Upheaval

For my birthday (next Monday) I will be giving myself a new ISP and a new blog design, incorporating ISBW into this site. I will do my damndest to make it as painless as possible on your end. I recommend NOW making sure your feeds are either via ITunes or feedburner, since the core feed will be changing, but if you’re listening via iTunes, the wizzard feed, or Feedburner you should be fine.

People keep asking why I want to leave my host, which is the usually popular Dreamhost. I love their support and their features, what gets me is my sites keep going down. I ask them for help, they either send me advice by pointing me to a wiki I don’t understand (sorry guys, my webmaster skills stopped evolving in 2000, I’m a whiz with tables, if that gives you any idea where my coding strengths lie*), or their specific advice doesn’t work. First advice was add virtual server stuff to my account. Now my sites go down as usual, and I get to pay more for it! Then when I threatened to leave, a very nice support man looked at my site and said to get a caching plugin. I did so and the sites still are going down. I complained on Twitter yesterday and they got all worried and checked on it, which goes to show that they are EXCELLENT at customer service, but the service itself is flawed. I feel like I’m breaking up with a very nice guy who keeps breaking my shit and killing my pets. “You’re a sweetheart, and you’re very good with glue and emergency vet visits, but don’t come here anymore…”

My site is not terribly popular. I’m a popular podcaster, but Libsyn hosts the files that get the most attention. In fact, because of RSS, and the fact that I’m more of a podcaster than blogger, people have little reason to come here on a regular basis. There is no reason my site should be going down as often. This will be a big job, so please be patient with me as I work on making this easy as possible. (FYI, If you’re wondering, I’m probably going with Hostgator, as a couple of people whom I trust recommended them.)

* And the fact that WordPress pats me on the head and says it knows what to do with my tables, don’t you worry your pretty little head about it, pisses me off a lot.