Recently in Blog Category

For the last eight days I have been fighting with my web hosting company trying to get them to restore my site connectivity after they had a hardware failure. For the first few days I had absolutely no connectivity whatsoever and was completely dead in the water. I spent nearly every waking hour working with them to try and get someone to take ownership of this problem and resolve it. Finally after several days of being down I requested that they move me to a new server so I could begin restoring things myself. They relented and moved my. Unfortunately they did not properly install the software nor load the PERL modules necessary for me to be up. It has been one of the most frustrating experiences of my life and I had come to the conclusion that I needed to find a new hosting provider.

Well it is July 3. It has been 4 days since my shared web host went down leaving my sites down and unavailable. It has been 2 days since a new server was configured partially restoring my web presence. As you know from previous entries the server was misconfigured when it was created and IX Web Hosting failed to load two simple PERL modules for connectivity to MySQL and to SendMail. These are not some obscure module that only I would use; these are standard modules that pretty much everyone on the planet would expect to have loaded. I have been working with the "technical support" personnel for IX Web Hosting to get these modules installed to restore my sites to full working order. There are three ways for you to contact IX Web Hosting technical support. There is phone support, live chat, and by entering a problem ticket.

Yesterday I ranted about IX Web Hosting and how I had been down for days while they attempted to try and resolve a hardware problem they were having. Late last evening after the Diamondbacks game I arrived home to find that the sites were still unavailable. I again reached out to technical support at IX Web Hosting to get a status. I was told that my sites would be restored "very soon". Since "very soon" had encompassed 3 days so far I wasn't real confident that I would be up any time during this millennium. I expressed my frustration and asked if I could please be moved to a different server. Even if I had to recreate all of my sites myself it would be better than looking at an error screen. The technician was shocked that I would want to move servers since this one was being repaired and would be available shortly. Yeah he should come and hang out on my end and see what it is like.

I have previously lamented about my struggles with IX Web Hosting who I am currently using. When I wrote in March I explained that there may be a bit of downtime to my sites due to being moved to a new server. My sites had to be migrated because the server was still using some very dated software and I needed something that was actually published this century. The server migration went fairly well or so I thought. As I started to dig into the configuration I found modules missing that made my blog unavailable. This was a simple problem but it took IX Web Hosting a week to get things straightened out. Finally I was back up and I tried to forget the problems I had had.

Social networking has gotten a lot of press recently. As the Internet continues to mature people try to understand what it can be used for and how it might add value to their lives. One niche that began with the younger crowd but soon reached mainstream was the blog. Blog which is short for weblog began as a way for someone to maintain a log of information on the web. It was just a few short years ago that if you interviewed the typical person on the street they would have no idea what a blog was let alone tell you that they had one. People were still getting their feet wet on the Internet and having a web site made up of a few static pages was seen as a luxury for the rich and technically advanced. I remember when I first built Now Hitting. It was primarily a series of static pages that I hand coded with individual styles. I had what would probably be classified as a precursor to a blog that I called "Diary of a Diehard". This was again hand coded but allowed me an area where I could write small entries about baseball and specifically the Arizona Diamondbacks. This was one of the more popular aspects of Now Hitting and drew by far the most visitors to the site. It was also one of the more painful areas to maintain as I had to create a new page per entry and I was coding each of them by hand. Not really the most efficient use of my time but I could definitely see value in it.

I really don't like Friday the 13th. It is not that I am superstitious, ok maybe I am just a little but you've never had to live through a 15 game streak where you couldn't hit a ball if your life depended upon it. It's funny, I am college educated and my IQ has been measured in the 140 range yet I still cannot get over the fact that luck plays such a part in life. Personally I don't think luck happens as much as it is a manipulation of circumstances by the observant. In a lot of cases you can make your own luck just be watching everything around you and making the right choices at the right time. That of course means you need to maintain a higher level of concentration and consciousness than most people are willing to devote each day. Still, it is possible. But before you think that you can manipulate everything in your favor let me assure you that it isn't quite that easy. Take today for example. The events that transpired with regards to my web hosting could never have been anticipated nor could they have been controlled.

In my last entry I suggested that there may be a little down time associated with a server/data center move that my hosting service would be doing. The expectation was that the move would occur on Friday evening and that by Sunday I would be back on-line. I felt like an expectant father pacing the floor worrying about my sites and my data. IX Web Hosting was very good at notifying their customers of what to expect and keeping us informed about how things were going. Early Sunday morning I received notification that the server move was completed and was even ahead of schedule. This was awesome! I went out and checked each of my sites and sure enough they seemed to be up and functioning. I left feeling that the worst was behind me. Little did I know that this was just the eye of a very big storm.