I realize this post is a little late, but I had a few issues come up with my Web Hosting provider this past week
I’m sure some of you noticed, I posted a couple different blog entries in January, but then noticed they got deleted, and then kept switching themes around. There was a reason for all this madness.
My old hosting provider, hastyhost, went out of business back in mid January. They were a really good hosting company, I had been going with them since I lost my job in 2007 after I moved to Fort Wayne and lost my VPS site and discussion forum. They were generous enough to give me a hosting package for $10 a year. It wasn’t big enough to hold a discussion forum, but it supported my blog, which was all I cared about at the time, since nobody ever visited my discussion forum anyway. My brother in-law offered me hosting on his server, and I was going to take him up on it, until hastyhost was gracious enough to give me that $10 a year offer.
Then when hastyhost went out of business, instead of giving us any notice, they decided to switch everybody over to a new company called XE Solutions, who was gracious enough to honor our old hastyhost pricing. That was a good thing, until XE Solutions had 3 hard drive crashes, and kept restoring everybodys account from the last backup they had, which was in early December, so thats where all my posts went..
The thing that gets me, I relied on the off-site backups the hosting provider provided for us, trusting them to take care of keeping the off-site backups current. Well when XE Solutions hard drive crashed, so did all their off-site backups. The same thing happened with my VPS last year, so I think that has taught me a lesson to keep backups HERE at home on a regular basis. I don’t know how to save backups on a cpanel shared hosting account though, so I’m going to have to learn, probably over at web hosting talk, which is a discussion forum I visit often, because I do want to keep regular backups here, but unless I automate them somehow, this will keep happening to me. Even if I had kept a backup here, it would have been even older yet then the backup they had, so I’m going to have to start keeping weekly backups over here on my hard drive, or on my portable HD somewhere, or something, not real sure what to do on that yet.
Anyway, after hastyhost went out of business, and they switched everyone over to XE Solutions, the first thing i noticed when they switched us over, they didn’t have suPHP installed, and it was in their policy NOT to include it. I’m not sure why, they told me but I forgot exactally, something about suPHP isn’t secure, and it could compromise accounts, which I knew wasn’t true, but they insisted suPHP was a security risk. I guess each hosting provider has their own strange policies. Its like, I don’t agree with a host not allowing Shell Access either. Sure a shell prompt is a security risk by itself, but you can change the connect port # to something other then port 23, which takes care of that problem, which is even a better idea then running Jailshell, but some of these hosting providers are really not that knowledgeable. Its like with XE Solutions, without suPHP, I couldn’t upgrade wordpress without changing permissions to 777, which is an even bigger security risk then suPHP would ever be, its crazy some of the ideas of these different providers.
So anyway, after fussing with XE Solutions, I finally just said “forget this” and decided to go with a more expensive host that I knew would be reliable. My current plan now is thru a company called vertexhost, who I have known one of the owners of for alot of years. He writes the Community Forum software I use, and they’ve been friends of mine for awhile. I’m still not getting Shell Access thru this host, but I really don’t use Shell that much anymore, unless I have to change ownership and permissions for some files on the server, thats all I ever used it for to begin with. It would be nice to be able to upgrade wordpress using ‘wget’ but I noticed with this host, upgrading wordpress thru the admin panel is much easier, I don’t have the file ownership and permissions problems I did with past hosting providers, so I decided it was worth spending $8 a month for quality hosting. So far, I’ve been very happy with Vertexhost, so we’ll see. I have friends who have been with them for over 10 years, and I trust their judgement, so that alone says alot to me.
I wasn’t sure, at first, how I would pay $8 every month, since Medicaid finds it necessary to check my checking account for withdrawls they don’t think are necessary for the basics of life. They don’t want you to go back to college and try to better yourself in a computer degree that could get you off Social Security and Medicaid to begin with, instead they want you to suffer, so when they see any charges they don’t think are “necessary” to live and breathe, they stop your food stamps. Instead of paying $8 a month for hosting, or $10 a week to contribute to the church, they say ok, you shouldn’t be using your money for those things, you should be paying that $8 towards food, not a blog, so then your denied your $200 in food stamps that month. Its hapened to me several times.
So I was like ok, how do I get around this retarded mess? Sure I don’t have to have a blog to survive, but $8 would only be 2 meals at most, its not like I could love an entire month of groceries on $8, so I don’t understand what the big deal is? Even with 1 person I spend over $150 a month on groceries, most more then that, so I don’t understand why Medicaid “whines” about a little $8 bill, or a $40 bill for TV, or another $40 for internet, its not like if I didn’t have those things, I still wouldn’t have enough money for food every month, its crazy, but because I do want food stamps and Medicaid assistance helping to pay for my Medical expenses (in the $1,000 range or more) I had to figure out a way to pay for my hosting and other small expenses so Medicaid wouldn’t find out about them.
I finally figured out a way, that hopefully won’t get me in trouble, we’ll see.. I decided to get one of those temporary Walmart money cards, and just pay my bills with that. There are a couple of advantages I found in paying bills that way.
1. The charge is denied from the card until you have the cash to load onto the card, which you do at any walmart store.
2. If the money is automatically withdrawled from the card, and the full amount isn’t in there, then the company who charged you just doesn’t get their money. There are no “bounced check” or other charges accociated with this card. WIth this, I can make other online purchases too, without worrying about bouncing my checking account. Right now I’m trying to get all my bills over there that I don’t want Medicaid to see that I have, so I can actually start living again.
I mean, its not that I care what bills Medicaid sees per se, its not that. Its just that, whenever I don’t have quite enough in my checking account to cover the bill, I end up bouncing a check, which ends up costing me $30 each time the transaction tries to go thru, which one time costed me over $200 just for 1 bounced check, and since the bank doesn’t pay the seller either, you still have to pay the bill along with the bounced check charges.
So I like this walmart money card idea much better. There is a small monthly fee for using the card after you’ve used the card for over 2 years, but I figure, to get around that, I can always get another card every 1-2 years, that way I can avoid those charges too. Even if I had to pay those small monthly fees, its worth it to have overdraft protection, it really is.
Anyway, because my site was messed up for so long, expect to see alot of changes here in the coming month. I haven’t decided rather I’m going to put the FusionBB board back up or not. I was thinking if I did decide to put a bulletin board up, I’d ditch FusionBB and just go with MyBB, since its the most like FusionBB then the other free solutions. Besides, I don’t make money on my site, I’ve never been able to, so there’s no use in paying another yearly fee for MyPaymentPal and all that extra stuff, when I don’t use any of it. I had a FusionBB site before, and nobody ever came to visit but once at the most. Even this blog doesn’t get many comment visitors, so I figure I’m better off sticking to the free solutions, unless I start getting some more interest in this site, but for now, free is the better way to go I think.
Alot of these plugins for wordpress want $10 a year for each plugin, and I just can’t afford that, so I’ll be switching plugins around on this site too for awhile. If there’s anything you want here, please let me know, but if people want the updated version of “ajax edit comments” just as an example, then there going to have to help me with the cost to upgrade, otherwise, they’ll just have to be happy with the old free version. I’d like to be able to put all kinds of cool stuff on this site, I just can’t afford it, I’m sorry. I could put all kinds of cool stuff on this site if I just had the money, and since I never ask for anything but donations, you guys will just have to be satisfied with the site the way it is.
May God bless you and your family in the weeks to come. Take care everyone. love you all!
written by tcoburn
