With the high prices of gas, and having to commute some 30 miles one way to work, I have been starting to pare down my entertainment expenditures every month. Yesterday I cancelled my Blockbuster online account ($19), an autograph site account ($5), my Jerry Doyle account ($5) and my IMDB Pro Account ($12.95). Hm, now that I look at that, it would almost pay for cable or dish TV.

That is, if gas prices happen to get under control.

It’s part of a larger process of Spring Cleaning and getting out the clutter. Having to move junk from one room to another when carpet was being put down made me actutely aware of all the junk I had accumulated, even in only 5 years of being back in Iowa.

Thanks to SOMEBODY mentioning it the other day (!!!!!), I again had the “have to go back to high school because you missed a PE makeup class” dream last night. Grrrr. It was basketball and you had to make a layup to complete the class, but they went every other person (skipping me) and then at the end said that everybody who didnt get to go (ie: me) had to do 19 hours of community service to finish the class.

gr. gr. gr heheheh.

Ok, this is funny, good but at the same time disturbing…
http://www.esanity.co.uk/podcasts/HandsToBoag.mp3
If you are a web programmer/designer, you’ll enjoy.

So, about two weeks ago I had a revelation. You see, according to a web site I found (sorry don’t have the link) a computer running 24/7 can average about $30/mo in electricity. I had been running my own web server at my house because I thought it was cheaper than paying someone to host all of my sites. It was a reasonable assumption, after all, I wasn’t paying a monthly hosting fee was I? Well, obviously I ended up paying MORE in electricity. So, being the frugal minded person I am, I decided to shut down my server and go with a hosting company.

I’ve tried many different companies over the years, and there was a really good offer over at netfirms.com that offered 1.5 terabytes of bandwidth a month. PERFECT for podcasting. I signed up, ave my credit card and started building my sites. Around Thursday the 13th I got a voice mail at home saying I needd to call the billing department to verify the order. Ok, that was weird, I mean I gave a credit card. But I tried to call on Friday, and was on hold for 20 minutes.

I was getting new carpet installed on Monday (another long blog post coming on that!) so my computers were unhooked from Sunday – Monday night. Now, I had setup all of my important web sites on the new server, including some pretty heavy installations of the gallery script, links script, and other things that took a lot of time. So imagine my astonishment when I received an email asking if I knew my sites were down.

Wha huh?

Yep, it was true. Because I didn’t call back within 3 days they erased everything I had built from the tuesday before – the saturday. Everything. Gone. Goodbye. I was NOT happy. Calls to their technical support line were met with “sign up for another account and re-upload everything”. No way, Jose.

So, I found another hosting company. This one appears to be sooooooo much nicer than netfirms (except the bandwidth isnt quite as good) but I am really happy with them so far. The gallery script works a lot better (yay for mod-rewrite) and my shopping script works, movable type works – basically everything is falling into place again. All for $9.95/mo. Unlimited domains. Sweet. The hosting company is www.hostgator.com and they are a great company to work with so far.

So, if you tried to get to my sites and they were down, or you were expecting a podcast (or two) thats why things have been delayed. I think I am finally up and running with almost everything now, but there are a lot of sites only half-uploaded that I am slowly working on.

So, netfirms… good riddance!

I’ll be writing more about VRE and AIS later…

But I just have to say its VERY cool to be paying 10cents a click on Google, getting people to your site, and then have then click on a link that MAKES you about $1.00 per click, or even 75 cents per click. Thats pure profit.

Must find more.