Hi Sherry, there are lots of ways to create and maintain a sourdough starter successfully, so there's nothing wrong with what you're doing. However, a starter that is maintained with equal parts by volume (cups) of water and flour isn't going to rise and behave the same way as our starter, which is maintained with equal parts by weight. I suspect your starter is quite liquidy in consistency, which can make rising more difficult. Our starter is fairly thick and pasty in consistency right after a feeding, but as it rises and ferments it gets thinner in texture, more like a thick pancake batter with bubbles throughout. A typical twice a day feeding for our starter looks like this: 1/2 cup (113g) starter + 1/2 cup (113g) water + 1 scant cup (113g) unbleached all-purpose flour. Our starter routine produces enough extra starter for recipes that call for a cup (227g) of ripe starter, with enough remaining to feed and perpetuate, and many of our sourdough bread recipes call for that amount of starter. For recipes that call for more than a cup of starter, you need to build the quantity of starter available on that last feeding before you bake, in order to have enough starter for the recipe, along with leftover so that you can keep your starter going. For example, our Naturally Leavened Sourdough Bread recipe calls for 2 cups (454g) of ripe starter, which is more than the normal maintenance amount. For this type of recipe you do need to think ahead a bit and build the starter, but this is easy enough to do. There are a variety of ways to build a starter, but if you don't have a scale the most straightforward is to double each of the components for your normal feeding, which would look like this: 1 cup (227g) starter + 1 cup (227g) water + 2 scant cups (227g) unbleached all-purpose flour (be sure to use a larger container when building your starter). "Ripe" starter is starter that you've fed at room temperature and allowed to rise to its peak, or is just beginning ot fall. For our starter process you want to see the starter able to double routinely and have a pleasant aroma as a good sign that its ready to leaven your bread. If you'd like to try our sourdough recipes, you might want to consider switching to our feeding routine, as it can be a bit tricky to substitute a different consistency starter into these recipes. We also have a gluten-free starter process, which you might also want to consider. 

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