New Web Hosting

This is the first proper post on my blog since December 2009, or May 2018 if you count the recipes posts I imported from a separate blog earlier this year.

After 14 years of hosting with Hostgator I got fed up with the sky high renewal fees of 172 USD, about 150 GBP not including the currency exchange fee from the bank.

Last year after I renewed the hosting with Hostgator I decided that would be the last time and that I would find hosting someplace else. That gave me a year to sort out my blogs and other websites I run.

With a new resolve, and a deadline, I started by reorganising my blogs. The first thing I did was to get rid of the recipes blog and import the posts into the main blog. I then moved the JavaScript section from the main blog onto a new site.

Next I started working on Linux Links. I had originally built the site from scratch but now I wanted to move it into WordPress. The first task was to export the data and import it in to WordPress, which to be honest was quite easy! The next step was to get the new site running exactly like the old one but by using WordPress functions.

To be honest I haven’t quite finished Linux Links, the front end works as I intend, but I still have to finish off an admin section I added.

With the change to a new host I could also publish a new site, Bristol’s Lost Pubs, I had been working on this for a couple of years after the original site closed down.

Here is a list of all of my sites.

And with that my new hosting is OVH. Welcome.

Has anyone noticed?

Lol if anyone is subscribed to my blog, then you may of recently received about 144 new emails from this blog.
That’s because when I imported all my posts in to my blog, I forgot to disable the Subscribe2 plugin!

Of course why!?
I have moved hosting, I am now no longer hosting my website and blog on Lycos webhosting, I have moved to Hostgator!

I was with Lycos for about six years, and three of them was using Tripod, Lycos free hosting!
I have been meaning to move hosts for a while now.

I have had no trouble with the service provided by Lycos, and the times I have had to contact their support I got quick answers!
But, there was some limitations with the way the server and PHP were setup.
For example, to get my blog working correctly I had to have two additional plugins. One of them changed the default compact WordPress rewrite rules to the verbose type.
And the second was to disable canonical redirects. The server was setting an incorrect $_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’] value, which sometimes caused some pages to time out with constant redirects.

I contacted their support staff and they said that they were unable to support a 3rd party product.
I installed their One Click Site install of WordPress, but it was version 2.3.2, which doesn’t suffer from the same problem. They told me that they had no plans to upgrade their version of WordPress.

I can’t remember where I heard about Hostgator, but so far its been good!
The control panel is a little confusing, but that’s only because I’m not used to it yet.
They allow you to have multiple databases, so I have separate databases for my blog, website, and linux-links.
I went with their baby package, which still works out cheaper than Lycos.

And the best bit!?
I have been able to ditch the two plugin’s, and all parts of my blog still work!
But I am still using Lycos to serve my domain’s from.