Administrivia: 20 June 2024

Ah, yes, the summer solstice. Anyone remember the solstice five years ago?

Look here for a hint.

Anyway. I’ve got news. You may or may not like it.

Okay. I love my website host. I see some people grumble about them, but they’ve always been solid for me. Five years. Probably the longest I’ve ever been with a hosting service.

Problem is they’re also massively expensive as shared hosting services go. They were $19.99 a month, I think, when I first started with them five years ago and I may have even gone for an annual plan that first year, which would have ended up being a lot less per month. But month-to-month was twenty bucks. And that was a little ouchy but I said whatever, I pay at least this much for Netflix and I don’t get any more out of that except the odd Rory thing and Supernatural and The Walking Dead, anyway, and so I went on with my life. Then after I moved out of my daughter’s father’s house, I had two price hikes in three years. So now instead of twenty bucks a month it’s more like thirty-five.

I lost my main source of income when I moved to California — long story, no one cares — and I’m working on that situation but it’ll take time. I had starting-out money, at least. But that’s not going to last long at all if I don’t get my expenses down a little more. I got my phone bill down by happy accident, but I still have this albatross to deal with.

NO I’M NOT KILLING THIS SITE.

I’m making it cheaper. I will be moving to a new hosting service shortly.

The reason I say you may not like it is that there will be downtime again. I am going to see about using their site migration service, which allegedly is free, and which should also minimize the downtime. I make no promises but that’s my goal.

I intend to work on this tomorrow (Friday) if nothing weird happens. So if you see things glitch or disappear, that’s why. If shit is weird with the site after it’s all done, I’ll go back and fix it — I’ve been working on this thing in fits and starts anyway. It’ll just be one more sub-project. I don’t care. Happy to do it.

Anyway, so that’s what’s going on. Nothing bad, just trying to keep things running smoothly.

The GREAT news is that I’ll be purchasing an annual plan and they are on sale dirt fucking cheap right now. So we won’t have this song and dance again until at least April. And probably not even then because I should be able to migrate the domain over to the new host and I may even be able to do it while the host has their dot-com domain sale going on. Won’t THAT be a hoot.

So look forward to that, I guess. I’ll let you know when it’s moved. Mwah.