My newest WP Engine website is under construction! My daughter and I are building it together. Since we like to go fishing a lot, we decided we’d do a website about pier fishing in our area of Florida. There are more than a dozen good fishing piers within 20 miles of our house, so we are going to do what I’ve found works best when making a new website: find something you like to do and make a website about it!
In addition to making the site together, I am doing a “case study” on how we put it together. As we build it out, that information will be available on the start a website section of this site. I’ll be chronicling the entire process.
Why WP Engine?
I have the WP Engine “pro plan” for a number of my sites. I migrated from Hostgator last winter because HOSTGATOR SUCKS! Let me explain.
I had a number of my sites hosted at Hostgator, including a big earning affiliate site. Right before Christmas 2015 (December 22 to be exact), my servers got hacked with malware. When I asked Hostgator to help me out, they wanted me to DO IT MYSELF or pay someone else to clean it up for me! Now I don’t know how to get into the php or MySQL or any of that other crap on my servers; I’m a blogger and internet marketer – not a frigging programmer! Had the malware attack occurred earlier in December or in November, it could have cost me a LOT of money in lost holiday sales.
They were so obtuse dealing with me, I swear I was going to lose my mind. Here’s what they said to me (the original reply was longer but this is the gist of their attitude):
At this time, we are no longer performing cleaning of accounts for our clients. This includes any malware removal or securing of accounts which have been compromised. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
When a money-making site gets hacked, it’s not an “inconvenience,” it’s a BIG PROBLEM and they took nearly a month to rectify it! Once I was back up, I left Hostgator faster than the Roadrunner blasting down the road away from Wiley Coyote!
That’s where WP Engine came in
They offer Managed WordPress Hosting. That means they manage the back-end of my sites and I deal with what I need to do to conduct my business. I don’t need to worry about C-Panels or databases or any of that stuff; that’s their job.
I was able to migrate my sites quickly and easily using their site migration tool and everything I needed to know was easily found in their “support garage.” When I had a small security issue, they dealt with it quickly. Their hosted sites load fast, too. I couldn’t be happier.
Back to the Fishing Site….
As the summer progresses, I’ll be setting up the site with my daughter and teaching her WordPress as we go along. The fun part is, we get to fish a lot! As I said earlier, I’ll be going through the process, step by step, of how we build it on this site.
Building out a website is a job. She wanted to do it so she could learn a skill and make some money online like daddy. I wanted to do it with her because it totally rationalized fishing a lot!
Stay tuned……
It’s been several YEARS since I wrote ANYTHING on Rob Merlino dot com! The reason is, I’ve been wicked busy with other projects like the