After nearly a month of troubleshooting unreliable WordPress administrative access with Bluehost, Bo Gordy-Stith, Epworth's Pastor of Media and Communication, took the unusual step of migrating the website and page management to a new hosting provider, Hostinger, on Thursday, June 4. Human and AI support resources at Bluehost had been unable to restore reliable website administration since May 9. Pastor Bo has been using Bluehost since January, 2021, when an update to a previous hosting provider rendered the Epworth website inaccessible. By Friday morning, June 5, the entire website content and admin suite had migrated successfully to Hostinger with less than an hour of downtime while the Nameservers redirected to the new host.
This host migration marks a significant change and reflects the seriousness of the persistent problem with website administration that multiple rounds of troubleshooting and support could not resolve. Epworth uses WordPress and Divi as our website builder, but needs a hosting provider to make it available online.
During the weeks of troubleshooting, both WordPress and the Divi stylesheet underwent major upgrades, so the move to a more reliable host comes at the same time as Pastor Bo and his team can take advantage of increased functionality in website development and maintenance. Lee Ann Walling, who created the Epworth Preschool website, and Mike Duer, who updates Constant Contact and YouTube links weekly, have helped greatly to troubleshooting and to work through this problem.