Okay, so this isn'a monthly column, but a every-other-month column!

Some of you P-3 Orion fans may have noted that the website was down for a few days.

That's because I had to do the website shuffle due to stupid deployment of good technology. This site is hosted at GoDaddy.com because they have great hosting plans. I've been hosted with them for years. Which is the problem. When I first started, they had 2 kinds of plans. I got the cheap one: $9.95/mth. Over time they created more types of hosting plans. My site got grandfathered into various new plans, and they continued to charge me $9.95. Well, this year they finally came out with ultracheap but BIG hosting plans. And I wanted to change to a cheaper plan.

I thought I was on the Delux plan (unix-based), but it turns out that I had been grandfathered into the Windows-based W/ASP plan. YUCK. Dont want or need ASP. So I called up customer service to change it, because on the account management website you cant DOWNGRADE your hosting, you can only upgrade it. Well, customer service tells me that they cant downgrade my plan either!!

I have to cancel my hosting, and then rehost at the lower plan. In the meantime, my DNS will be out for 36-48 hours.

Hello!?! Why can't your engineers who create accounts just ftp my site from your windows box to your unix box??? Why make me do the work, AND lose my site for 3 days in the process? But no, they "dont have a bridge" between the systems. I'm like... huh? They're both on the internet.....

But alas, its too difficult for them. So the site was down.

But now we're back up, and my wallet is happy. i hope you're happy too.