Howdy all,

Thanks for the tips on reliable webhost. Sorry I didn't respond sooner. Been getting the house in order for out of town relatives to come spend the weekend with me.

Tomorrow (Saturday) we are burying my last grandfather. Lost both of my dad's parents and my mom's dad finally past away. He was 87 years old. Up until last year he was still sharp as ever. But a series of mini-strokes (whatever that is) wiped him out mentally. Now a massive stroke finally killed him.

My grandmother (his wife) is still kickin though. She's 83 and has zero health problems. No high blood pressure. No diabetes. Nothing but grey hair and slowing down physically. She can't get to the phone as fast as she once used to. Other than that I see no changes in her.

She still drives (like a slow poke grandma though). Is still quick witted. And still gets around and does gardening and canning and lots of other things as if she's still 50. I hope I have whatever's in her veins. Only time will tell.

Anyhow I probably won't be back online until Monday. So forgive me if I don't have time to pm everyone who replied here.

I will get to you all though.

Thanks again and have a great weekend.

ttyl

Andre

Hey Andre, my condolences, man.

I just lost my grandmother. She had a heart attack. She was 86.

So when I say, I know what you're going through, I mean it.

Hang in there!

Dale King

Andre, *hug* I lost my Grandma on July 7th. My heart is still broken. I'll include you in my prayers.

If you'd like to know more about mini-strokes, drop me a PM. I'm an EMT and have seen many TIAs and strokes in my time, and am happy to answer your questions in plain English, if I can help.

Take care, Andre!!!


Bailey

Hi Bailey, thanks for the condolences. I offer mine to you too.

Weird how everyone accepts a new born child coming into the world as 'normal' but fall apart over death (myself included). Billions have died already and we still cry over it. Weird when you really really think about it.

Anyhow, hold off on sending info about strokes. I get so paranoid by medical info that I've self-diagnosed myself as pregnant more than once. I can only imagine what would happen if I actually start reading about heart attacks.

Oh, my mom had her first heart attack and open heart surgery at 36 years old. Every time I get a spasm in my chest muscles I start checking for numbness on my left side. Yeah, paranoid.

Oh, the reseller of my hosting space is back pedaling over the thought of coughing money up. I didn't pay all that much for a year of hosting but I'd hate for them to get even a penny if they don't straighten up.

I have some blog articles, autoresponders, and other stuff I'll need to back up and reinstall to a new host if it comes to that. The pain in the tush of setting up file permissions, setting up mysql databases, email addresses and filters, etc makes the idea of changing servers far from attractive.

But I will if things don't straighten up.

tc

Andre

Condolences also, Andre. It's indeed tough when someone you care a lot for
has finally passed on, but as Dale said you gotta hang in there.

I hope you don't mind me asking a few questions regarding your thread:

1. Is your host livewirehost by any chance?

2. Since when have you started with them and when did the downtimes start?

3. How often have they occurred?

Honestly it's not a good idea to prepay for an entire year if you're especially
just starting out with a new host. Sure it's cheaper in the long run, but you
might experience unncessary hardships to get your money back if you decide
to cancel early on.

If and when you decided to choose among those the others have suggested
here, I also suggest going monthly for the time being. Probably 3-6 months 'til
you're 99% sure you can entrust them more with your business.

Also, do not expect your host transfer to be your last. The reality is a hosting
provider can be good for a while then turn sour the next, so you have to be
ready to jump ship again at a moment's notice.

Perhaps you can also look at pair.com. I believe they're hosting this forum.

Thanks Janet for the recommendation. I have one domain hosted on Godaddy. I prepaid that for a year too because it's so dirt cheap to host a single page sales letter there.

I'll track godaddy's uptime once I start promoting the offer. So far no outages that i've noticed. But usually takes forever to load a simple page though. Maybe I'll move it to a new host too once I'm ready to start promoting the site.

Thanks to everyone who's replied too.

* I decided if my host goes down again for hours without warning I will either use Bailey's services or 1to1 hosting. I got a positive recommendation for 1to1 from a reseller who's a competitor of 1to1. That's a pretty stronge testimonial. But Baily kicks butt in terms of being 'real'. Oh, and she's a geek too! My kind of people! 1to1 probably will lose this battle...

Anyhow thanks again everyone for the recommendations.

Andre
PS: Now if only I could find an easy way backup hosted files from a unix server and save all the file permissions and other settings for easy reinstalls I'd be so so stinkin' happy. Hopefully it doesn't come to that though... [fingers crossed]

Andre, your ownerships and file permissions should be preserved when you create an archive.

You can do this via FTP (in your FTP client) -- there should be a setting in the program for retaining file permissions.

Or if you create your archive via command line (SSH) your file permissions will be retained that way as well.

Andre are you on a cPanel host? If so, creating an account backup is super-easy. Login to your account's cPanel and go under Site Management Tools > Backups. There is a link there for "Download a Full Account Backup." The wording might vary slightly but that's what you're looking for. Just click the link and the server will tar up your entire account ("tar up" means it creates a .tar.gz archive) and initiate the download to your hard drive. Just do this every so often (I recommend weekly) and then you have a complete backup of your account, including databases and everything!

Bailey