Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Published in the Ottawa Citizen

Thanks go once again to Robbi Hay, editor of the Ottawa Citizen’s Ourtown section, for an image of mine once again as the header. This image was shot in early spring a few years ago and is a pretty accurate reaction to how the last few weeks’ thaw / freeze cycles have gone.

Grab this Thursday’s Citizen to see what’s happening around town this weekend and beyond …

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Monday, March 7, 2016

IPower.com – I can no longer recommend this web hosting site

I have been using this service for years. Probably decades is more accurate. They have rarely had problems that affected my email or web sites, so I have always been happy to recommend them. But since the start of this year, they have been wiping out my whole site with great frequency. It happened again today, and I have had it.

I may or may not choose to leave them, but I am certainly putting out the warning that they appear to have a competence issue at the very least. YMMV of course …

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UPDATE: The websites are back up again. As always, they remind me that I must review their terms of service, which have obviously changed.

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They are immensely frustrating these days to deal with, as even trivial increases in script activity cause them shut down your whole account, even though you may very well rely on subdomains for revenue generation. This is the crux of my inability to recommend them for anyone even remotely serious.

At this point, it appears that their strategy is to hammer on anything above the level of “toy” to force you to upgrade your account. And since they are not coming clean on that policy after wiping out my accounts three times in only a few months, I can only say that you should look around at all the options with your eyes wide open. I have taken steps to move my gallery to a simple, self-contained php solution that is extremely portable. Thus, when I get time, I am free to move my domain anywhere I like.