Elburro: Back in the Saddle

Back in the Saddle · Oct 30, 05:55 PM

Well, our roving donkey, who has bravely gone where all kinds of folks have been before seeking cheap webhosts, is now back in Pittsburgh. And I transfered the database without breaking (!). All that means is that you are now reading content courtesy of Pair Networks, and not a weird page saying, “Fatal Error! SQL call to somethingerother.php failed! Syntax error line 684 of somethingelse.php! Contact your network administrator.” (uh, that’s me) Basically, a Dead Donkey in the Middle of the Web until I could cajole a little help from the Good PhotoDoctor.

But that nightmare didn’t happen. Either I’m getting smarter or the software has improved.

So….the mind spins along. The “Boss” would like it if our $49/mo hosting bill went down to $29. I can do that easily by getting rid of SSL on our account. Which would cause two (non-producing) web stores to stop working. I could convert them to third party shopping carts: Mals (free and fairly configurable) or Americart (costs $, but insanely configurable). They certainly have their merits over database driven shopping carts where you add products over a web admin interface. Say you’ve got a belt that comes in 30 colors and 16 different sizes, and the real long sizes cost a little more or there’s quantity discounts. Whoa, try entering all those different combinations in osCommerce! Then say, you like your pre-existing html coding and don’t really want to learn how to make a database driven site look anywhere near as good by spending 150 hours searching through forums.

But we seem to be on a tangent of some sort. Some of us who are a little crazy kind of like fooling with that crap and the extra $20/mo gives us a cheap playpen to do it in. Which gets down to I might sign up for one-a-them grid hosts, just to fool around, and pay for it myself. Then the Boss is happy, and I’m only short about two good six-packs/month.

In the meantime, I have a prepaid year over at Dreamhost with a gazillian gigabytes of storage and bandwidth and unlimited mysql databases sitting empty.

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