Alwanza.com has moved.  I moved from Softcomca.com (aka Myhosting.com) to Wedohosting.com.  The story is worth telling, because I had been with Softcomca for more than a decade and had been happy with the price and the service.  Trouble is that 24/7 phone tech support is less than worthless if the people available to help aren't real techs. 

More than 10 years ago when I purchased a hosting plan for alwanza.com, I chose a Windows server.  Back then it didn't make much difference to me because I coded all my pages statically in raw HTML.  The deal on Softcomca seemed like a good one for me.  Later I coded more and more dynamic pages with Perl and MySQL and also Softcomca starting hosting on Linux too.  But I didn't switch because I was already serving my scripts from home and my attention was focused elsewhere. 

But my attention has been focused on alwanza.com and alwanza.net recently, so it seemed like a good time to make the change.  Unfortunately, the time I chose to make the change was at the beginning of a week long period of vacation for the techs at Softcomca.com.  Instead of helping me move my domain from their own Windows server to their own Linux server with the least amount of interruption of service, they broke my email. 

They broke my email?  How the hell can a website break your email?  Well it has to do with DNS and MX records (mail pointers).  You see, Softcomca was where the DNS for alwanza.com was, but my domain name email (dne) is hosted elsewhere, at Verizon.  The deletion and remaking of my account on Softcomca, which is what the non-tech at Softcomca posing as a tech advised me to do, wiped out the settings by which my MX record was forwarded to Verizon.  That meant someone had to contact Verizon to find out what those settings should be so that they could be reentered into Softcomca's DNS.  Of course, Softcomca wasn't going to do it.  And Verizon was in almost as bad a state as Softcomca.  It took me 2 days of phoning, waiting on hold, emailing, to reach a real tech there.  By a "real tech" I mean someone who understood the terms "A record, C record, and MX record".  Their "escalation protocols" were a little broken the week between Christmas and New Years.  But when I finally reached him, he was golden.  He gave me everything I needed. 

Now back to Softcomca with the settings and everything should be back to normal again.  Right?  Not so fast.  The non-techs at Softcomca.com weren't "authorized" to do any of the work themselves and so I was directed to enter the settings into their Webform.  Trouble was, their Webform wasn't working properly.  It took almost all of the settings, but kept mis-setting my A record.  If the A record is broken, the other settings won't work either.  Apparently this is because the first non-tech mis-advised me to "Park" my canceled account. 

Lets just say that Softcomca non-techs and I "exchanged words".  They told me they doubted that they had anything to do with my email being broken.  They suggested that I didn't understand what I was talking about.  I should mention that I had NEVER heard a female voice over at Softcomca so maybe they just believe women can't tech. 

In addition to moving Alwanza.com hosting to a different ISP, I have been doing a lot of "infrastructure" work on alwanza.com.  By "infrastructure" work I mean things that would be invisible to non-techies.  I installed a P3P policy.  I created a test certificate for ssl on alwanza.net.  I tweaked my web configuration file, creating both password-protected and secure (https) directories, on alwanza.net.  I made use of my mirror site and automated scripts to find errors on alwanza.com and I've been correcting those errors.

In addition to the work I've been doing on alwanza.com and alwanza.net, I have 2 websites that I've been asked to do work on.  I've already done some work and billed for it.  There's more to do and I'll say more about it next time. 

We've been having some trouble with our tv computer.  It is 4 years old which is "old" for a computer dedicated to television because that is where many recent innovations have been;  high definition, webtv, streaming media.  I'm troubleshooting it.  I had to roll back the Nvidia driver to the previous one because the new one crashed our computer so badly we needed to hard reboot and login in safemode to fix.

Can you believe the Softcomca.com story trumped my story about walking on feet and regular shoes again?  I'm walking.  Things are getting back to normal.  I'm supposed to take it slowly.  Today I can walk in shoes for 3 hours, tomorrow for 4 hours.

I've been expecting more snow and ice.  It has been freezing in the morning and up around the mid-40s (degrees Fahrenheit) in the afternoon.  Today it is overcast.  The birds have been emptying our big feeder every 2 weeks. 

I'm looking forward to the new year.