What happened to Common Sense Technology blog?
The hosting Internet Service Provider, iPowerWeb, failed to automatically renew the domain name where the Common Sense Technology blog was hosted. For various reasons, when I started the blog years ago, I placed it at a web site that I had then used in conjunction with a consulting business, http://mitchellconsulting.net/commonsense.
Due to the incompetence of iPowerWeb, the weblog has now been moved permanently to:
While I was on vacation, I was first alerted to the loss of the blog by Scott, N7FSP who called my cell phone. I also received quite a number of emails asking what had happened.
I immediately telephoned iPowerWeb - and they and their domain name registrar went back and forth pointing fingers at each other, even though the entire fiasco was due to iPowerWeb. Once that was resolved, iPowerWeb agreed to renew the domain and charged my credit card.
When I returned from vacation I found that the site was still off line. More calls to iPowerWeb revealed that they had not actually submitted the domain name renewal at all! Additionally, they falsely claimed that I requested they close the account and deleted the entire domain, including several web sites and database files. iPowerWeb admitted making mistakes in their emails and online tech support "chats".
I've concluded that iPowerWeb likely chose to kill the account because this blog had gotten too popular for a shared hosting account at that ISP. iPowerWeb hosted over 12,700 domain names at the same IP address as my web site - implying they had one web server shared with 12,700 domains! That is about six times the level that should be on a shared server.
Because the weblog used Wordpress - which is written in PHP script - there is an overhead in retrieving and display each page from a MySQL database. Wordpress requires several hundred times more processor time per page than serving an equivalent HTML/CSS/XML static page. The result is that the blog probably took up more of their over extended processor than they wished it too. A real business would have contacted the customer and offered to sell me a premium service. Not iPowerWeb. Their business appears to be hosting hundreds of thousands of very inexpensive domains on massively shared web servers - which works as long as no one actually visits most of those domains. A related problem was that certain search engines - notably Yahoo and sometimes MSN - were hammering the site with page requests. Yahoo, all by itself, sometimes accounted for 40% of all "visits" to my web site. I have set up a robots.txt file to now ban Yahoo from indexing the web site since no one uses Yahoo for online searching anyway.
iPowerWeb claims to offer expansive disk storage and bandwidth to all customers but I suspect these limits are bogus. Their real limits on system resources are likely far less. Rather than admit that, they may choose to simply kill off those customers who exceed the real limits. (DirecPC, the satellite Internet provider, got caught doing this years ago - they told customers they had unlimited Internet access but actually capped usage at less than 200 megabytes per day, after which they cut you off. Eventually, the company lost a lawsuit and had to refund equipment purchase costs.)
iPowerWeb also outsourced the domain name registration to a company based in China (obviously, domain name registration is a job Americans are unwilling to do - NOT), the process of regaining control over my own domain name then extended from August 4th to August 20th.
The hamradio-online.com domain was hosted at iPowerWeb. Coincidentally, that account was up for renewal - instead of renewing, I immediately moved it to GoDaddy.com hosting. I am in the process of moving all of my domains away from iPowerWeb to other providers. Depending on some business activities, there is a possibility that I might end up leasing a dedicated or virtual dedicated server for hosting several business and non-profit group sites. In which case I would finally have a server with the capacity to reliably serve everyones needs.
Due to the long outage of the Common Sense blog (we had a ten day outage due to iPowerWeb last year when they could not figure out how to replace broken hardware), I am now going to see how many visitors return before I ramp up lots of efforts on the blog again.
About half the visitors to the Common Sense blog came to it via hamradio-online.com and half came directly to mitchellconsulting.net/commonsense. If I've lost half the readers, I would be discouraged from continuing with the blog as I had in the past.
Important
- The new URL will be http://hamradio-online.com
- If you prefer, you can also go directly to the new blog at http://hamradio-online.com/commonsense
- If you read the web site with a newsreader program or an online service like Bloglines, you will need to re-subscribe to the newsfeed for the site since it has changed.
To reduce my time in baby sitting Wordpress I have switched back to Blogger which produces static web pages for the server. I have also looked at some other solutions including iBlog and Thingamablog, which are offline editors that publish pages to the web site. For now, I expect to stick with Blogger.
