New Host

For the first time, this site has a new host.

New Host For This Site

Frequent visitors will notice that the previous web hosting banner disappeared and was recently replaced by the HostGator banner. To be honest, the old banner should have been taken down long ago. The only reason it was not, was due to laziness on my part and the difficulties I was having with the site over the past few months of having them host it.

I had a few problems with the previous host before.

Just after starting this site, the entire host went down for an entire day. The reason given was a power failure to the server floor. Although the building had backup power, it would not work as the problem was only on the one floor. They promised to make sure that it would not happen again. Ok, I can see things like that happening (I am generally a forgiving person).

Sometime last year, the same thing happened.

The exact same excuse was given. The exact same promise was made. This time, I was not happy but I did not act fast enough to move. They renewed my account for the next year before I was able to move. So, I figured I would take my time for the move – after all, usually there were no real problems. I had a full year to make the move.

Last summer (2009) things really fell apart here.

I tried an update. I have been very busy with outherFor once, I tried the shortcut and tried and auto-update and failed to do my usual. I did not shut off extra plugins. I did not do a backup. Saying the update did not go smoothly would be an understatement. There were problems with the file transfer and things came back scrambled.

Additionally, I could not get a good FTP connection.

My FTP connection kept failing while I tried to upload the files manually. It is hard to repair something when the connection to the host keeps failing. My opinion is that this connection failure may have been part of the cause for the bad update but I could be wrong.

Denis de Bernardy, the creator of Semiologic Pro, the theme I use did all he could to help.

He spent several hours trying to straighten things out. He did finally get it working. Well, as good as he could.

I soon got an alert that my site was using too many resourced from the host.

This is where things got really bad. I replied to the alert to ask what was the problem. The site was moved to a backup server long before I received any reply. Not that the reply did any good. The only thing I could do was shut down any added features the site was running and hope that would fix it. Apparently, it did as they stopped telling me there was a problem.

I thought the site was Ok again.

I added back a few plugins. Trying to get the site close to where it was. Still trying to avoid anything that I thought would be a problem.

Again the alert from the host.

Again, before I received a reply from my own reply as to what might be the problem, I was told the site was moved to a backup server. Just a note, when this was done, I was unable to make any corrections as all my links to the site would no longer work and the domain would turn up the host’s “this page has been suspended” type of notice. All before I would receive any reply from them. If your going to suspend an account, shouldn’t you answer the trouble ticket first?

Talk about terrible service.

How can you fix something that you cannot connect to? What kind of service suspends the account before replying?

Anyways, lack of time to do much forced me to deactivate nearly everything behind the scenes on this site.

That is why this site has been neglected for the past few months. I had no time to try a move (this was a first time moving a blog to a new host for me). I had not idea what could be causing the problem. Semiologic Pro runs fine on other hosts. I could not think of anything that would be using extra resources. All I could do was deactivate everything I could think of. Afraid any excess changes would get it suspended again, I was afraid to make posts.

I also had some additional minor problems with the previous host.

I mentioned the FTP connection problem. This was always a problem with them. Since they were the first host I had, I had gotten used to it. Only now I realize that I do not have the same problem with FTP on other hosts. There were occasional outages. These were always attributed to them as some type of DNS problem with my ISP or a routing problem between here and there. I am not entirely sure that is the truth. I cannot think why the DNS or routing would fail. The internet is designed to be redundant in this regard. I have had some schooling in regard to routers.

So, this site is now hosted by HostGator.

I have not had any problems that I know of with any sites I run on them. I expect few problems now. HostGator will now be one of the ads featured on this site and I am comfortable recommending them to anyone. Service has been great from them when I needed it. In fact, they were quicker to reply to questions when I was getting alerts threats from the old host than the old host was about my request for information about the problem.