Darfuria

Well, you may have noticed there has been some downtime of late. You may have also noticed how much faster the website is. Basically, after having speed issues with my web host at the time (Dreamhost), I decided to check out the 1 week free trial of the private server. The free trial basically moved my account from a computer shared by 50 people, to a computer shared by not many at all, and gave the access to change the amount of memory my server had. I was looking at spending about £30/month on the private server, which was £20 more than I was already paying.

Unfortunately the private server turned out to be worse than the shared hosting, so after 5 days of messing with it, I requested to be moved back to shared hosting, because obviously I wasn’t going to pay £20 more than what I was paying for a worse quality server, and I wasn’t going to pay the £80 or so per month that I would have had to pay for the private server to be up to the required standards.

I contacted Dreamhost, asking to be moved back to shared hosting, and they said that they were unable to move me back until I was using less than 200MB of RAM, because that is too much to be using on shared hosting. I informed them that nothing had changed on any of my websites, and if I was using 200MB of RAM then, then I would have been using it before. Dreamhost said that this was indeed the case, but they didn’t realise this was the issue, and apparently I was causing downtime issues for other people hosted on that shared server at the time.

I went through insane amounts of shell commands, monitoring CPU usage and memory usage, and was unable to find any scripts that were using so much memory, so after one final request (I really like Dreamhost and their control panel) I decided to think “oh fuck it”, and found another web host. I’m very annoyed by this, because I’ve had to do a stupid amount of maintenance and fiddling to get everything back up and running.

I have now moved to This* (ThisWebHost) and they are wonderful. They’re a very small (but growing) company with very fast servers. They’re very polite, helpful and responsive, and whilst I really wasn’t looking forward to going back to using cPanel software, which is pretty much standard for hosting these days, I’m really glad I made the move.

Dreamhost are now insisting that I pay for 4 days worth of private server usage, because obviously I had to back up all of my stuff and change DNS settings before I could close the account, which is very annoying. I’m not sure whether I’ll pay them or not.

Anyway, if you are thinking of changing web hosts, I certainly recommend This*, as they have been truly fantastic. If you do decide to sign up, use my affiliate link so that I get a small bonus. Also, don’t forget to enter “LAUNCH” as a promotional code to get 25% off of your first bill.

I was originally going to go for a website theme that had boxes that were a random colour, but I couldn’t find a colour scheme that I liked to do it with, so instead I’ve gone with this. As you can see, it’s not completed, but it is finished enough to make it live and not have to look at my old template anymore, which I got bored of.

It’s a bit odd, I know, to go with a very autumn theme when it is spring, but there you go, it’s how I was feeling and what came to mind. I know that the leaves won’t be liked by everyone. Regardless, please leave a comment and tell me what you think of the new theme. Any improvement suggestions are, of course, welcome; as is constructive criticism.

Thanks to Craig for the designer’s eye and suggestions.

Edit

I have just upgraded the website to WordPress 2.5, and it is fantastic. Definitely the best version of WordPress I have ever seen. I still need to finish the navigation and clear the website up a bit, but check out what I have done with images by clicking the thumbnails below.

Just a quick update. I haven’t heard anything from the agency that took me through to the interview with the SEO company, and that was over a week ago now. They’re actually being completely useless, as I’ve tried to contact the guy who was dealing with it countless times by phone and e-mail, and I left messages, and he hasn’t responded. Even a confirmation stating that I didn’t get the job would be nice. No matter, I have applied for a couple more jobs and I will no doubt be posting about how I get on with those.

As soon as I can afford to purchase the domain name, I am going to be recording videos and putting them on a new website I am going to make called iamtheguitarhero.com. Basically this idea gives me a learning plan that I can schedule myself to for playing the guitar, and the concept is that I work through the Guitar Hero games, playing the songs that are in them on a real guitar. It should be fun.

Since I made my last template, I have used WordPress a lot more, and have learnt a lot of new things. Because of this, I have decided to make my very own template from scratch, and put the new things I can do to use.

Here is a screenshot of the template I am building, which is still a long way from completion: