Well, it looks like Funny is FINALLY back online. Evidently one of the issues was that it took GoDaddy a good long time to re-direct the domain name to the new server, after I decided to move away from BlueHost.
What a hassle.
But more to the point, how disappointing. I’ve really liked Bluehost’s service over the past several years. When I decided to monetize Funny about Money, of course I had to move off WordPress.com, where the site dwelt for a couple of years after I’d moved it from Apple’s now-defunct iWeb. Until recently, BH’s reliability has been impeccable and its tech representatives quickly accessible, smart, and effective.
Lately, though, Funny seemed to be down every time I turned around. Jesse Michelson, our amazing Web guru, had already started hosting sites on his own server and so, knowing that was a possibility, I asked BlueHost’s techs what their story was. Repeatedly, they told me the server hosting my site was “undergoing maintenance.” So, we asked them to move the site to a different server, one that wasn’t constantly under repair. They assured us this would solve the problem.
Yeah: it solved a problem, if you regard having your site be online all the time as a “problem.” Now there was even more down time!
The last time I called them, the site had been down for some two hours during a period when I happen to know most readers access it. After the third or fourth call, I reached a tech who tried to upsell me! He suggested that if I wanted reliable service, I would have to pay a lot more for the privilege.
Izzat so, dude?
Funny has over 2200 posts just now, making it, admittedly, a fairly bloated site. BUT: it is now demonetized, its proprietor having tired of seeing her pages junked up with Adsense trash (the Scandinavian call girls really tore it!), which of late was returning exactly 0.00 dollars per month. With no advertising running on the site, there would be no reason not to simply back up the data to disk, delete about 90 percent of the old posts, and start over again at WordPress.com.
Well. There would be a couple of reasons, not the least of which is it would probably harm the PageRank. But since I’m no longer selling ad space, WGAS?
But I would like to use several categories to help build a couple of e-books, after I get the first three e-books in the pipeline up on Amazon. So I wasn’t crazy about the WP.com option.
Hence, over to Jesse’s servers. As transfers go, it had its…interesting…moments, but with Jesse running interference I only despaired once or twice. Probably moving to WP.com would have entailed just as much hassle, and I would have lost content and possible PageRank.
So, for the time being, it’s good to see the site back online…and I’m feeling reasonably pleased.
This morning the four-week comp course starts. Yesh. I did swear I would never walk into a classroom again. But it’s probably relatively safe. Students tend to self-select in short, intensive courses like this, meaning there probably will be fewer flakes and fewer overt crazies than typically show up in F2F sections. And it’ll be over fast. The proceeds will pay the new cleaning lady for a full year.
