HostGator is the best host for WordPress Blogs
I've used dozens of hosting companies over the years, and none stand out more than HostGator. Honestly, I was skeptical before I used them because I figured for the prices of their plans (starting at only $3.96 a month), it had to be garbage. Before I used to use GoDaddy simply because it was easy to register a domain name and then sign up for a hosting plan. The ease of having it all in one place was good, but then I ran into a lot of problems with GoDaddy hosting. Many times my site would get shut down for too much bandwidth usage, and not being able to connect to a remote database was also a struggle.
However, my friend had been using HostGator for some time, mainly for his clients, so I decided to try it out. For $3.96 a month, you get a single domain, with unlimited bandwidth and unlimited disk space, and a SSL certificate. Pretty damn cheap. I also liked that anytime I had a question, I just asked on Live Chat. Live Chat is not something that GoDaddy offers, which is a big downfall for them.
HostGator uses cPanel, and I found it familiar and easy to use. If you have multiple domains, you might want to try the $6.36 per month package where you can host unlimited domains. It's cheap, easy, and the site is pretty fast.
They seem to be optimized for bloggers because WordPress runs fast and flawless, even WordPress updates.
Highly recommended, cheap, and I will keep using them. They even claim to host 5 million domains.... Check out HostGator for their latest specials.
WordPress: html { margin-top: 28px !important; }
If you have WordPress 3.1 and you recently noticed a bar across the top of your site, you might be wondering what this is.
I did a view source on my site, and found these new lines:
<style type="text/css" media="print">#wpadminbar { display:none; }</style>
<style type="text/css">
html { margin-top: 28px !important; }
* html body { margin-top: 28px !important; }
</style>
At first I couldn't tell what program was inserting these, so I downloaded my newly updated site to a local drive, and used Notepad++ to do a file search.
It turns out this is due to the new admin bar in WordPress 3.1, and you can only see it if you are logged in as an admin, your users can't see it. Some people think this is a bug in WordPress 3.1, but it's not.
If you want to get rid of this bar, put this line in your functions.php:
add_filter( 'show_admin_bar', '__return_false' );
You can hide parts of the admin bar with CSS. To remove the comments and the appearance options add this to your stylesheet:
#wp-admin-bar-comments {display:none;}
#wp-admin-bar-appearance {display:none;}
This will help you remove the admin bar in WordPress 3.1 and get rid of that annoying 28px margin!