Is www.ads-software.com the right choice for me?

Yes to all your questions. You can literally do whatever you want with a self-hosted WordPress. It does require additional babysitting that WordPress.com team takes care of on their end.

See this guide to get a better idea of the difference between the two:
https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/wordpress-org-vs-wordpress-com/

@studiocolumbo

Yes, as Viktor says you have total control over sites you host yourself…..I am just piping up to clarify that “www.ads-software.com” is simply the repository for the WordPress software that you *download and install on your own hosting account* with a hosting company, versus the site you now have hosted with wordpress.com.

www.ads-software.com is also a great resource for Themes, Plugins, and documentation to help you.

ALSO, if you feel your question has been adequately answered, be sure to mark your Topic as Resolved so that others who try to help in the forum will know your question has been answered – this helps all forum members. Thanks!

Don’t do it! It’s the worst mistake I ever made. I switched from wordpress.com to www.ads-software.com and I’ve had nothing BUT problems. So many problems. Maybe find a different provider, but do NOT switch to www.ads-software.com. Problem after problem.

@annettedrake if you have any problems please post your questions in the forums here, and people will be able to offer you osme help. As this is a community of volunteers we can’t help you out unless you ask us something. ??

Hello catacaustic.

Gosh. Where to begin?

I was happy with wordpress.com. But I wanted more ecommerce tools because I want to sell my books directly to readers, thus making more off each book and being able to autograph them. So, I switched to www.ads-software.com.

I chose Laughing Squid as my host. I cannot afford the $129 fee, so I initially tried to move all of my content myself and could not. One of the Laughing Squid reps moved it for me.

A couple of things happened:
1) My business email, [email protected], wouldn’t allow any emails through. They were all returned. I contacted Hover, and they said it was because of the move. So, I contacted Laughing Squid and they were able to fix this. But, meanwhile, I missed several days of important emails.

2) Now important pages don’t show up. For example, one of my novels, Bone Girl, says the page cannot be found. The content is still there. It’s just not linked somehow. The same is true of my past blog posts. The content is there, but not linked. I have no idea how to correct this.

3) When my website was with wordpress.com, I checked the stats for pages/posts. Now, I have no stats.

4) I spend a few minutes each day deleting spam. I’ve tried to sign up with askimet, but have not yet figured out how to do it.

5) I have a bookstore now, but have not yet been able to set up ecwid so that people can buy my books directly from me. Frustrating! This is why I switched in the first place.

I don’t think I would do it again. So many lost hours when I could have been writing. Instead, I spent it with www.ads-software.com.

Hope this information helps you understand my advice to not switch.

Best wishes,
Annette Drake

[Signature moderated]

It seems like all of your issues are from either the hosting (email), which they’ve helped to fix up, or from an outside commercial entity (ecwid). Those are issues that realyl do rest with those parties, and don’t have anything to do with the WordPress sorfware. With ecwid especially, you’ve paid them for their system an dsupport, so they are the ones that you need to turn too for that.

The stats are a bit of a disapointment to some people because you don’t get the same stats on your own .org site as you do on .com but that’s where systems like Google Analytics come in. You’ll find they give a lot more info anyway, so will give you more then you were getting before.

Akismet should be easy to sign up for. Again, even though they are sort of related to WordPress they are an externl company, so you should ask them for support. They are very good, and they’ll help you out.

The only thing that seems like it’s a big issue is the pages not being found. I believe that’s due to the menus not being set up correctly. When I look at the link in the menu for ‘Bone Girl’ it’s got a page ID of 1022, but when I do a search for it, I get a page returned that’s got an ID of 1324. That’s why there’s issues there. It’s worth going through the menu, seeing if there’s any other issues like that and re-adding those items back to your menu so that they’ll point ot the right pages.

Hello, catacaustic.

I think the wonderfulness (if that is a word) of www.ads-software.com is something you and I will need to disagree on. For example, this morning, I cannot log onto my wordpress site. I’ve tried my password several times and finally, entered the password I was sent by www.ads-software.com support. Now, my browser won’t even go to the www.ads-software.com/wp-admin site. It keeps sending me here. Well, that’s great but not where I want to be.

At this point, I’m thinking about leaving wordpress completely and switching to GoDaddy or some other host. It’s just way more hassle than it is worth.

I like your response in that nearly every single one of my problems with www.ads-software.com had nothing to do with wordpress. You do understand that I didn’t have any of these problems until I switched to www.ads-software.com, right? I hope I communicated that.

Okay. Love to write more, but I still have to figure out how to get into my www.ads-software.com site. UGH!!!

Thank you,
Annette

Unless you provide a link to a page demonstrating the problem, no one will be able to offer much in the way of assistance.

I cannot even log in now. I type “www.ads-software.com/wp-admin” and it instantly jumps to www.ads-software.com/support. So frustrating! And these forums are great, but where is the real support? With WordPress.com, I could send an email and I would receive an answer, usually within 24 hours. Does www.ads-software.com offer that level of service?

WordPress is free software and this free, volunteer-staffed forum is the only support resource available via www.ads-software.com. If that is not suitable for your needs, you may want to consider hiring someone.

I type “www.ads-software.com/wp-admin”

Why? Your site is not hosted here. No external sites are hosted here.

Hi, Esmi.
I simply want to try to log into my website. I type in www.ads-software.com/wp-admin to bring up the log in. But now, it only sends me to this support page.

I type in www.ads-software.com/wp-admin to bring up the log in

Why? Your site is not hosted here.

You should be typing in ‘yourwebaddress.whatever/wp-login.php’ to log in to your site.

www.ads-software.com/wp-admin would never have logged you into your site so I’m not sure why you are saying you are only unable to login now (2 hours ago), whereas 6 days ago you were able to login…

Annette, you login is at https://www.annettedrake.com/wp-admin and you had that before, so why did you try to log in at a differnt URL now?

www.ads-software.com does not host any sites. That’s what you’re paying your hosting company for.