On my Night Sky Observer website, I’ve found that the WP-DBManager plugin doesn’t autodetect paths to mysqldump or mysql. Had to submit a support ticket to Bravenet to get this info. More time spent waiting…

Several hours later…Bravenet got back to me and told me they won’t provide that info. I’ve appealed to their better judgement but am not hopeful of a positive response. It’s beginning to look like I’m going to have to move the site (all 5+Gb of it!) to another webhost at some point. That will not be a trivial task.

With Bumblesoft having sorted out the issue with issuing licence codes, I finally got an unlock code for the Easy EmpireBuilder plugin used on the Baileys Tackle blog, only to find that my server is down with a 502 Bad Gateway error. All my sites on this server are down. Have to scrub installation of a blog on baileystackle.com yet again. Have submitted a support ticket and now have to wait till the problem is fixed.

The Run-Up to Auto Blog Blueprint

I first came across the concept of autoblogging back in November 2009. Basically, all it means is that your blog runs on autopilot, pulling content from different sources and publishing it on a schedule you set up. Most such systems run on WordPress, utilizing a range of different commercial plugins. Some of these plugins pull and publish content on a schedule; others create a number of future-dated posts, based on keyword lists, that WordPress publishes when that post’s future date becomes “today”.

The system I came across late last year was WordPress Mage. This is a full autoblogging system based on WordPress. It also comes as a set of WordPress plugins for those who prefer to install their own WordPress blogs. Training is provided on how to build and market blogs using the system. Blogs can be monetized in a number of ways (Adsense, Clickbank, eBay, Overstock, Amazon and LinkShare) and you can always add other affiliate image ads and links to blogs as well.

I built a few blogs with it and decided to buy a couple of plugins to better display eBay listings (phpBay Pro and Auction2Post) and a plugin to turn Amazon product listings (along with customer reviews) into blog posts (ReviewAZON). Becoming more familiar with the software, I was able to make my sites look better. The WordPress Mage ethos is to build sites quickly, keep building and hope that some of them “stick” and take off. The training also advocates putting 50+ eBay listings on a page above any content.

What I didn’t know at the time is that WordPress Mage is very resource intensive and having more than a couple of such blogs on a standard webhosting account (e.g. on Hostgator), results in more than your fair share of server resources being used. In my case, Hostgator suspended my account for overuse of resources, which meant I had to find another webhost who could meets the blogs’ needs.  I kept two blogs on Hostgator and moved the rest to Webhost4SEO. It was then that another problem raised its ugly head – the WordPress Missed Schedule Posts problem.

I wasn’t heavily promoting the blogs and the upshot was that they weren’t making money. Indeed, they were costing money due to the amount of time being put into them. I also  had a lot of hosting issues that have meant that the blogs were offline for periods at a time. So that’s where the Autoblog Blueprint comes in…

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After almost a week of being offline due to webhosting problems, WebBiz KnowledgeBase is finally back online. So why did it take a week? Surely it should just have been a matter of changing nameservers and migrating the blog from one webhost to another. Easy, right? Nope! It should be a relatively simple thing to do but things are never as easy as you expect…

Why The Blog Needed To Be Moved

Ok, the first question I hear you ask is “Why did you need to move the blog at all?”. Well, it wasn’t something I decided to do on a whim, just to see if I could do it. Originally, this blog was on a Webhost4SEO shared hosting account. I had other blogs on that account too, but those were blogs built using WordPress Mage. As I’ve come to realise, that particular set of plugins is a resource hog but more on that later.

Anyway, webbizkb.com is my prime blog and it’s the one I worry most about and the one I always want to have up and running. The other blogs on the shared hosting account were chewing up the server resources and every so often the server had a heart attack and keeled over. All sites offline as a result. At the time, neither I nor the webhosting company knew what the cause was but an errant WordPress plugin looked to be the likely culprit. As the blogs grew in size, the server keeled over more often. And webbizkb.com was down for hours, sometimes a day, at a time. And at other times, the site was very slow to load. Not good. And that prompted me to look around for alternative hosting…

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Ever have one of those days when just about everything seems to go wrong? Well, I’ve pretty much had a week of that. Some things went well, most didn’t.

So what did go right (I’m starting with this list because it’s much shorter than the things that went wrong!)?

1. I released the latest edition of my SiteBuilder Elite software. That had been on the back burner somewhat, because I’ve been dedicating time to following Alex Jeffreys in his coaching program.

2. I released the latest edition of my LunarPhase Pro software. This has absolutely nothing to do with internet/affiliate marketing – it’s a software tool for amateur astronomers that predicts various lunar phenomena, contains an interactive Moon atlas and other stuff.

3. I got my most recent blog post written up and published (My Article Marketing Strategy).

4. I managed to get a Squidoo lens set up for my training with Alex Jeffreys.

Now for what’s gone wrong…
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If you bought my SiteBuilder Elite website authoring package, you’ll know that I recommend Hostgator as a webhost. Why them and not GoDaddy who are a huge brand in the web hosting business?

Well, first off, I have used both hosting platforms so I have good experience of both. For me, however, GoDaddy is all about making people aware of their brand and not providing an end product that’s good enough. It’s a classic example of style over substance.

So why have I come to this conclusion?

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