Time for yet another update – this time one regarding all my projects, of which Xadara is really the only one that has been going steady.
To make a long story short, January has been a pretty productive month, albeit with some challenges, for me and hosting. On New Years Day I discovered why the site was running on an older, now unsupported version of PHP — it was because I had set it to use such ages ago and never updated things! Go figure, a simple toggle and boom, we’re back to current.
This will help as if I ever do decide to finally re-launch forums those will be able to run as I intend them to, rather than me have to make compremises with the forum software I’d use. This also allows the podcasting plugin I prefer to run again, since it requires a current PHP version above what mine was set to for so long so this means I should have no issue bringing back the podcast if / when I feel the urge!
The second thing to cover here is site consolidation – I have one other major website, basically a passion project, which sadly I’ve not much worked on in the 2 years it’s existed, and part of that is due to the hosting plan it was with – that was separate from the hosting which Xadara is on.
I’ve also been considering a few new side projects and looked into expanding my current hosting to be able to accommodate such. It turns out the cost was far cheaper than I expected, hosting wise. Cool, I could up my hosting package and run more sites from the same server, making things simple! Then it hit me — why not migrate that one site over to the same host?
While I hadn’t had any major issues with the host the site was on, it wasn’t the same, and I had a recurring issue where the site would simply go offline for a few minutes then come back. The hosting company reported no issue and I never did see such myself, but I got email notifications of the issue repeatedly from the Jetpack WordPress plugin. That was a mild annoyance though. In all honesty, for someone wanting to start a site I’d absolutely recommend them if someone inquired – it just wasn’t right for me and this project anymore.
The real issue was simply “out of sight, out of mind” — I didn’t think about the site as often, and would always put off working on it. It isn’t like the content is somehow ever-changing either. It’s one of those sites that once it’s “done” that should be that, but I just have to my lazy self into gear and make it happen. I figure it being on the same server as Xadara itself would make the most sense, and since it will only have so-much content in it it won’t impact this site too much. I’d rather have it available than not, and the cheaper overall cost to run the site is well worth the benefits I get – any more projects I want to run from the server now won’t cost any more on the hosting end of things, only on the domain names.
Needless to say, it’s a win-win for me all around. I did however recently pay for that hosting for a year and had a bit of a time in emails back and forth verifying that I wished to cancel, but I knew I would never make use of the hosting account again in the next year and would have preferred the resources be free for the next up and coming web admin to use. The sales staff were very nice and genuinely sounded like they genuinely cared about my hosting needs. They didn’t pressure me to keep the service like some companies would, but just wanted to make sure I was certain I wanted to cancel. Very nice.
With that said, I hope in the next few days to re-launch the website in question, as well as maybe update it some more beyond what it was. Tomorrow seems like a good enough day for that.
So, yeah, right now things are pretty good here for when I really get back into the groove of working on things. Right now I’ve got a few other projects going on in the day to day life and working more than normal, but that also means more content coming soon enough related to these projects. Yes, I know I’m a bit vague in this article but the companies and site names in question aren’t important — just the process of me getting things in a better shape around here. I’ll probably tell the story of the other site and its hosting in more detail in the future, given how pleasant my experience actually was with them.
So, as always, more to come.