Apres Sunday night dinner, looking for a relaxing tv show to watch with the ferals, and choosing NCIS.

Needing to multi-process, but I can’t decide which device to use whilst watching tv avec doona: the android tablet or the laptop. So I bring both into the living room, grab a couch, and a glass of red wine.

Pose the question to the youngest feral: which device?

His answer: you’re asking me? you made the right choice. (I brought both)

In the beginning, was free hosting. Freewebs.com, geocities.com were the first ones I tried, but the limitations and ads were too annoying after a while.

The next one was a US/Canadian company that had an interesting affiliate program attached. I thought I was joining under an active business builder, but alas, cookies got the better of me, and I got no spillover at all. It was a very nice company, but overseas hosting wasn’t the best solution from an SEO perspective back then, especially if you had a .com domain you wanted to rank in Australia. So I looked for an Aussie PHP hosting company.

Started with Jumba first. They were ok at first. Then the support problems started. Some Chinese spam caused one of my sites to keep crashing, so they turned off ALL 12 sites without telling me. Um, I was quite annoyed. I put a placeholder page up for my broken site (while I waited for a new laptop to be able to debug the problem) and somehow Jumba managed to delete the .htaccess files for all 12 sites. Luckily I had my own backup, but that was the end of them.

Moved to Chombo, and again at first things were ok. Then a series of calamities seemed to strike them. Connections to data centres that caused everyones sites to go down. For days. Actually four days in September – and that was the last straw with them, especially as they didn’t update their clients, Twitter page, Whirlpool or their official status page during that time. And there was also the time when the infamous Turkish hacker got in and replaced all the index files. And somehow my single generation backup was in progress during the hack, so Chombo said they had absolutely no backups for me. Can a hosting company really run like that?

So now I’ve moved to rackservers.com.au. In the past I have manually moved all my sites over, one by one, although I know you should be able to backup everything through cpanel. But of course Chombo’s cpanel backup function failed. So Rackservers doggedly copied everything across for me.

I’ll still create my own backups. I had even bought a new external hard drive and new laptop in preparation for that, just before Chombo had gone down for four days.

Cross fingers, this will be the one!