by Shishir Chandrawat | Mar 4, 2015 | Web Development, WordPress
Follow me WordPress is a powerful tool to build amazing websites and it’s not only limited to blogs, with the host of themes and amazing plugins available. One can build pretty much any website off WordPress. I decided to start Grishbi quite some years back and was always taken back by the complexity of making a website until I learnt about WordPress. The first task about to setup my website was to find a suitable host. I researched a lot on the available options like GoDaddy, BlueHost, HostGator and I finally ended up with SiteGround. I chose SiteGround after considering the following factors. Performance: I am a huge Fan of GoDaddy and all my Domains and SSL are bought from them. When I compared their hosting performance with others, I did find them quite down the list. SiteGround and HostGator were among the top contender but some of our clients recently had some CPU performance issue with HostGator, so I chose SiteGround. WordPress Support: GoDaddy is excellent with support of their own products like Domains and SSL certificates and also so they were ready to provide support about hosting as whole but not specifically about WordPress, which was definitely one of the requirement then. I spoke to SiteGround team and they were very helpful (though they also didn’t know all) but they definitely put efforts to answer my questions. Price: When we start something new, we always want to keep the initial investment low. SiteGround offered me one of the best hosting prices then. Probably the difference was in range of 50 cents here and there between the competitors but with Monthly...
by Shishir Chandrawat | Nov 19, 2014 | Web Development, WordPress
Follow me I will begin by saying that I am not a WordPress expert, I do know a little about MS servers (hence all the articles) but WordPress I am learning as it comes. So as the destiny decided to make aware of another aspect of WordPress, We got an email from my WebHost stating that our account has been suspended because of CPU overload. Though they were kind enough to restore it once but wanted an assurity that we will fix whatever is causing the High CPU overload. Hence the learning started. I read a lot of articles and discussion from the very kind and big WordPress community and made some interpretations of my own. Following are the steps I took to resolve the issue or rather the way I approached the problem. Ask your WebHost: Usually the Web Host’s support team is helpful and after all they felt that your site is over utilizing the CPU and suspended you. So lets ask them the following questions a) How much over the quota am I ? Probably they allow you 100,000 cycles and you are at 125,000 cycles. It’s best to know, it gives you an idea of how deep are you b) Whats causing the CPU over load? CPU over load can be because of Plugins , widgets , theme or may be just the visitors. They may not be able to answer very clear (But try to drill them a little), it may result in meaningful information. At least they should provide you which files are being queried upon the most and the name of the...
by Shishir Chandrawat | Jul 25, 2014 | WordPress
One of the client reported that they are unable to send email using WP Mail SMTP Plugin while trying to use the in house exchange server as relay on port 25, they were getting the following error ERROR: Failed to connect to server: Connection timed out (110) Error : Connection refused : 111 We were using our internal SMTP (exchange 2010) server to relay the email, we validated that the exchange server is fine and in state to send or receive emails via port 25 . validated the same by configuring an outlook from outside the network. Still the wordpress developer wasn’t able to reach to the server to relay its emails. Troubleshooting 1) We made the exchange server an open relay but still wordpress was unable to connect 2) I logged into wordpress console and configure it with gmail credentials used following settings for Gmail Mailer: SMTP SMTP Host: smtp.gmail.com SMTP Port: 465 Encryption: SSL Authentication: Yes Username: your full gmail address Password: your mail password Referred this link for settings : Link 3) This also didnt work with error 110 4) I decided to replicate the issue on my wordpress installation, so that I can get better control 5) Installed the plugin on my install and used the same Gmail settings to relay, found it working good 🙂 6) Tried the exchange relay settings and it failed with error 110 ERROR: Failed to connect to server: Connection timed out (110) 7) I was sure its not our exchange server issue, so reached out to my host Site Ground for support 8) Provided them the require settings and they tested and...
