I’ve decided to enable advertisements on this blog – primarily to offset the cost of hosting and running the thing. I’m going to use Google AdSense, as their ads aren’t really that irritating (no Flash), and hopefully they will be unobtrusive. If this turns out to be wrong, or they bother me, they will get shut down as fast as they were added.
Just letting everyone know.
This site has been pretty much unusable for the last three days. This is why: 
When I asked customer support what was going on, the answer I got was this:
We do apologize for the inconvenience that you experience right now. However, we have some issue in our server right now and our admins are currently working about the issue.
No follow ups later, no responses past that. Days of problems, no serious acknowledgment of the issue.
From my outsider perspective, 1and1′s shared databases seemed to be having issues, and any request to my site with a DB backend drove another load spike. Other sites hosted on my 1and1 account (Carolina Greenworks, for example) never went down or had any kind of speed issues. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long, but over this weekend, I’m going to do my best to shift everything over to my ASO hosting account – where I get real answers from real tech support staff.
My new photoblog, Gurufoto, is now live. I will be deprecating the old pixelpost photoblog soon, as I have already moved all the posts and photos over to the new server, and will shortly begin redirecting all traffic to the new photoblog.
It’s also a time to give a shout out to A Small Orange, my new hosting providers. Good prices, excellent features, and unparalleled customer support. Unlike my complaints about 1and1, the ASO crew seems to know what they are doing, and even have intelligent people manning the support queues at 11:00 PM, which is the only time I’m able to work on my side projects. So, for the ASO Team: YOU GUYS ROCK!
Anyway, please return to your regularly scheduled programming.
I’m finally doing it. Packing up and leaving 1and1.com as a hosting provider. I’ve registered gurufoto.net on A Small Orange, and I’m starting to move content there. It’s currently a work in progress, but it is progress. At the moment, the SSL cert is self-signed, which I apologize for, but I’m working on getting a properly vetted and secured cert, at which point I’ll put in ModRewrite rules and make everything SSL all the time.
See you there.
I’m waiting for paychecks to land this month before spending more money, but the plan is to consolidate everything into a multisite WordPress installation on A Small Orange. It’s going to be somewhat of a challenge getting everything back out of pixelpost and into a WordPress site, but pixelpost is dead, and I really don’t feel like writing my own photoblog package. I’m tempted to setup two domains – leaving gurucollege.com as my blog, and [something] as my photoblog. Which leaves me wanting for a second domain name, and a script to help pull pixelpost images, comments, etc out and dump them into WordPress.
I’m happily taking suggestions for both.
