fate of the websites

I've decided to cancel the current hosting for all of my websites.

There were a host (ho ho) of reasons for doing this.

Partly it was to save spending the money. None of the sites were hugely expensive, but given how little use I currently make of them it's like pissing money down the drain.

Another reason is that the company they were registered with and that provides the hosting was rubbish. I don't know that the new company I'm switching to will be any good, but it will be a clean break. Customer service was particularly poor at the old place.

Also, the hosting was of disparate types and accessed through different means and using different tools (despite all being the same company - another reason I'm not keen), which made things very confusing. This gives me a chance to consolidate it all into one place.

I'm going to kept all of the domain name registrations, which I've also transferred to this other registration place. I fully intend to revive trismugistus.com at the very least, but not for a while - certainly I won't even think about it until I've finished the magazine scanning, which I see as my main hobby priority for the immediate future.

I'll probably see if I can't get the sites to redirect to my blogs, but I'm sure there'll be lots of feet dragging over the transfers and cancellations. Making it easier for customers might encourage them to change things, and then they'd loose your money!

I've also decided to get my own broadband again.

Piggybacking on my landlords cable is something of a double-edged sword.

The upside is that when it's running smoothly, it's super quick. I can get download speeds somewhere in the ballpark of 10meg, which is super groovy.

Unfortunately, the download cap is pretty stingy - when you've downloaded about a gig it throttles the connection back something chronic. Of course, from my point of view it's still pretty quick - going from 10 down to 2 is a big drop, but 2 is as quick as I've ever had using telephone landlines. So the net effect of this doesn't bother me too much.

What does cause me problems is that the connection regularly flakes out. I'm used to this of course - loosing synchronisation is quite common on landline broadband too (I was more surprised that you get it on cable too) - but the problem is that the modem and router are obviously in my landlords house.

So if he goes out or it's late at night or early in the morning, I have no internet. Also part of the reason he suggested me using it was because he hardly uses the internet, so even when he's in he may not notice. And I also feel I'm being a bit of a nuisance constantly knocking on his door just to ask him to reset the modem/router.

I have actually noticed just recently that when I set a bunch of torrents going the connection dies very quickly. I've in the habit of setting them going before I go to work and leaving them going until I come back, by which time they've finished. I'm not sure if this is some deliberate move by Virgin to cap me in another way or just coincidence, but it is rather suspicious.

And it also means I feel a bit guilty that I'm now regularly killing his internet. As such, my new plan is to get a fairly basic phone line broadband. I can use it for torrents if that is what's causing the problem and it also means I've got a back up.

Not that it proved simple either of course. Turns out that when I cancelled my landline broadband back in September last year they never properly released the line. And to make things more complicated, the ISP was bought out by Talk Talk, so I spent ages trying to find out who to talk too, let alone getting it sorted :/.