BlueFur Web Hosting, BlueFur Dedicated Server, and BlueFur Personal Customer Service. Advertised and lauded on BlueFur.com home page, these were all things I unfortunately experienced from the Canadian web hosting company. This will be a long, sad story and the post about it will be lengthy and melancholy as well (though it will not begin that way), broken into multiple parts so they can be read in easily digestible segments. What I have to say is important to any webmaster seeking hosting or to one thinking of switching hosting companies.
Underneath The Cover
The reason for this series is to inform through my experiences, to educate on what to look for in a web host and web hosting for your website. As the little guy, as a person starting out, this is very important as there are wolves ready to pounce on you if they catch the scent of a ripe and maiden pigeon. Through this series you will bear witness to nightmare web hosting conduct at the hands of my former website host and myself (“Call me [Pigeon]. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely”), the unawares punching bag and victim of highly dubious business practices. Through this series you will learn how to pick the right host so that what happened to me will never happen to you or others thinking of acquiring a web host for their website.
There are many words I could use to describe my experience with BlueFur, my first web hosting company, but I will not. I will keep a civil tongue lest it be ripped out by the root by lawyers over libelous accusations and stretchers. Here you will find the truth of what happened to me at their (expletive deleted) hands by their own hand (I saved Every. Single. Email.).
BlueFur Logo
In the Beginning
My introduction into the webmaster world started with John Chow. I read an article showcasing John Chow in Entrepreneur Magazine (the February 2008 issue) and decided to start my first movie website soon after. I started it on February 7, 2008. I read John Chow’s eBook. It had many useful tips, especially for someone new to the field like I was (the inspiration for my own how to guide: Start A Movie Website: WordPress Edition). Under “Domains” in John Chow’s eBook was a suggestion for a hosting company called BlueFur.com. I looked at their website. I looked at the offerings and decided to go with a service entitled Managed Blog Hosting. Since I was new to websites, I figured I needed all the help I could get. I automated my payments so that I would always be on time with them and my BlueFur services would never be interrupted. Everything went well for almost a year. When I needed help with a plug-in or was having some issue with the movie website, I emailed BlueFur (submitted a ticket) and within a reasonable amount of time, the issue was ironed out for me or I was given instructions on how to do so myself.
I had learned many things from January 2008 to November 30, 2008. I made many contacts through the medium, some of which I would even consider friends. I was about to celebrate my one year anniversary in January 2009 with over 400 posts published during the aforementioned timeframe. Our movie website was being spidered by 12-16 bots per day and it was getting nice hits from Google (what I thought were nice hits at the time). The movie website had a Page Rank of 4, had over 658 modified images in 404 posts, 78 (400-1700 word) Film Reviews, a fair amount of comments (in my opinion), and there were some cool links pointing to the site as well. I had put in countless hours modifying the php files of the site, social networking, you name it. I poured everything I had learned and was learning about webmastering, publishing articles online, search engine optimization, and running a business into that movie website. It was not the best or most high-tech movie website on the Internet but it was mine. It was my baby. I had given birth to it.
All of that ended on November 30, 2008 because of BlueFur, my web hosting company at the time.
Coming Up
The next segments of this web hosting series can easily be heralded as: “Here comes the pain baby! Here comes the pain!” – Brian De Palma, Snake Eyes, but first a question:
- Have you every had trouble with your web hosting company before?
Please feel free to share that story below.
