Moving On

As you may have learned from personal experience the quality of my hosting service has been horrible in the past two weeks. I tried all I could to resolve those issues with my current hosting company (which shall remain unnamed) but it seems that having paid several thousand Dollars worth of hosting fees in the past three years does not really mean anything to them – neither apparently does customer retention.

Working with a hosting company is a lot like a personal relationship – you know when you got a good one and you know when you’re mainly staying for convenience. And there may come the point when you realize that the daily hassle of listening to her nagging simply outweighs the convenience of having easily accessible sex. And so you resort to the only remaining option, which is to call it quits and to move on to (hopefully) greener pastures. For this evil speculator unfortunately the time has come to pack his bags and to move on.

Now, make no mistake – moving to a different server is an ugly and painful endeavor – one of last resort which I consider very carefully. Last time when I moved to a different VPS I spent hours manually syncing subscriptions from one database to the next as some folks were sitting behind slow DNS servers which still pointed them to the old server. This time I am initiating the move on a Friday, which will hopefully get as many folks pointed to the new server by Monday.

But let’s not fool ourselves – no matter how well you prepare there’s always some kind of issue that creeps up and thus I humbly ask you guys to be patient and to not send me angry letters if something doesn’t work properly on Monday or Tuesday. But by all means please send me an email or post a comment right here if something seems completely broken.

In case you don’t know what a DNS server is: It’s basically a server at your own Internet provider that maps IP addresses to domain names. Once I make the switch my own DNS server tells all others that there’s a new IP and they then update their DNS tables and you get connected to the new IP when typing in evilspeculator.com. However, some hosting companies are a bit on the slow side and it takes them a few days to properly map things. If you don’t see a new post by Monday or Tuesday then you are probably still connecting to the old IP and in that case I encourage you to contact your own hosting company to tell them to update the DNS mapping for evilspeculator.com. If that fails then you might want to clear your browser cache and relaunch your browser – again, I strongly recommend Google Chrome.

Subscribers: I am going to turn off the signup page as soon as I start the site transfer. Which means that anyone still connecting to the old server will be unable to manually subscribe to any of the products (renewals is a different story and none are due until about two weeks from now). This is intentional as I want to keep things in sync. Only once I am confident that the site transfer has been completed properly will I turn on the signup page on the new server again. I’m sure there will be stragglers and I can probably take care of them manually. But I definitely do not want too much overlap as I don’t want to spend my time syncing PayPal subscriptions with my own database.

Hopefully by early next week I can once again focus on trading and the site will be ticking along like a Swiss watch. The last two weeks have been taxing on several levels – and having to constantly argue with my hosting company is not a situation that either they or I enjoy – and I’m sure they are happy to see me walk.

If you have any issues and are unable to email me then you can also reach me via twitter – the link is on the top right of this page. If everything fails try smoke signals – I keep an eye out for those 😉

May the Dark Lord of Digital Doom have mercy on my rotten soul for what I am about to undertake.

Cheers,

Mole