As I had mentioned earlier, I was planning on transferring my domain to GoDaddy, a company I’m not overly thrilled with, but regulations prevented me from moving the domain for 60 days.

I decided to call GoDaddy and ask them about that, and ask if I had no choice but to be held hostage by Domain.com, and they said yes, with a ‘but.’ After speaking ill of GoDaddy, it turned out their representative was very helpful, and we ended up simply pointing the domain to a WordPress account on GoDaddy’s server, so typing in is301.com will point there instead of to Domain.com.

This was the penultimate and extreme measure I had to take to get things running again.

That would take a few hours to propagate though, so in the meantime I decided to try disabling plugins on the site while it was still hosted on Domain.com. A couple of days ago I had downloaded the entire site for backup purposes, and it downloaded almost 50,000 files over 7 hours. That struck me as odd, and from the folder names I was seeing it appeared to be caching information. That number of files guarantees a slowdown in anything, but I was using a plugin that was supposed to manage the cache and significantly improve overall site speed.

I don’t know why I hadn’t put two and two together earlier, or why Domain.com couldn’t figure it out, but I suddenly had a lightbulb-above-the-head moment when I realized the caching plugin must be storing those tens of thousands of files for caching purposes, and likely slowing down the site.

So I disabled it. And guess what?

The site came to life. It’s response times were greatly improved. I even considered cancelling the GoDaddy account, however even with the improvements in load times it was still not up to my expected response times, and I had such a bad experience with their Domain.com’s non-existent customer support (that should have been able to look directly at the site and recognize a cashing problem from their end), so I decided to continue with the forwarding anyway.

I’ll have to rebuild the site, but I have all posts, comments, and even images thanks to WordPress’ Export ability, so I just have to upload a single .XML file, reinstall some plugins, and re-upload the images (re-assigning header images will be the bastard of the whole thing) and it should be good to go at long last. I’ll update, and even post a new welcome post, when it’s ready.

And therein lies the problem.