I'm sitting here putting off doing my laundry, so I thought I'd write my first entry to the new diary section. Wow, it's been quite the two months. I've had such a pain in the butt with my web hosting that it's almost not worth getting into. I'm sure, though, that someone has to be wondering why the site was down for so long. Well, here's the story.

So, around December 8th...like maybe 2:30 in the afternoon, my former webhost decided to change some settings on his server. He didn't inform me that he was going to do this. For the technically oriented out there, the nameservers changed. The company changed as a whole. It changed from Rackshack.net to ev1servers.net. Wonderful idea I think. Change something important like that, but don't inform all the paying users.

I tried to contact the guy I normally do if I have a problem. He told me it was my DNS settings. Lehman's terms, that means the name TransLife.net wasn't set up correctly. It was pointing somewhere else. So yeah, I went in and changed it to what he told me to. It takes a few days for the change to filter through the internet. Waited...waited...waited....nothing happened. Site still down.

So I tried to contact the guy again, he blew me off telling me it was still my fault and the DNS was still wrong. So I tried changing it again to what was listed on the main hosting site. Waited again, nothing again. All in all, I probably did that four times with different settings each time taking up probably 3 weeks of the 2 months. Eventually I got sick of trying to contact that guy that I tried contacting the host directly. They didn't get back to me either. At this point I started looking for new hosting.

In my search I found one that was inexpensive and supported JAVA, since I just learned that language. I was going to write out my own stuff to use on the site. However, once I got the hosting, I learned very quickly that it wasnt worth my time. For those of you that are planning on making a website, DO NOT get windows based hosting. Total waste of money.

Through the help of a friend at work, I was directed to TotalChoiceHosting.com. I looked it over, and it looked wonderful. I eventually signed up for it, and it's been 400 times better than the other hosting I've had. I highly recommend them if you're in the market. The whole price of this website just went down, and it's capability went up. How's that for good stuff? So yeah, that's the story.

What did I learn from all this? Many things. One: Don't use windows based webhosting. Two: Ev1servers.net are not all that great. Three: Backup the website periodically. Four: Do research before starting into a project so as to avoid getting ripped off. I think in the end it was a good experience to have, however annoying. I don't expect the site will be down anytime in the near future, but if so, it definitely wont be for that long.

So yeah, sorry about the interruption. Tomorrow I will write about my actual life and such. K, time to go meet some friends. Bye.

Luv,

Jessica