The 2008 EricDSnider.com Pledge Drive
If you’re like me and you check EricDSnider.com constantly throughout the day, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve had some downtime in recent weeks, periods of a few minutes (or hours) where the site was unavailable. According to my webmaster/brother Jeff, this is because our web host, Dotster, is a terrible company. In his words, “I am not exaggerating when I say they don’t care even a little bit whether we are satisfied with the service we are paying them to provide.”
The point is, we need to change to a new host, and the options we’re looking at — the ones that will actually get the job done — will be more expensive than what we’ve been paying. EricDSnider.com brings in some income through affiliate programs and ads and stuff, but not enough. To the extent that it’s possible, I’d like to avoid paying money out of my own pocket to keep the site up.
And that brings us to the 2008 EricDSnider.com Pledge Drive. Now, we’re not going to take the PBS route and try to guilt you into donating a few dollars for our hosting fees. The content on this site, like the content on almost all non-porn sites, is free, and that’s how it should be. If you don’t feel like donating, don’t do it.
But if you do have $5 or $10 to spare, we’d appreciate it. You can use Paypal to send it to me, and I’ll send it right over to Jeff, and he’ll spend it on candy. No! On web hosting. We promise, only web hosting. My Paypal address is eric(at)EricDSnider.com. If you don’t have a Paypal account, you can use a credit or debit card to send the money.
Thank you for your support! As your reward, here’s a video of a Haitian weatherman. You really have to watch it about 10 times in a row to get the full effect.
March 31st, 2008 at 12:57 pm
WHAT is that weatherman saying???
March 31st, 2008 at 1:20 pm
What hosting company are you looking at going to? I’d let you host on my server, but I have no guarantees about uptime. I’ve had maybe a few hours down over the last couple years, so generally it’s pretty reliable, but not guaranteed. It’s just a single server that I run some side projects on and offer hosting to some friends. What all would Jeff need (PHP, MySQL, etc)? It’s not ideal from a redundancy perspective, but you’d have great support; I’m pretty quick to respond to issues.
Otherwise, I’d recommend Liquid Web, mostly because I’m going to start a job there in May. Or possibly BlueHost. They are upstairs from my current job and offer $7 a month shared hosting. I’ve heard they’re pretty reliable.
March 31st, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Whatever you do, don’t use Heritage Web Solutions. I worked there in Tech Support. The servers break all the time, and they say you get unlimited bandwidth, but you really don’t and they do not have enough people in Tech Support. And all the people who are in tech support want to do is sell you stuff, not help you.
My husband and I use Hostgator for our website and they have very, very good uptime… I’ve not had the site down ever. I’m not sure what their bandwidth limit is (It says 6,000 GB of bandwidth, but sometimes you have to go read the fine print to make sure that’s true, and what period of time that applies to, etc… I’m sure Jeff will know). However, they do guarantee 99.9% uptime (they credit you if the server goes down) and the email is very reliable as well. And they are really cheap. They have a good BBB report too. And they have cpanel with Fantisco, which is awesome!
I haven’t read too much about how good Bluehost is, but my husband is going to start working there at the end of April, so he might be able to hook you up with a good deal if you’re interested in them.
March 31st, 2008 at 2:04 pm
They are not looking at shared hosting solutions anymore. They are ok for the most part but this site has a lot more traffic than a site should have on shared hosting. As far as Host Gator goes, we have a site on there at work right now and it is awful. It goes down a few times a week. It might not be at the highest traffic times but when you have software monitoring it, it is going down and if a customer tried to visit the site in that time they wouldn’t be able to.
March 31st, 2008 at 2:11 pm
I only had to watch it four times before I got the full effect. That was funny.
March 31st, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Wow, somehow I’m in TEARS after watching that video. I think it’s the look on Arthur’s face after he hears what the anchor says - something that says “Wow. That’s a terrible, terrible joke. AHEEHEEHEEHEEHEEHEE!!!”
At the beginning, the weatherman is saying, “Pretty much everywhere, it’s gonna be hot.”
I had to watch it 5 times to figure that one out.
March 31st, 2008 at 5:53 pm
I had to watch it 6 times to understand Arthur, but it became funny after 2.
March 31st, 2008 at 9:27 pm
Our business uses godaddy for hosting and we love it. They’re helpful, cheap, and based in the US.
March 31st, 2008 at 9:33 pm
Man, I need some of what that guy is taking…
April 1st, 2008 at 5:48 am
better yet is the zombie kid the video links to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMNry4PE93Y
April 1st, 2008 at 7:27 am
I think we all should be as crazy and happy as the Hatian weatherman. We need more moments like that in our day! Thanks for a good laugh!
April 1st, 2008 at 7:30 am
Wow… I was just thinking what a terrible April Fools blog this is but the date in the URL clued me into the fact that it wasn’t today’s blog… I’ll talk to my accountant (aka the wifey) about paypaling you some coin. Thanks for the great site.
April 1st, 2008 at 8:19 am
Youtube needs a looping feature.
April 1st, 2008 at 8:25 am
I’ve been pleased as punch with SliceHost. They do Virtual Private Servers (VPS) which means you get a virtual server to reboot at will and configure as you see fit. Of course, since you’re starting at nothing and building your way up, it takes a Linux guru to get everything in place properly. For the price, however, it beats doing dedicated hosting.
And yes, they have all the goodies like awesome support, great uptime, etc.
April 1st, 2008 at 9:25 am
I can also vouch for BlueHost. I use them because UK hosting is insultingly expensive - per GB of hosting/transfer, it’s about 50 times more money than in the US. Good customer service too, with people answering e-mails 24/7, and everything is quite easy to administer.
April 1st, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Was it planned, or just irony, that I couldn’t access the site this afternoon? I had already read the post, but I check multiple times a day (work gets pretty boring).
April 2nd, 2008 at 1:22 pm
And why is this in English instead of French/Creole? Is this like some Univision-type channel for English speakers in Haiti?