April 21st, 2006
Now here’s something that isn’t making headline news and should be. This will affect everyone if it makes it through and probably people either think no one will be able to enforce it or it’ll never happen in their life time. This is real Big Brother type stuff.
If you’ve ever been frustrated because you were using a library, campus, military, or work computer and couldn’t get to a website because it was blocked, imagine if your phone company or service provider could do that to you just because they want more money? Imagine that your service provider could charge you extra to go to ebay or Amazon.com or bloglines or cnn.com. Imagine that your service provider could decide whether or not you could read Air America’s site or Rush’s or Fox News or NPRs based on their politics not yours.
Just think about it.
Congress is pushing a law that would abandon “network neutrality.” Network neutrality prevents companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from choosing which Web sites open most easily for you based on who pays them more. Your local library shouldn’t have to outbid Barnes & Noble for the right to work more properly on your computer.
If the public doesn’t speak up now, Congress will hand control of the Internet to companies that want to decide what you do, where you go and what you watch online. Politicians are already trading favors for campaign donations from these companies. They’re selling us out to people like AT&T’s CEO, who says “the Internet can’t be free.”
Internet freedom could soon be fenced in by the phone and cable companies. If Congress turns the Internet over to AT&T, everyone will be affected.
How does this affect you?
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Tags: COPE Act, Congress, net neutrality, blogs, iTunes, web hosting, politics, Internet
April 20th, 2006
You may not have noticed it but in the last 12 hours or so, www.exit-23.net and it’s affiliatied subdomains, including www.nothingtastesasgood.com moved from www.lunarpages.com to www.asmallorange.com.
As I was making the move, LunarPages had the bad timing to send me an email offering cash incentive to recommend my friends to them. Trust me, when I call and cancel tomorrow or Friday once I am sure everything is fully moved, they’ll be hearing about what I’ll be saying to friends and clients about what I’ll be recommending.
Meanwhile, A small orange’s customer service was extremely helpful and patient yesterday as I was full of pre-purchase questions. I absolutely wasn’t interested in another dedicated server. I certainly don’t need a lot of space, but I did want room to grow. However, LunarPages made me wary of webhosts that are over-restrictive of CPU-usage. Since there are a lot of Wordpress folks using a small orange, I am unafraid as that was what was causing LunarPages to freak out.
So, please let me know if you encounter any errors or bugs. I’m wandering around and checking on things myself and trying to make sure stuff is working. I’ll be looking to upgrade Nothing Tastes As Good and The Weekend Chef in the very short future as well as get back to posting regularly on both sites now that no CPU police are on my case. 
I’m also probably going to start a non-Wordpress photo blog soon and have been looking into that. ASO has several installable ones available that I’m going to look at in their stables.
Needless to say, I’m very impressed. I’ve already paid for the whole year what LP was charging me per month.
Tags: Lunarpages, a small orange, web hosting
March 24th, 2006
Well, all of the websites hosted by exit-23.net were moved to the dedicated server last night. I shut a couple down permanently for non-use or because they were just attracting spam hogs. Turns out I have a lot more space and a lot more database priviliges over here on my own, so I’ll be offering some more of my friends some space to get them started. Might as well. I hate to ask for money from them though. However, I am going to be hard pressed to afford to keep up with the cost of these sites now. They’ve increased in cost by 12 times overnight.
Anyway, I think the click-through at least on this blog appears to be much faster, though the saving of posts is still a bit slowish. Let me know what you think.
Now I can go back with trying to add Technorati tags to my old posts. I was about half way through. I’m fairly sure that’s what caused all the fuss at Lunarpages — “OMG! She’s adding Technorati tags and it’s using up CPU resources! She must be stopped!” :P I’m not entirely sure what use Technorati tags are anyway. I don’t really think many people come here. I mean, a surprisingly lot of folks come here to find out about how to change a nose screw but I don’t think many people actually come here otherwise — though I most certainly do appreciate the ones that do. However, back to the technorati tags, I was adding them into my old posts, as I was saying, which I think is what triggered this whole thing. I think that systematically going through 700+ posts and resaving them stressed out Lunarpages’ CPU’s resources or at least they thought it did according to whatever rules they have set up for users.
Do please let me know if you find something is broken. I’ll be playing around with stuff and upgrading all of the Wordpress engines and plugins to the latest and greatests over the next few weeks. I might even try to figure out how to separate the three current blogs that are intermingled in one MySql DB into their very own MySql DBs since I have this big playground for the time being.
Tags: blogs, Lunarpages, web hosting
March 23rd, 2006
Well, if you’ve been by in the last 24 hours, you probably didn’t see anything. I mean, it was a virtual cyber-wasteland over in the exit-23.net hosting-land.
And it’s not a pretty story either. And it’s not over either.
It started yesterday morning actually. I woke up late because the power had been out at my house and when the power comes back on, my microwave makes this horrible screeching sound, which is way better than any alarm clock at waking up the masses at the Mallory abode anyway. When I left for work, the internet at my house wasn’t working, and I assumed that was because of the power outage; I figured it would be straightened out by the time I got home.
Besides, I can access all things exit-23.net-ish like email and web-stuff via the intenet from anywhere which is the beauty of the setup. After all, that’s why I bought into having my own domain and web-hosted space all those many years ago when people were still dilly-dallying on Geocities.
I checked my email before I left work and everything was dandy…or so I thought. I do recall an odd email from a freind from down South who said she’d tried to send several emails that day and they’d bounced, but, well, she’s in Katrina-country and they’re always having problems, so I didn’t think much of it.
When I got home however, the internet was still not working. A call to internet tech support got that worked out, but for some reason, all of my exit-23.net accounts wouldn’t download. I of course blamed my internet provider because they’d changed settings in the past that had caused problems downloading before. They had a history.
This began several hours of going back and forth between the internet tech support and Lunarpages tech support — Lunarpages is the service I use to host exit-23.net and have for years and haven’t really had problems with before.
Mind you, the Lunarpages tech support guy insisted that he could download my email so therefore it must be the internet provider’s fault, especially since I could access my email via the web. This is important. It’s important to note that I spent actual time working with this guy. I spent enough time to not only get his name, but learn his voice. You’ll see why.
So eventually, I used up every last tier of tech support with the internet provider, all the way to India and there was nothing I more could do. So I was sitting there toying with it all on my own and very near tears because it was just plain frustrating when suddenly I couldn’t even log into the webmail. Heck, I couldn’t even log into the cpanel anymore!
Well, panicking now, I called Lunarpages back and got the same tech guy. With 5 minutes before Lunarpages “official office hours” closed despite their “24/7″ tech support advertising on their website, he put me on hold and then came back and told me that my account had been suspended. He said that they had tried to send me an email but it had been bouncing — probably because they had shut off my email account! When I asked why, he couldn’t tell me but asked me for a valid non-exit-23.net email and said that they would email me there and if I answered quickly enough, everything would be resolved that night.
Basically, he brushed me off.
No email came.
I eventually, opened an urgent ticket under their 24/7 online help desk.
I was told by the online tech support that someone had tried to email me but my email had bounced - surprise! However, it appears that Wordpress 2.02 and all of my tweaking was causing a lot of CPU suckage on the shared server and they didn’t like that. My choices were basically
- get lost
- pay for an expensive dedicated server
Supposedly, other people are normally given seven days to decide before their account gets shut down but since exit-23.net has a dash (-) in it, they couldn’t move it to a temporary server and since they couldn’t contact me because my email was bouncing, it became a critical condition. So they just plain shut me down without warning.
Anyway, I decided for the time being to go with the Dedicated server, but of course, they’re dragging their feet and they can’t just discuss this over the phone and get it over with and have it done and they may have turned my email back on but it’s still bouncing all over the place and half of my domains still aren’t up as I typed this in notepad at 9am.
Of course, what really pisses me off is that I was on the phone with tech support while they were shutting my account off and one hand didn’t know what the other was doing and if they’d just talked to each other and me, everything could have been resolved right then and there instead of dragging it out and becoming the nightmare it did.
So, almost 24 hours later, no one, including my mother could get in touch with me because despite the fact that I had email access, my emails are still bouncing all over the place…
Right now I’m wondering what it takes to have my own webserver in my own house…
***When I finally did talk to someone on the phone over there after waiting on hold for 20 minutes and then being hung up on and then waiting on hold again for 30 minutes, the person wasn’t able to give me any information. When I said that my website wasn’t up and running, he said that it was. When I said that my email was bouncing, he denied it, though family members had told me so. He could not tell me when the move would be made or how long it would take. When I asked to speak to someone in the department who would be working on the move, I was told that they don’t speak on the phone.
WTF???!! I was told that I would be contacted via email when it was done. That’s it.That’s bullshit.
I work in I.T.
Communication with users is key.
You do not run a business like that.
I am so pissed off.
***Hours later…They sent me an email
finally telling me that everything was back up and they are just about to start the move to the dedicated server.
WTF were they doing all that time?
Well, guess what? Nothing was back up!
Meanwhile, I’ve been reading up on what it takes to run a webserver out of your home and it’s not as big a deal as one would think. At the very least I wouldn’t have to deal with asshats in California who can’t be bothered to talk to me on the telephone. If I have a problem with tech support, I can just deny myself lattes until it’s fixed.
***
As you can tell, I finally did get back on the blog. They have not moved the websites to the dedicated server yet, as far as I can tell, so expect another down when that occurs because I will need to update the DNS once that happens. I’ve been looking around their online forums and it looks like Lunarpages has pulled this stunt a couple of times lately. Maybe it’s less about setting up a dedicated server of my own and more about finding a better webhost. I don’t know, it kind of seems like an interesting challenge.
Tags: blogs, Lunarpages, web hosting
