Updated (May 27, 2010): I have now been with HostGator for several months, and I have to say I am extremely happy with them. The features they promise are exactly what you get. I am hosting several domains on one account, for dirt cheap, honestly, and it all works flawlessly. Their live support is available 24/7, and they always solve the problem, and are very polite and courteous.

If you are looking for a webhost, you can not go wrong with HostGator. Try using the coupone code inthelimelight when you sign up to receive $10.00 off your package.

Original Post: I can’t say I expected this, but as it turns out, I have switched webhosts again. I had been extremely happy with my prior host, so my recent experience with them really caught me by surprise. For that reason, I am going to resist the urge to detail what happened here, or even mention their name. Suffice it to say, I think they could still provide a valuable service to a lot of people, unfortunately, they were no longer able to meet my needs.

Finding a webhost is probably the most difficult part of running a website. The problem is that there are literally hundreds, maybe even thousands of companies out there offering webhosting and knowing where to start looking is near impossible.

Your instinct, if your like me, is to search the webhost review websites. Unfortunately this is not a reliable way to find a webhost and most of these websites are in fact giant affiliate marketing sites in disguise. That is, they are being paid by the webhosts at the top of the list. You can’t even trust the user reviews because they have often been tampered with, or in the case of really negative reviews, sometimes the user just didn’t know what they were doing and got upset because of that.

So for me, I have decided to take a gamble that Tyler Cruz is right, and give HostGator a try. Remeber to use the code inthelimelight when you sign up to get your ten dollar discount.

The process of transferring my site to HostGator was actually quite tricky. I wanted to ensure that there was no downtime, and that the process would be entirely transparent. Therefore it was necessary to completely copy my database and files over from my previous host, before I transferred my domain. The reason this is tricky is that WordPress has some internal functions that are tied to the domain name, and therefore testing a website that is running on a server without that domain name pointing to it can be quite difficult. I won’t go into detail about how I solved this problem, but I sill say I banged my head against the wall a bit.

There was another bonus. After my server move I began testing various function of my site and I discovered that my WPAds plugin had ceased to function properly, probably since the upgrade to WordPress 2.9. It was still rotating my ads, but adding new ads or changing existing ones had become impossible. It was clear that the creator of WPAds was never going to update it, so I once again started searching for a replacement.

Well this time I found it! Ads on The Limelight are not being served by the Datafeedr Random Ads plugin, and it’s fantastic! If you are looking for that elusive, free, ad management plugin for WordPress, this is it.

I also took this opportunity to tweak the layout a bit. I got rid of the PagePeel Ad, and increased the font size somewhat. What do you think?