So I’ve been blogging now for nearly 4 years and the internet is getting more complicated. I mean you can not simply put up a website / blog and walk away and hope that it stays up on it’s own for that amount of time. I pay for hosting service for my blogs and what I had noticed is that the price for hosting steadily crept up. Much of the time I was too busy with other things to pay attention and sort of just paid what I was being billed. My latest host seemed to intentionally rachet up my price because they seemed to want to get rid of me as a customer.
They said I was putting too much load on their servers. Since I first started with this hosting service they increased my price by 5 times! What were they talking about “too much load?”! I mean I type a blog entry at most once a month, I’m not selling anything, and few readers actually make comments. When I asked them about their claim my websites were creating too much load, I got total silence except for an occasional email with words to the effect of “Dear Wilson we understand that you may not want to pay our high price tag so we wish you well … oh by the way let us know when we can take down your websites” — feels sort of passive-agressive customer service.
So I had a bit of lesson in boundaries. If I was wealthier I’d probably pay their high price tag and “beg” they keep me since I was quite scared about the effort to move 4 year old websites to another host. Instead I took a deep breath and slowly started reading tutorials about moving blogging websites and shopped for a new host. Too make a long story short … I managed to find a host that was 1/5 th the cost of the previous host and furthermore provided great service. In fact they moved my websites for me! But you know the previous host used to be 1/5th the cost and provided great service?
So the overall effort to conduct the website move was NOT TRIVIAL. I probably invested a good 10 hours spread out over several weekends and felt like I had to make use of some of the best of my technical abilities having worked as a computer programmer for well over 20 years to orchestrate the move. Now I have to admit some of this blogging that has become so technically hard might just be do to my age. I mean I used to be a heavy duty computer geek, but for at least the past few years I’ve fallen out of touch with computer programming and my energy level is not as high as it was in my late teens and early twenties — part of the “tired middle aged man” thing.
So on November 1st, I celebrated a successful move of the old host to my new hosting service. Whoopee! Then in one day I’m surprised my hosting service partially disables my websites with a message that it been under internet attack. So a light bulk went in my head. This attack of my websites is probably the “heavy load” that my former hosting service was complaining about.
So my new hosting provider sent me instructions on technical things I needed to do to beef up security in order to stop these attacks and then allow them to stop disabling my websites. These were things that looked technically cryptic and scary. I mean if I did them wrong I could knock out my websites for a long time and if I didn’t do them my hosting service would continue to have to partially disable my blogs.
So once again I spent several hours watching training videos and doing some reading. And now my websites are more secure but in the process I sort of learned that I had about 4000 people subscribing to my http://www.touchthesource.com blog. And unfortunately I think I may have deleted all of them as well in my effort to increase security — oops. But then again I’m not sure if it was really an oops, because some of what I read suggests that it’s not a good idea to have so many subscribers. But I’m not really sure … I’d probably have to spend some time doing research on that.
There’s the fact of “self esteem” that I have to admit gets a boost when I think about several thousand subscribers that I used to have and have now deleted — sigh. In a way it’s like having several thousand friends on Facebook. It makes me feel popular. But then again many of those thousand subscribers might not be actual humans but computer programs intent on causing harm. So I’m conflicted with personal emotions getting mixed in with an increasingly technically complex things one needs to due to keep a website up successfully in the midst of a lot of internet attacks on websites.
I just want to blog. I just want to to share my thoughts and experiences as a middle aged man. I’m just typing words — nothing fancy or sophisticated. I’m just want others to be able to read those simple words I type, nothing more. But this simple act seems to be getting more and more complicated even if I do nothing.
Does anybody else out there blog and I’m curious what do you think? Is blogging getting easier or harder?