I currently have 2 websites that are built in WordPress – which I happen to think is a FANTASTICALLY powerful platform for creating your own good looking websites with minimal coding knowledge – but that’s another story!
Both of the sites – 1 of them is the one you are viewing now and the other is a hobby site of mine; www.thalassacookbook.com – are similar in the following respects;
- I have not spent a great deal of time – correction – any time! – driving traffic to either of these sites.
- They are both small sites that have not developed vast volumes of content at this stage.
- Both are updated with similar regularity – maybe every fortnight or so.
The only real difference between these sites is where they are hosted; www.allbusinesscomputers.co.nz is hosted by Webfarm which has New Zealand based servers and for whom we are a reseller. www.thalassacookbook.com is hosted with Bluehost.com for whom we are an affiliate. So an interesting case study from the point of view of comparing the performance of the 2 hosting options. So here are my observations based on the last 3 months approx. that these wordpress sites have been up.
Spam
The comment spam on my Thalassa Cookbook site has been astronomical! I had not expected this as I only set the site up for friends/family to enjoy so when I visited the site and 3000 odd spam comments had accumulated in a matter of 30 days or so, I was horrified. What amazes me also is the persistence of these spammers who think by spamming in bulk with the same BS about cialis, viagra et al. that someone is going to purchase it? Go figure. Anyway, I fixed this by setting up my moderations properly and installing a plugin called Aksimet into the site which means all the spam goes straight into the ‘rubbish’ and I just go in from time to time and delete it. It’s no big deal. The Akismet stats however show that the comment spam still persists – hopefully one day they’ll give up as they realise it’s going nowhere.
By contrast, I installed the Akismet plugin into this site – hosted in NZ – and I can count the spam comments caught on one hand since the site has been up.
Traffic to Sites
I installed another plugin – Wassup – on both sites which gives me great information about the traffic numbers and visitor sources to the sites among other information. A lot of the traffic to thalassacookbook.com can be attributed to the comment spammers, but after discounting this, both sites have had similar numbers and similar quality traffic. A review on this site about laptop computers has received LOTS of traffic – and now places relatively high on Google for a couple of searches despite now needing an update!
The one difference between the sites is that I have my email address on this and not on the other – despite this, I don’t receive a lot of spam emails, showing that the spam filters used by our hosts are working!
In summary, although I think the comment spam through Bluehost is excessive, but with the plugins installed managing it is easy and Bluehost do offer a great value service, with hosting and domain name costing only USD$60 for the entire year, and their Simplescripts for installing wordpress and other features is excellent. I am yet to try their email service so cannot comment on that.
Webfarm hosting, on the other hand, although needing to be set up by someone with some I.T knowledge, as it’s not as newbie-friendly as Bluehost, is doing a great job of it’s Spam filtering which alleviates the necessity of dealing with this unwelcome barrage.
My choice for a hobby site, one-off site or when cost-effectiveness is important would be Bluehost.
My choice for my .nz business website and particularly when my email address is on the site would be Webfarm. Contact us if you are interested in a Webfarm hosting package.
Give us a call to discuss this in more detail and any time. We’d love to hear from you.
October 2009: Update: Despite the relatively small amount of email spam received via this site, I now use a contact form with a ‘captcha’ to alleviate any spam problems both on this site and the other wordpress sites we have built and are now building for many clients. This is certainly ‘best practice’ regardless of your host.
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