BigDaddyCool

OK as you can see – I’M BACK!!!!

And this blog now has a new home on GoDaddy.com. Here’s the story as to why…

When I started this site I originally went with an organization named Hostazar, and I found that through a product that I’ve advertised on here called “Blogging to the Bank”. Now I haven’t made a million dollars by using that product, but I have been able to utilize the techniques that were spelled out to advocate for those of us out of work at the moment – and to me that is much more fulfilling right now. I figure the money will come later. Anyway, I went with Hostazar because they were easy to set up and it only cost me $3.95 per month for 1gb of storage.

Yeah well,shit happens. What happened soon after I was up and running was that I had trouble paying my monthly bill through PayPal. It just kept bouncing back at me until I received a notification that my account was cancelled. I contacted Hostazar to see what the story was and after about a week they finally got back to me. They informed me that they were having problems with their PayPal account, and that I should just wait to hear from them about other payment options.

So I waited.

And waited…

…and waited….

….aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand waited!

Finally earlier this year there was a change in ownership, and there were some new procedures as far as payment went that had to be carried out. I only found out about this after my account had been suspended and I couldn’t get to my editing program to update the blog. I contacted Hostazar about how to re-instate the account and they informed me of the new payment procedure. I thought “finally, someone who is on the ball over there” and I made my first payment in over a year and got the site back up.

I had also noticed that there were three additional invoices that were now open since I had payed, and since I had figured that they were some sort of back-payment that I had to make. So I erred on the side of caution and payed those as well. Since they totalled no more than $12.00 I figured no harm no foul.

Yeah, that was until July 2nd rolled around and I decided to finish a post I was writing about Sharron Angle and her whacked-out vision of who we are as job seekers when I suddenly found that I couldn’t get to my editing software. Not only that but I couldn’t even find the blog!!! It wasn’t until I tried to get onto Hostazar’s home page and couldn’t that I figured out that my host was down – totally. I figured that it would just be a matter of time before they were back up and it would be business as usual. After all when they had that freeze happen in the UK over Christmas the same thing had happened. So I figured that I would just wait.

So I waited.

And waited…

…and waited….

….aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand waited!

Finally I got tired of waiting and I decided to take matters into my own hands. I had had an excellent experience moving my family site over to GoDaddy.com a couple of years ago, and I wanted to do some research about the possibilities of moving this blog over there as well. I liked what I found and I finally made the decision to go ahead and move this site over.

Now I’m glad that I backed up the database to this site which included all of the posts and pages that I created before Hostazar went down, because that meant that I would just have to upload it to GoDaddy and simply pick up where I left off. I went ahead and bought the new hosting space and waited for it to become active. As soon as the site was ready to receive files I uploaded the database. At first I wasn’t getting anything on their special preview page, but then I later found out it was because I didn’t have the right theme uploaded. So then I uploaded the theme I had since the beginning. The problem with that was that not a lot of features were showing up. There were two sidebars that I had and only one of them was showing up no matter what I did.

There was only one way to solve the problem as it turns out – install a different theme. I found one that was to my liking and installed it and ‘viola – I had my site back!!! Now I have spent the last couple of days re-installing some of the plug-ins that I had before so that the site would work as before. I have also added some ads for my new host as GoDaddy also has an affiliate program. Hey, couldn’t hurt, right?

So in a nutshell – I’m back, and I have a lot more confidence in GoDaddy as a host as my family’s website has had no problems since I moved it here.

So on that note, here’s to a long and happy relationship. I will be back posting more of my opinions soon, so…

Until next time…