The "Nada" Farm Chronicles

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This is sorta new to me, but here we go.

I went online about 10 years ago, I knew nothing, I mean less than nothing, which is what I now know, nothing I mean. Well I am getting educated, not that I care to know. But I, as usual, am being forced to learn about something that should simply take care of itself. WHAT IS WEB HOSTING? Yep I have been doing this for 10 years and until recently it just worked, but as always, someone comes along and improves something, to the point of it not working any more. Almost like clock work after I renew my subscription to the hosting service they fix soomething so that I need to futz around with things for a week, to get it right again. I mean to make it work again, so this year I decided I would find another webhost. Well actually, this year they screwed things up early, and reminded me I had determined to try a cheaper service. I know it seems pretty grandiose of me to have this silly website to begin with, my name as a web address and email account and all, well it costs over $145.00 a year for that extravagance, and even more really, in that the name of the site alone costs $20.00 a year as well. So even though I got the web site builder program for less than a hundred dollars, and the pictures are free, and the excellent writing is my personal contribution (priceless) oh and consider I have to maintain a web connection, or drive to town to piggy back, either of which cost $49.00 a month or multiple trips to town to connect. Well it adds up! And heap on top of all of that a webhost who screws up 200 pages of code just for the fun of it. (OKAY, they claimed they needed to change affiliate sites and have been warning me for 4 years) BUT, what the hell is an affiliate site, and so what if they change? Well I found out, first I couldn't get to my site online at all. The FTP was screwed up, (I changed nothing, as per usual, they changed something about "security codes" and my site doesn't automatically follow every webtrend by using robots...) I finally just logged on to the main host site, and found that an advertisement that I had included (with the promise that anyone going from my site, and contracting with them, I would get a $75.00 kickback for their first year.) I found this was a lie when I went from my site, and contracted with them for a website, for the church we were attending at that time. My intention was to use the $75.00 to pay for the church website the first year and then let them pay for it after that. I also webmastered the site for them for free and... of course paid for it for the next three years as well, but that's another issue... ((Christians are pretty backward about the internet)). ANYWAYS, when I couldn't get to my site, or get the pages to function correctly, I finally contacted the help desk and got a major runaround, probably no more or less than usual, but I had decided to go check a couple other web hosts. I eventually got the next three years for about 66 percent of one year of EZWeb Hosting. And was instantly inundated with offers of assistance in moving my site over. Of course this required the cooperation of EZ Web Hosting, they needed to send me a number in an email. and 6 days later no number, no email, no contact.... well they did send a request for my assessment of the quality of their services and an offer to give them a great rating as my past webhost. I just don't see that happening. I tried before to get my service backed down, to the $75.00 a year rate I was paying for the church, they claimed I couldn't do that, until I told them I would be moving to another service, suddenly I could do al kinds of things to save money, well really only scale down to the single service I was going to for $68.04 for three years, as compared to $430.20 for the same time frame. Anyway, as I said before, this is contingent upon the two people who work at EZ WEB-Hosting to get around to sending me the email I require. They oddly enough never had trouble getting back to me about the blame of my non working site, being my fault, or sending me any of the bills I paid over the last ten years, just the little email that releases me to the Indians that run iPage. 6 days and counting, Technically, it is now 7 days, and I still don't have the email that other sites claim "should take no more than 5 minutes to send and receive". Well, what do they know, obviously they aren't E Z Web-Hosting. Oh and about the greyed out box on this page, just to the left here, it is what remains of the affiliate program. Which I have come to understand, was an "affiliate" of the E Z Web Hosting people, that would handle selling more websites.... Okay, so who, besides me, reading this insane website, would even consider buying a web hosting plan to begin with? So it was a suckers bet for me, from the start. But when I donated the site to the church, I realized it was a scam, but then (insult to injury) they left me with a crap grey box, and no cool animated logo. That was the turning point for me. Anyway as you are reading this I have made the transition. I am now hosted on iPage for a couple bucks a month, and they were helpful and responsive and doing a good job for me. I'll have to wait a couple cycles to see how it works overall, and make an update page, but for now, all is well on NadaFarm.... Of course, there's always something to write about, and well, this week is no exception...