Somehow, for the past twelve years, I have managed to write a blog post at least once a day, I realize that I’m a piker compared to some. Dustbury has been posting since 1996, but at least I’ve gotten to 4/7th of his total, roughly.
This last year was probably the toughest, technically. The provider I had came about because I had won some online contest back in 2010. I got six months free before paying a fairly modest fee. I was happy because I understood a “real” blogger has one’s own URL. (I’m seriously rethinking that position.) But starting in 2013, I experienced a number of outages. In the last year, it happened on 21 June, 20 November, 9 December, and 23 February, some for a considerable duration.
Then on 9 March, my provider sent me this message:
The datacenter cost has gone up extremely and I have had to reconsider my position of offering web hosting. Within the next few months all clients will be cancelled as their contracts come up for renewal.
Roger you will need to register at https://www.namecheap.com/myaccount/signup.aspx so that I may push your domain name to you so you can manage it and make changes to the server names, renewals etc..
You will also have to find web hosting with another company within the next month and transfer your website files and MySQL database to the new host.
To make backups of your domain name simply login to your cPanel account and click the BACKUP icon. Be sure to backup the home directory and the database to insure you have all your files.
To login to cPanel use the following information…:
This was a hard decision for us but we just cannot continue with the cost that’s associated with the datacenter.
Once you have found a new web hosting company and moved all your files, please let me know so I can remove your files from the server.
Ugh. I don’t even know what half of that MEANS.
At this point, I started manually moving all my completed, but not yet live, posts, and the posts in draft to another blog, https://rogerowengreen.wordpress.com, where I had managed to capture my posts from the beginning of my blog to September 2014. (It occurred to me, in retrospect, that if I hadn’t moved the files from my first five years on my original blog http://rogerowengreen.blogspot.com/ then all the files would have moved to the WP backup.)
Then on 28 March, I got a “Where are you at with this transfer?” message. My blog was down for over a day while files…do whatever files do, but at least I had a secondary site for people to do. That site has, in addition to my posts from October 2014 and earlier, the ones from February 21, 2017 and forward.
If time were no object, I’d copy those 2.3 years from the current blog to the backup. But I’m having trouble enough moving forward. I compose in blog B, and then copy to blog A. This takes a little longer each day. As a result, my blog reserve has been more than halved. Worse, the number of posts in draft have ALSO shrunk.
So we’ll see what the next year brings.