Tech, Food, News, Life - Blog - Michael's Piece of the Web » web hosting

One more advantage

Michael — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 22:15:50 +0000

Now that I’ve moved my site off of VizaWeb, there’s one more advantage that I haven’t metioned yet. You can now view my site from many places that were blocking VizaWeb and their servers. This means that I’ll no longer have to be embarassed when my co-workers can’t find my website when I send them to my Spyware Guide.

Is your site up?

Michael — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 02:24:06 +0000

OK, so if I updated this blog constantly I might know whether my website is working or not. But since I don’t I have to trust that my website is online. After my experience hosting the site with VizaWeb, I don’t trust webhosts’ uptime guarantee anymore. So I’ve enlisted the services of SiteUpTime.com.

They monitor your site and e-mail you if it goes down. They have packages ranging from free to $10/month.

Check them out now and worry less about your site’s status.

Done with VizaWeb

Michael — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 18:24:05 +0000

For the past few years I’ve hosted my website with VizaWeb. During this time my site has been offline at various times, but usually came back within a few hours. While this is totally unacceptable from a hosting company, I never bothered to change just because I didn’t have time to worry about it.

A few months ago they had a major outage that lasted a little longer. I still stuck with them. Then over Veteran’s Day weekend they had a total outage. Besides disappearing off the web, they were also unreachable via phone and e-mail.

I could care less about my data. I have full backups of it locally because I trust no one but myself with my data. However, what really scared me was the fact that they were also the registrar for my domain name. If I could not get a hold of them to release my domain name, I might never be able to transfer it to another registrar. Let me tell you, it was a VERY tense couple of days!

Luckily they did eventually come back online and amazingly did respond to my e-mails. I immediately transferred my domain name to another registrar (Dotster) and have now also moved my site to another host (Host Monster).

While VizaWeb seemed good at first, they received a lot of business because of being recommended by radio personality, Leo Laporte. That’s why I switched. Of course, Leo did pull his sites off of them a long time ago and recently also pulled his sites out of the same datacenter (The Planet) that VizaWeb uses.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to put this behind me now and move on with my new host. I’m out some money, but at least I’m finally rid of VizaWeb forever!

Upgraded WordPress

Michael — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 17:15:27 +0000

After many months of of ignoring it, I finally upgraded my blog to WordPress 2. It’s a pretty significant update. You probably won’t notice any changes on the front end, but the back end it much different. Thanks to a bunch of new Ajax content you can now drag components around the screen much like you can on Google’s Personalized Homepage. It also features a WYSIWYG editor so you don’t have to tweak the HTML code f you don’t want to. Now of course, I still go into the HTML and make edits from time to time, but many of the functions that I always did by hand in the past are not automated. Of special interest to me are the graphic alignment and the link target parameters.

Forms updated

Michael — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 04:40:06 +0000

I just updated the scripts that run all of the forms on my website. Hopefully thi upgrade will stop the influx of spam that I have been experiencing.

You can test out the new script by clicking the guestbook buttons on the sidebar. It won’t look any different to you, but please let me know if you get any errors.

Feedster

Michael — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 08:51:41 +0000

No Need to Click Here – I’m just claiming my feed at Feedster

Technorati

Michael — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 21:07:20 +0000

There’s nothing interesting for you to see in this post. Just move along and go about your normal business.

I’m just using it to claim my site on Technorati. It’s easier than going into my templates that I worked so hard to create to use their standard claim method.

Technorati Profile

Blog Outage

Michael — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 20:40:30 +0000

You may or may not have noticed that my blog was down for the past few days. Apparently my webhost (Vizaweb) was having some sort of MySQL database issues again. I like them as a host over all, and the price is sure right. However, I hope they get over these “growing pains” that they’ve been going through.

I don’t check my site every minute of every day, so the only way I realized it was down was that several of my scheduled entries never showed up in the RSS feed.

If you ever notice any part of the site isn’t working, please feel free to e-mail me.

Server issues

Michael — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 16:03:15 +0000

My site is currently hosted a company called VizaWeb. They provide good service, but they seem to be having some growing pains. Many people, including myself, switched to them because they were recommended by technology guru, Leo Laporte. The onslaught of new customers seems to be causing problems. I’ve experienced some downtime as a result.

What I’m asking of you is that if you see my site is down or unreachable, please e-mail me and let me know. If you don’t know my address you can use my contact form once the site is back up. You can also post it in the comments of this entry.

Thanks!

Blog Upgraded

Michael — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 17:02:25 +0000

You might have noticed that this blog looks much diffrent than before. I installed some new software this weekend. Now it’s running on actual blogging software. The one I chose is WordPress. I saw it demonstrated on Call for Help on G4-TechTV Canada. So far, I like it. I’m slowly getting the hang of editing the CSS and PHP files to customize the look and feel. I think you’ll see the Blog become a bigger part of the site now that it’s a million times easier to update!

Run, Googlebot, Run!

Michael — Fri, 08 Jul 2005 19:06:27 +0000

If you’ve tried using the Google Search box on my homepage lately, you may have noticed a lot of broken results. When I updated my site, I changed the directory structure and until the Googlebot crawls my site again, Google’s indexing still points to the old files. They usually crawl the site at least once a month so you should see it updated anytime now.