In case you hadn’t noticed (or if you haven’t been here before), I haven’t updated this site in nearly five months. I have instead started blogging on a new site, “common abnormality” and you’ll find my more recent posts there. Eventually I think I’ll just let this blog die off. If you’ve find any of my content interesting, check out the new blog.
Thanks.
Just wanted to give a heads-up to anyone looking for web hosting: avoid IX Web Hosting!
Let me rewind a bit…I used to purchase my web hosting from 1&1. I was always completely satisfied with them but about a year ago, I purchased a VPS from VPSLink. I decided I wanted “full control” of my web hosting environment and the ability to control everything about it. A big factor in my decision was that I wanted to customize my mail services as well (SpamAssassin, ClamAV, postfix, virtual domains, etc.), so I switched to the VPS. The VPS worked out quite well for me and I was happy with it. There were two instances of downtime (to move my VPS to another physical server) and both times I was made aware of it well in advance. The downtime was minimal.
A few months ago I moved my e-mail services to Google Apps and, for the last several weeks, was not using the mail services on my VPS. In fact, postfix was “turned off” quite a while ago. I finally decided that the VPS was overkill and I could save some money by getting rid of it (it was costing me $39.95 a month). Thus my search for a new web host began.
I came across IX Web Hosting’s site and began looking at their services. I was sucked in by “The CEO’s Promise” “30-Day 100% Money Back Guarantee“, “Any-Time Money Back Guarantee“, and “Uptime or Cash Guarantee“) and signed up a few moments later and paid $95.40 via credit card for a year’s worth of service. That was on November 17th.
Since my VPS was still active and hadn’t yet been cancelled, I wasn’t in any rush to move my websites over. I moved this blog over first and, two weeks later, happened to be doing some work on it when some “weird things” started happening. That lasted for a few moments until the entire site was unavailable and visitors instead received the infamous “Wordpress database errors” message. I waited about 20 minutes to see if it cleared itself up. When it didn’t, I created a support ticket.
Two hours later, the site started working again. I started messing with it some more. Ten minutes later, it was down again (note that it wasn’t me causing the issues!). After a bit, it was straightened out and everything was well. Remember that IX Web Hosting had a 99.9% uptime promise — they’d already ate up about half of their available downtime for the next year.
That little incident pissed me off and I was ready to cancel, but I stuck it out. Two weeks later, the same thing happened again; more problems with the mysql400.ixwebhosting.com MySQL server. I decided enough was enough, headed back to 1&1’s web site, and signed back up for their Business package. With their end-of-year special, I even got a lower price ($17.27 for three months, with a year agreement). I backed up my files from IX Web Hosting and copied my database once the MySQL server came back up and promptly created a ticket for account cancellation. This was on December 17th, exactly 30 days after I signed up (remember the “30-Day 100% Money Back Guarantee”?).
While creating the ticket for cancellation, I was asked to provide an explanation:
Please provide reason of cancellation? I’d be happy to. I was blindly suckered in by your outrageous claims regarding the quality of your service. In the last two weeks I have experienced no less than *THREE* outages due to database issues. I was going to cancel two weeks ago but when I realized you’ll keep half of the monies I already paid, I backed out. Well, not this time. I’m done. I’m going back — no, *RUNNING* back — to a former provider. They (1&1) provide better service, and at a better price to boot. Please terminate this account immediately. Monetarily, rape me for whatever your contract allows — I don’t care. At this point, I’d just about pay you to be done with you. Good riddance. Jeremy L. Gaddis
Yeah, I was a little pissed. =)
IX Web Hosting’s package came with two “free” domains, which I promptly registered. They were stupid domain names that I’ll probably never use, but hey, they were “free”, right? Uh, no. Of the $95.40 I paid to IX Web Hosting, they:
I don’t mind paying for the domains. Well, I don’t mind paying reasonable rates for the domains. Everybody and their brother can register a domain for seven or eight bucks, so I know that the two domains didn’t cost them $18.21. Apparently “30-Day 100% Money Back Guarantee” doesn’t really mean that. Likewise, apparently CEO Fathi Said doesn’t keep his promises.
Fortunately, I had already went back to 1&1 by this point. Once again I’m happy with my web hosting and haven’t had any issues with them. Altogether, I’ve used them for a few years and I imagine I’ll just stick with them. With what I ended up paying IX Web Hosting for one month, I could’ve gotten nearly a year’s worth of hosting from 1&1.
In summary, I’d stay away from IX Web Hosting if I were you. Their service was unreliable, support tickets weren’t responded to in a timely manner, and they kept over 75% of the money I paid them. If you’re looking for a reliable web host, do consider 1&1.
Just a heads-up… I moved the blog’s RSS feed over to FeedBurner (RSS feed here). Using the WordPress plugin provided by FeedBurner, everything should just work. I was able to subscribe to the feed using Google Reader, but please let me know if you run into issues. Thanks!
Originally uploaded by jeremygaddis
Jeremy L. Gaddis
Just a heads up… I moved this web site to a new server this evening. I think I got everything straightened out and working properly, but if you happen to find some broken links or other issues, please do leave a comment and let me know so that I can get it fixed as soon as possible.
Thanks!
A few weeks ago, I jumped on the Twitter bandwagon. “Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service, instant messaging, email, or an applications such as Twitterrific. Twitter was founded in March 2006 by San Francisco start-up company Obvious Corp.” (–Wikipedia).
If you’re reading this on my web site (as opposed to reading my RSS feed or my Facebook notes), you’ll notice a section in the top right entitled “Jeremy is…”. The items that are underneath it come from my updates to Twitter.
Normally I wouldn’t spend much time updated some web site what the latest details of what I’m doing, but Twitter has made this exceptionally easy via their Twitter API. By using the API, third parties can write their own applications to interact with the Twitter service. Shortly after signing up, I wrote my own “client” that would update my Twitter status from the Linux shell. It was easy and useful, but meant I had to stay logged into a Linux box to quickly and easily do updates. Eventually, I found OutTwit and Twitterfox.
“OutTwit is a add-in for Microsoft Outlook with lets you send and receive tweeter messages (tweets) without leaving Outlook.” I work in I.T. and I have Outlook running 24/7, both at home and at work. OutTwit integrates with Outlook by putting a small “toolbar” on the main Outlook interface. Updating my Twitter status is simply a matter of entering my update in the textbox and hitting enter. It’s very quick and easy which means, of course, that I’m more likely to update my status at random times. You can also choose to receive your friends’ updates in your Inbox as e-mail messages, though I chose to turn that option off.
“TwitterFox is a Firefox extension that notifies you of your friends’ tweets of Twitter.” By installing the extension, you also get quick access to update your own status as well as being notified of your friends’ updates as well.
If you are a “twitterer”, like me, and you have either Outlook or Firefox running most of the time, definitely check ‘em out.
WordPress 2.3 is out and I finally got around to upgrading, which took all of 90 seconds since I’m using subversion. Open source FTW!
Okay, it’s official… I’m moving from WordPress to Drupal. I haven’t had any luck finding any good scripts to migrate all the content for me, so I may just give up on it.
In the meantime, all of my “old” content will remain on the WordPress site at www.jeremygaddis.com. Everything new will be posted to blog.jeremygaddis.com until I figure out exactly what I’m doing here…
For those of you who “read me” via RSS, please update the URL for your feed. The new URL for my RSS feed is http://blog.jeremygaddis.com/rss.xml. Sweet!
Well, I’m thinking of making the switch from WordPress to Drupal on my web site.
I’d like to do it, and was going to do it a while back as well, but trying to find some existing code to handle an automated migration didn’t prove very fruitful. I may end up converting all of my previous posts over by hand, which I don’t think will be much fun at all.
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