about tailgating. We have a football season to get ready for!