Tyler Blog’s new domain home is www.divergio.com.

You may have wondered why the site went down for a long time. The answer is simple: I let the domain name expire and then was lazy. Neocaridina.com was going to expire, and I felt that it was too long and complicated a domain name for most people to type anyway, so my plan was to switch the site to divergio.com.

Read on for a rant about web hosting…

Unfortunately, that ended up being much more of a task than I realized. It should have been simple, just renaming a couple of directories on the ftp server, but instead I’ve spent the last two days and literally the last four hours straight getting it working. I actually got so frustrated trying to make it work with my previous host that I gave up and switched webhosts.

I’ll just come out with it: my webhost was GoDaddy.com. Part of it is my fault, because I have the domain name and the hosting under separate godaddy accounts. It’s still possible to get things working, but because of the way their domain system is organized, you have to setup all kinds of custom forwarding (which really shouldn’t be necessary). I know this because I had the same problem with neocaridina.com and, even after an hour and a half of support calls, still had slower performance reaching the website.

Considering I’m in Hong Kong and can’t afford to sit on the phone with godaddy, and also considering how irritating to their user interface is, I just gave up and switched to a new host. This host is a pay-as-you-go pay-only-what-you-use host. I’m trying it out and seeing how much I actually use. If it works out I think I’ll stick with them.

Long story short, I had to resetup everything and reimport the sql databases, plus I ran into the typical configuration problems, too, so the whole thing was a huge headache and I’ve only now finished. With problems like these, I sometimes question whether it is even worth it to run my own blog instead of just using a service, but I still demand some custom plugins that the others can’t offer.

All this work getting it up and running and I still haven’t made any new posts!

Posts I’m planning to make:

• Sendai part 2
• Osaka
• Yangshuo and Guangzhou

I’ve put all of these off so long that they will likely be abridged with mostly pictures, but better late than never, I suppose.