I’m reluctant to post after the last time. I didn’t intend for so many people to comment, but here goes. It was a very good suggestion to create a staging site and that is what I did. Only at the final step I ended up with over 4,000 errors. I had a lot of help from a very kind gentleman and the staging site was set up manually. However, trying to do anything with BackupBuddy’s push/pull feature resulted in more errors.
I’ve now spent the past ten days between my host and iThemes support. The latter have been excellent. From my host I’ve had “there is nothing wrong with our server”, “there are hundreds of domains on the server and nobody else has a problem” to an almost flat out denial when iThemes found two problems. Now they have tinkered with something to try and prove a point and I can no longer make a back up at all, plus MailPoet has also died. One of the errors was wp-cron loopback and there were also cURL library issues.
iThemes very kindly made a clean back up for me yesterday and I was all prepared to move to their hosting, only I’ve been told it is very unlikely they will let me use Classic Press. At this point I feel like I’m stuck in the middle of some crazy turf war. I want to use CP, but apart from that, all I want is to take photographs and write blog posts. I spent all yesterday in tears and now I’m wondering if the best thing is just to delete my site. I’ve worked on it for the past seven years, but the aggravation is making me ill.
The truth is that I don’t know who supports WP and who supports CP. I un-Jetpacked my site when I moved here because that one was obvious. I found one host who supports CP, but they don’t have enough space for my site. The back up is a tad over 700Mb now and then there will be the staging site. I need a bit of extra space to host images on my photography forum, or else all the links will be broken. I don’t expect to find the cheapest host possible, but equally I can’t afford much on a tiny pension
Sorry to hear about the issues and hassle you’ve been having.
I migrated to a shared hosting package with A2 hosting last year and have been happy with service so far. I believe they offer free site transfers for new accounts which would help you move your site over.
I run several sites with them where two have databases over 1GB in size and files over 300GB without any capacity issues.
Only thing that came up was Patchman identified an XSS vuln in some page; it erroneously saw them as Wordpress; I flagged as ignore and not heard about it since.
I have ClassicPress on about 10 sites without any other issue (including two sites which get 10-15,000 visits per month.)
Thank you Tim. I feel as though I’m bothering everyone. I can probably move my site and create a staging site if there are no errors, but I don’t know which host to choose. iThemes have been so helpful so I don’t understand why they won’t allow Classic Press and because of that, I’m afraid to take any decisions at all. I read about wp-cron and understand a bit, so BackupBuddy and MailPoet dying don’t worry me too much. There is still this nagging feeling that this isn’t going to end well…
There’s no reason why it shouldn’t end well. The only reason why iThemes may not allow ClassicPress is because their hosting is likely to be based on WordPress and WP might be pre-installed, but I don’t know that for certain. I’ve messaged them to ask, and then we’ll know for sure. It’s not a case of iThemes being difficult or anything. It’s just that their systems are (currently) designed to work with WP.
There really shouldn’t be any issues with wp-cron. if your existing hosts have disabled it, it’s because their hosting isn’t up to the job, in which case it’s definitely time to move elsewhere.
And if iThemes aren’t suitable, there are several other hosts around. You may not get the complete BackupBuddy / WP (or CP) hosting package with other hosts but that’s something that can be worked around.
I’m primarly with Schokokeks.org (also see the thread about them in this very forum) - they are perfect for staging, development and smaller sites. Although they are based in Germany, they should have any issues (read: language barriers) to take on non-German customers.
