Bad Luck with Steadfast.net’s MySQL Server
Today when I went to check this blog at about 3:30pm PST I figured out that it took very long for it to respond and it can’t connect to the database. I then checked other websites but also the same. Later on I figured out that’s because steadfast’s mysql2 database server was down as their hard drive screwed up :(. I checked their website and they said they replaced the hard drive, but they needed filesystem check as well. I waited and waited for a few hours but at 7:55PM CT they said the filesystem check process restarted and I have to wait again. I kept on checking their update about the problem and at 9:45pm they said the filesystem check is completed and some data are corrupted, but they have the backup from the morning. I then checked my website and it worked for a like a minute or so but down again. Later on I checked their update again and realized that the good news is gone; instead they replaced it with a bad news in 10:00pm saying that the RAID card screwed up and they’ll look at it. An hour and a half later the bad news came, that the whole RAID array is gone and they had to replace the whole thing! After another hour wait they said they are installing the system back to the new drives and finally at 1:13 AM they are up again, and they restored the backup that was taken at 1:30AM CT on October 21, ahhhh. Fortunately nothing was changed on my websites at that time of period.
I have never had any issue with this hosting company before. My websites were almost never down until yesterday, but this time it is been down for too long. It was down for more than six hours. On all other hosting companies that I have before they have downtime as well, but only for a very short time rather than this lengthy delay. However, this issue is not common and I hope that this won’t happen again.
Hostgator unlimited space and bandwidth for cheap price
Hostgator right now is giving you unlimited space and bandwidth for all shared hosting packages. Also, for the Baby and Business plan they allow unlimited domains. It’s a very good deal for just $4.95, $7.95, and $12.95 a month for the Hatchling, Baby, and Business plans if paid 3 years at once. If you don’t want to pay for 3 years at once you can pay it for 2 years, 1 year, or even monthly, which is $8.95, $9.95, and $14.95 a month, still not that much higher than 3 years at once for the Baby and Business plans.
My experience with switching in between paid web hostings
Yesterday I started to look for a reliable web hosting. I searched online trying to find a good yet reliable web hosting and realized that many of them either require you to pay for a whole year at once to get a cheaper price(which is still not cheap), or have too few bandwidth per month in general.
After hours of struggle I found Host Department and almost signed up for it, but its website was very unprofessional and very tricky, i.e. you have to click “Php Web Hosting” in the bottom of the page where it says “Host Department’s Specialty Hosting:” in order to get php hosting package at the same price instead of the non-php, also the advertisement in the home page is very confusing and the sign up process is very poorly designed, i just gave up before paying for it.
I then tried GoDaddy’s hosting’s Economy Plan, it allows you to pay about $8 for the first two months and $4 each month afterwards. But alas, while GoDaddy is good for domain registration it really sucks for hosting, it takes about thirty minutes to do what you could have done instantly in other hostings, like setting up the account and creating a mysql database, its server software is very outdated, it gave me hard time to import mysql databases because of its older version of mysql. Finally it doesn’t seem to support .htaccess that well, you can’t make custom error pages there, but only in the freaking control panel that takes even thirty minutes to change custom error page. I also heard other people say about the lock table issue when hosted on GoDaddy. Because of all these I gave up GoDaddy and asked them for refund on the hosting account calling the non-toll-free number.
Later on I stopped looking for cheap web hosting because for me they’re unreliable unless they provide less features like space and bandwidth. I looked for some more expensive yet reliable ones and found HostGator and DreamHost. HostGator got many positive honest reviews from some trusted sites like whreviews.com, while for DreamHost it has more disk space and bandwidth. I had asked some people who is using it about its reliability and many of them didn’t have any problems with it. But I first decided to use HostGator anyways with its baby plan since it allows me to pay with paypal and I can try it the first month for $0.01, the plan is $9.95 each month and with a promo code like “jury” you can get $9.94 off for the first month on plans other than hatchling(the cheapest one, billed annually and 1 month free with promo code), I was very satisfied with it and didn’t have any reason to switch.
But today I had one little problem, a problem that probably won’t apply to you. I asked one friend from China to visit my blog and surprisingly they said they can’t open it anymore since I switched to HostGator, I then asked others to try to open it and they can’t either! I started to realize that HostGator is blocked in China by its “Great Firewall”, just like Blogger had been blocked! That really frustrated me since I’m planning to develop a Chinese website with other registered domains in the same hosting account to take advantage of its multiple domain hosting, I also didn’t want to lose any visitors from China. I had to switch again since what I’ll lose is just one cent. I then switched my blog to DreamHost today, which has a lot more nice features, space and bandwidth, and I’m very satisfied with it. It has many more features than HostGator plus 200 GB Disk Storage and 2 TB bandwidth even with its basic plan with the same price as HostGator’s baby plan.
Bonus: if you sign up with the promo code USEFULHOST50 for DreamHost you’ll get
$50 off (the maximum possible) on any hosting plans
Finally I moved my blog to http://www.theusefulblog.com
Today I decided to use the domain theusefulblog.com for my blog and use Wordpress to host my blog instead of Blogger. I decided not to use tipspedia.info since .info domain kinda sucks. I bought a very cheap web hosting from CirtexHosting which is only $2.50 a month or $24 a year. Despite its low price, I found the service is excellent, it gives you 5000 MB Storage, 100 GB Bandwidth, PHP, CGI, MYSQL, and 5 Email / FTP Accounts in the basic plan, it’s almost never down and its support is also excellent, and it has Live Support where they answer your questions very quickly, the email support is also very fast.
After I created the host and installed WordPress on it I started to migrate the old posts from Blogger to WordPress. Because my Blogger was beta I can’t import it directly, I had to import its post’s RSS to the new blog, after importing I found the timestamp was off by seven hours I had to change them back one by one by hand, I also had to type the comments in one by one again since I don’t know how to import them from Blogger to WordPress :(. It took me about three hours to do all those…. Finally I finish migrating by putting the customization I had from Blogger to here and pick a theme for my new blog.
Right now I just don’t know how to change the top menu for this K2 style TrueBlue, the links over there are not obvious enough,
if anybody know how to make it look better please tell me about that by leaving a comment here.
Url-xp.com is a scam
One day in a forum I saw a website http://www.url-xp.com/ that “pays” $2.00 per 1000 impression + Pop-under, so I gave it a try to see if it works. I went to sign up there and I saw a very simple page where you can put the paypal email address or e-gold account there, but surprisingly there’s no Term of Use or anything like that there.
After signing up I put a website there and I tested the money link that “pays” $2 per 1000 impressions. Surprisingly it counts all visits including my own repeated visits, I wasn’t sure if it really pays because those websites that pays per impression almost always doesn’t count the visits from the same IP immediately, so I refreshed the money link 1015 times, and it showed about $2 there.
After three weeks I still didn’t get anything in my paypal, I check it again and the website still shows the two dollars there, except now it says minimum payout is $50. After seeing that I gave it one more try and added one more url to auto-refresh. I auto-refreshed every 3 seconds for one whole night until I wake up and see the balance went up above $50, after this the page still looks the same as before except for the balance. I checked it out after some weeks and it’s still the same, I still didn’t get anything paid for it. Now I check it again and the website is gone! I went to look at its domain registration data at GoDaddy.com and it says domain suspended because of abuse: http://who.godaddy.com/whois.aspx?domain=URL-XP.COM&prog_id=godaddy.
here’s the picture of the $50.153 they owe me, it seemed to be gotten effortlessly, but it’s never paid:
The best free web hosting sites
You can find a list of free web hosting sites at http://www.free-webhosts.com you won’t need to register domain for almost all of them, I listed some that I think the best below.
If you don’t want ads in your website http://www.phpnet.us/ and http://www.freewebtown.com are the best for you. http://www.phpnet.us/ gives you 300MB web space and 80GB bandwidth a month, no file size limit at all; while http://www.freewebtown.com is the only one that offers 2GB for free with no file size limit either, but the drawback is it only has 2GB bandwidth per month, the same as its space. if you want to get additional bandwidth you have to pay for it.
If you don’t care about the ads and you want a website with unlimited bandwidth and lots of space http://www.prophp.org is best for you, it gives you about 250MB space, no bandwidth limit and no file size limit either. The ad they put on your pages is only a banner on top.
Some very cool free stuff and tools online
Did you Know that:
- Now in aim you can make a free phone number in AIM phone line.
- In Windows Live Local you can see the front of your house.
- You can download free LEGAL music in mpfree.com, they’re in WMA format 128kbps or 256kbps, which is very cool.
- You can also download copyright free classical music online in the ClassicCat website.
- You can make free INTERNATIONAL phone call (including U.S. of course) in phonehog.com or make free phone call inside U.S. with Skype.
- In firefox you can play very cool game without any plugin, you can try it here.
- You can play video with java online.
- You can make a very cool mp3 player with flash (Very cool, works in myspace.com)
Blogger’s bug of switching back to publishing on blogspot.com after publishing on ftp
Today in the morning Blogger was down, but I thought blogspot.com was also down(in reality it didn’t). Because of this an idea of publishing on ftp came up to my mind. So I changed the setting to publish over ftp and published the blog to my own computer. Surprisingly when I switch I didn’t get any warning about I might lose my hosting in the current Blog*Spot Address when I changed the setting.
After a while I realized that blogspot.com is not down and doing OK I regretted that decision and tried to switch back to Blog*Spot Address. Here comes the problem, now I can’t get my angelchen1111.blogspot.com back when I switch back, it said it’s already in use although it isn’t. I checked it and still see my blog there, nobody took it over. After that I tried to make a new blog with angelchen1111 and even tried a new account with angelchen111.blogspot.com, all those doesn’t take it back. I read the help file and now understood that my host is supposed to be released after switching to ftp and I can take it back if nobody took it over. But the host didn’t seem to be released and nobody could take it. I got tired of this and slept thinking about I might need to get a new name.blogspot.com and update all links :(.
After I wake up the solution comes, I tried to publish on Blog*Spot Address with name other than angelchen1111 and hit publish, after publishing I changed the Blog*Spot Address back to angelchen1111 and published again, Bingo! Now it worked and I finally took angelchen1111.blogspot.com back. Warning, this might not work for everybody, please don’t try it with your Blog*Spot Address that you really want to keep or you might lose it, I made a new account to do the same thing again and it FAILED, it couldn’t take back the Blog*Spot Address. Try this only if you want your Blog*Spot Address back after switching to ftp or sftp.
Here I warn you people again not to switching back and forth the method of publishing, because sometimes some strange bugs might come out and screw up your post. Think over before you switch to ftp or sftp, you might not be able to get your Blog*Spot Address back after you switch.
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