Thursday, September 29, 2011

The Details

Written by Kodi Wolf at 6:09 PM

I didn't want to post the details about what my technical difficulties were (or rather my solution to them) on the off chance my hosting provider (AssortedInternet.com) ended up reading this and decided to pull the plug before I was ready, but that's not a problem now, so here's what was going on.

Basically, I had to switch hosting providers because my old host kept changing stuff on the server, making my site break without notice. This was causing me to spend days on troubleshooting, only to figure out after much hair-pulling that it was something they'd done and not a glitch in one of my scripts or my code. With those kinds of problems happening several times a month, my progress on the site was pretty much brought to a standstill. After they refused to fix what they'd done the last time, I finally decided to move.

Of course, it wasn't quite that simple. I had to do a ton of research to find a new host that I was confident wouldn't screw me the way my old host had. Through that research I also came to the conclusion I needed to not only move to a better host, but also upgrade from shared hosting (many domains hosted on a single server) to either a dedicated server (one domain on one server) or a virtual private server (VPS; one server partitioned to act like many smaller servers with one domain to a partition).

Since I was paying a measly $7/month for the shared hosting and dedicated servers start at $200/month, I decided to go with the more reasonable $50/month upgrade to a VPS. And I chose HostGator.com as my new hosting provider, mostly because they're the cheapest and have an amazing support base (24/7 live chat, e-mail, forums, and tech articles, all from mostly native English speakers). Since I've only been with them for a few weeks, I can't really give a long-term review, but so far, they've done everything they said they would and have answered my many questions (sometimes not as thoroughly as I'd like, but if I keep digging, I get the info I need).

Having my own server (even a virtual one) is very new for me, but the support techs have definitely helped and I seem to be muddling through all right (at least the hacking attempts have lessened).

So, I'm slowly getting back on track. In fact, I recently tested PayPal (that was the last thing Assorted broke and refused to fix) and it's working great now. Next on the list is to do a live test (I've only tested in PayPal Sandbox so far) and to get BetaWolf up and running. They don't know it yet, but they're going to be my beta-testers for using the site, since they'll have to go through the membership signup process and fill out forms, etc.

Hopefully, if all that goes well, I'll be able to finally open the site and get back to just writing. Though I know that first month or two I'm probably going to be inundated with e-mails from people wanting help with one thing or another, so it'll probably be a month or two after that before I finally get back into the swing of things.

So that's what's been going on for the past two months (longer if you count the months of troubleshooting before that because of Assorted's nonsense).

Well, back to work. :)