I’ve just spent a couple of days switching to another hosting company. I probably wouldn’t have bothered changing if I didn’t get an email all of a sudden that my hosting fee will increase threefold. Turns out my old hosting company sold the business to iWeb which then promptly issued me a new invoice (later cancelled). Turns out they did send an email, titled migrating servers but without timeline, without giving any options and with no details about the new servers, logins, etc. I just saw my site was down all of a sudden. When I called iWeb the tech support although very polite had no idea what was going on, why the site was down, where my account and data is. They asked me to change NS at the registrar and just wait. I was then sent login details which worked briefly and then just sopped. In short it was a big mess, at the end I got an email that my site actually hasn’t been migrated yet and is still on the old servers. By then I’ve already had enough of iWeb and just moved to a new hosting company called stablehost.com so far so good and hopefully it will stay that way. I also cut down the cost of the hosting from $13 a month (I know.. pricey, legacy plan which I didn’t bother changing) to a really low cost of $2.56 ($7.7 quarterly). It’s a really basic plan (enough for my needs) which explains why it’s so cheap, one of the cheapest cpanel hosting I could find, but also because of the coupon / discount promotion they’re having at webhostingtalk.com

Anyway, it’s not that I update the site much (ever?) anymore but some posts still attract traffic so people are still finding some useful tidbits here and I also get traders contacting me via the site which is nice so I’m keeping it alive for now. And make sure my backups are good, I had the wordpress db emailed to me automatically every day, a bit overkill, but helps when you need it.

Tags: backup, blog, cheap, cpanel, hosting company, iweb, servers, tech support, webhosting, wordpress

I upgraded WordPress to the latest 2.7.1 version yesterday, everything was done automatically using the WordPress Automatic upgrade plugin. With the exception of one plugin which wasn’t re-activated automatically everything went smoothly. It automatically backs up everything, prepares download links for it, fetches the latest WP, installs it and cleans up after itself. Neat. I always felt it was a pain to keep updating WP with all the frequent versions that get released, it seems like this is a thing of the past.

Btw, the new WordPress dashboard is much better than the previous version. Everything is arranged nicely and the ability to create new posts as well as view and reply to comments directly from the dashboard is quite useful.

Spent a couple of hours this morning updating the theme and template. Nothing too earth shattering but let me know what you think and if it loads up ok for you.

.. almost. Still tying up loose ends here and there. If you see something not working as it should please let me know.

Wow, time flies.. It’s mid September already and I’m starting to see the end of the year around the corner.

Anyway, I’ve been mostly busy with wedding arrangements and related bureaucracy over the last few weeks. I’ve also re-started an old hobby and got myself a Nikon D60 DSLR. It seems though that the summer is behind us and markets have started, just barely, to present opportunities that are more suitable for my style. The first week of September was far better than any week in the prior 3 months or so. But then last week I was treading mostly water with only minor progress in P&L. So who knows, maybe we’ll start seeing some action again or it’ll be slim pickings. I’m optimistic though, I guess I have to be to survive mentally :-) So given the action I’m seeing so far in September I started scaling up my size again. If I see conditions starting to deteriorate I’ll scale back down but for now I’m back to about half my typical size from earlier in the year from way below that during the July-Aug period.

Incidentally, my DAX trading started to suffer through drawdown and generally choppy conditions right as my stocks trading picked up, it may be related or it may not be. I missed lots of days in August due to not being able to be around when the DAX trades so maybe I also kindda lost focus and touch with it and the whole endeavor being new meant the setback was not a small one. So that’s one area where I still got work to do.

So that’s it for my (very) infrequent update. I haven’t felt to blog much recently so I just didn’t. One of those things that come and go in waves and as I go through different interests and priorities in life.

Dave mentioned this interesting / cool / creepy tool called firefly which allows people visiting a site to chat between themselves. I’ve just added it as you can see in the banner to the right. Check it out, if as FSM said, you need one more way to burn time :-)

I have nothing to write about it. But that doesn’t mean it should stop bloggers from posting the shocking headline, right? ;-) So I’m joining in and contributing my communal “wow” to the trading blogsphere :-)