My husband that hero…or when I fled OVH for Siteground. The Sunday Post 01/02/2022

Today is Sunday time to look back in the rearview mirror and talk about my week . I am linking up to the Sunday Post hosted for years by Kimberly@caffeinatedreviewer .

In my private life

Well, this will be a mostly “private life” mixed with blogging life post as last week of blogging has been…difficult to say the least!

First let’s talk about the holiday!

We had a quiet Christmas, gathering on Christmas eve with the kids, my mom and my mother in law. We all got tested before meeting each others even if all adults have been vaccinated three times already and the kids already twice.

It was quiet and quick as my daughter is studying for her partials so we went back home before midnight!

On December 25th, I woke up at 7:30 AM to drive my daughter back to her dorm.

My son offered me two funko pops that I can customize to make them look like book characters.

On December 31st, it was also a quiet evening, just with my husband and son.

We were all in our PJ and watched Disney +! All three adults watching “The Last Dragon” and then “Lilo and Stitch!“

I began my holiday that night and have now two weeks ahead of me to rest and do what I want (mostly).

Now, onto the title of this post: My Husband that Hero…

I had already told you that since December 12th I had lots of problems with the blog being either slow, either unresponsive

As I hadn’t changed anything, I contacted my provider, the French OVH company, to ask what was happening.

Every time, we went to look at their infrastructure status and all was in green (good) or yellow (slight disturbance) according to their public dashboards.

But we had problems! So that didin’t mirror what I experienced.

The only way to join them is to create a ticket.

A ticket that gets an answer after 24 hours if you are lucky.

And what answers! Always generic answers telling that the problem was with you.

Either “I was taking too much resources and should change my (paying) plan”. But when we looked at the stats, it was not true.

Jetpack told me all the time for days that my site was off then on; then off,then on etc.

My husband began to work to improve my website. Caching, cleaning, optimizing etc.

On the 29 th, the performances on GTMetrix had improved and the loading time was way less than the 8 seconds as it was to begin with.

Then..on December 30 at 10 AM, I got an “Error 500 : FastCGI time out”.

Meaning “something has gone wrong on the web site’s server“.

I don’t know you but when I read “server” that means the problem is at my host provider, not on my website.

Began a string of tickets created by my husband, as he is an IT guy and even if he is not a web designer, he could talk better that “techie” language than I.

Soon he became…enraged!

We got only again generic answers denying that there was any problem at OVH, even when we sent snapshot of our logs stating black on white that the errors were indeed server errors!

My husband began posting on Twitter and on Twitter, he had a much faster reaction than through the tickets! Go figure.

Their answer was always “we have no problem on our site” or ” try with another IP address or another browser”.

From December 30th AM till December 31st PM my site was mostly dead.

After having “talked” laboriously for 6 days with the OVH “Support” (it is NOT a support at all, that term is a total JOKE), we decided to move from provider.

My husband had studied the different offers and read lots of reviews and contacted the SiteGround support.

In less than 2 minutes, in the afternoon of December 31st he had someone in a chat.

We decided to move the site and take a more expensive plan than I had at OVH but I wanted a support and a site running. Because by that point I was ready to stop blogging pure and simple.

Problem: we couldn’t use the SiteGround migrator plugin because…OVH server was down (even if they pretended otherwise) and the migrator was always stopped.

Lucky for me, my husband, on December 29th, had downloaded the site backup on our internal server. A very old computer that he repaired and use as a sandbox full of docker containers to host all his IT tools.

And on that local server, my website turned just fine, proof once more that the problem was not on my side but on OVH’s side.

So, in less than 4 hours, thanks to the Duplicator plugin that I had installed years ago, he manually uploaded my site from our home backup on SiteGround, changed the DNS etc.

SiteGround has amazing tools like SEO plugins, Google analytics, WEBP conversion, lazy loading, caching etc and we encountered some problems on January 1st as some didn’t work well with the Jetpack plugin.

So it was touch and go to see what features we could activate and what features we could not as it conflicted with other plugins.

But we did it!

Now I still have some minor problems here and there, things I must fine tune. The browsers, WordPress, Jetpack etc will need time to point everything to the new server.

My theme is a theme pre Gutenberg and I suspect that it is not optimal for the Gutenberg editor. I will try to find a more compatible one and you may see the look of my theme changing somehow in a few weeks.

Every time that we had questions and needed SiteGround support, they contacted us in less than 2 minutes, with technical solutions. They were extremely helpful!

We’ll see in some months if I am still happy but so far I am.

To give you an idea, I’ll leave below some pictures from Trustpilot reviews comparing OVH and Siteground.

Let’s begin with OVH reviews.

As you can see for OVH, on 1232 reviews, 72% give “BAD”.

Here is one testimony (one example representing many that I found)

Then let’s look at Trustpilot reviews for SiteGround

On 9.724 reviews, 92% give “EXCELLENT”.

I think this says it all.

So I want to thank my husband, who really was my savior, my hero, and who spent a whole week helping me fix my problems!

Thank you darling, you are the best husband I could ever have dreamed of!

OK I am stopping here!

No blogging news as I had lots of problems but next week, this post will be back to normal…hopefully!

Thanks for reading!

Sophie