I found Charles Smith from Five Euro Food – he now owns a company that sells wordpress webhosting packages for people like us.

How many of my blogging friends remember Charles? We’ve probably all wondered what has become of him since he left France. He and his wife moved to Sweden to be near family as they raised their little boy. Charles is from England and before the baby was born he was working in Paris doing computery things. He gave it up to give his son a better place to grow up.

Charles had to learn a new language and cope with a very different environment – but then what? I had no idea. Not much new on his blog but from time to time I would check back on fiveeurofood.com and he hadn’t posted and me not being one to be nosy, I just left it. We shouldn’t do that. We should (I should) be better.

Then one day last week, our good friend Helene D’Souza from Masala Herb asked how things were going and mentioned that she was moving her blog from Hostgator. She told me that Charles Smith has his own webhosting business now called WPopt.net and he was going to move her blog to one of his 100% monitored servers. I was eager to see if Helene’s blog would be faster loading on the new setup.

Right away I went to webpagetest.org and ran a test on her site and waited a few days and ran the test again after the move. Her blog loads 11 seconds faster than it did before. Now eleven seconds might not seem much but reducing the wait time by 5% – 10% or even 20% is huge.

The day before yesterday I heard from Charlie Louie from Hotly Spiced who is also with Hostgator and they had shut her site down because of a plugin called wordfence that Hostgator said was hogging all the machine resources. Instead of writing to her and telling her what the problem was, they shut her down and waited for her to contact them. What horrible service! AND… she’d prepaid for an entire year.

If she can get her money back, she’ll move her blog to a wpopt.net server and if not, she’ll move the second her contract is up. Everyone wants to be with a webhost that they trust and who will always have their back. Good support is almost as important as a reliable server, especially if you don’t know how to manage your blog or server. I would trust Charles. He’s good people AND he is a mighty fine food writer and recipe developer. This is one of my favorite recipes of his – Swedish Sockerkaka. It’s a Swedish sponge cake filled with buttercream and strawberry jam and topped with more buttercream and fresh strawberries.

So if you want a great sponge cake, follow the link to the recipe but if you want webhosting or advice you can trust, contact Charles at wpopt.net.

If you check out Charles’ webhosting, the link I’ve included is an affiliate link. I wrote the article and John just read it and said, “You didn’t sign up as an affiliate for Charles?”

Me: “He’s got an affiliate program?”

Him: “No one would mind that you had an affiliate link as long as you declare it.”

Me: “You think?”

So I did. You should too.