Help Support StayLDS through Donations

[Brian Johnston]

Hi everyone,

I will be taking over the hosting and administration of the StayLDS domain. I added a button to the website to accept donations via paypal. These will be used to pay for hosting services, bandwidth, maintenance and other stuff like that. If you can, even a small donation can be helpful.

Thanks!

[Rix]

Thanks Brian...I'm sure you will do a great job! I will be happy to help...

[Tom Haws]

Hey, Brian. I'm just checking that you have a hosting account that's not only adequate, but economical. I'm, for example, still with the one we signed up with in 2002 for $100 per year at JaguarPC.

[Brian Johnston]

I'm doing research on that now Tom. I am definitely all about keeping it economical, but I want to also make sure it is flexible and dependable. I am not sure I am totally happy with BlueHost. Things have been ok, but they also go down for days when they decide to transfer our domain around in their server farms.

I'll post some details here when I get a chance.

I'll probably transfer the site from BlueHost to InMotion when it is feasible.

[Tom Haws]

I have direct experience only with Hostmonster and with JaguarPC. Here's what I have discovered:

1. There is a difference in how hosts treat people. Hostmonster treats you with less trust, while Jaguarpc makes you feel like they have given you the keys to the kingdom (I guess like a small-town feel).

2. It's no fun when they move stuff around and go down a lot. When Aletia was bought by JaguarPC about 5 or 6 years ago it was painful with several downs. What kept me with Aletia/JaguarPC was that they had an attitude of humility and "Oh, my bad, I'll fix it right away."

3. I don't know if other hosts are better, but I have learned with JaguarPC that it's a SUPER good idea to download database and site backups in case your site gets hacked. With StayLDS, it's being monitored all the time, so probably you can always get a backup from your host immediately if an attack happens, but I have been hacked, didn't notice, and let the their backup cycle pass to where all their backups were bad, and all I could do was rebuild my phpBB from Google caches. Painful. You may want to inquire about the exact backup policy and supplement it at home, especially with a culturally significant project like this.

p.s. I don't like running around with a lot of Mods on my phpBB, but if you need any programming help with phpBB or anywhere else on the site, I'm pretty fluent with php.

[Brian Johnston]

Thanks for the offer of help Tom. I will let you know if I run into any snags. I setup an account with InMotion hosting today. John and I will work on the transfer of the site to the separate server in the next couple days. We'll be on our own hosting platform, which I think will be more stable. It will also allow us to customize the site more. I would like to create a regular set of web pages as the portal to the overall community. We can also host support resources better that way I think.

[Tom Haws]

Yeah. Getting the keys to the kingdom does make it a lot easy to make the site what you want. If you are editing files directly, you might love the WinSCP and Notepad++ combination, or maybe you can point me to something even better!

Tom