Hosting

Moving to Bluehost.com

Hosting, Websites, WordPress / By / / , / 9 minutes of reading

Because of the outage at MacHighway.com, which last for about 5 days for me, but even longer for other clients, I decided that it was time to move to a different (better) hosting service. MacHighway was a local Denver company when I first signed up with them almost six years ago, but they have bought by another company, at least once, perhaps more? They are now owned by Deluxe. The quality of the technical support from MacHighway has deteriorated during the past year or so, as it has been offshored. The offshore tech support resources don’t seem to be at all familiar with the Macintosh, so they have lost their niche reason for attracting customers. They are really now simply providing cPanel virtual hosting on Linux servers, like most other hosting services. What drove my decision to leave MacHighway was a combination of the lack of support, along with the lack of communication. I think that I may have been one of the first to post about the outage on both Facebook and Twitter, since for part of the outage, MacHighway’s own web servers were offline, leaving customers with no way to contact support. Even when they got their main web server and their support site back online, there was not much communication. Their network status page did not reflect the outage. They have closed their call center due to COVID-19 concerns, and their online chat assistance was not active. Migrating to a new Hosting Service Below I have outlined […]

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Back online again!

Hosting, Websites / By / / / 2 minutes of reading

My web hosting provider, MacHighway.com, apparently botched a datacenter migration, and on Saturday, 9 October 2021 at approximately 20:00 UTC all of my hosted domains, websites, and email went offline. MacHighway did a horrible job of alerting affected customers, and didn’t post any updates for some time. Even their own websites were offline for awhile. They eventually posted on Twitter and Facebook, but only provided updates about once per day, and several times claimed they were “95%” restored or “all systems back online” when many clients were still down. On Tuesday, they posted on Twitter that if you were still experiencing issues to reach out to support at Deluxe, MacHighway’s parent company. I emailed them Tuesday night, and only got an automated reply. That reply email, though, had a phone number to contact support at Deluxe, so I called them this morning. Unlike the folks at MacHighway, the support team at Deluxe actually answers their phone, and I was able to speak with two support people. They were able to see the same issue that I had reported 24 hours earlier, that the external, internet-facing DNS name servers were returning the wrong IP addresses for hosted domains. The escalated the issue to their tier 3 admin team. By about 1600 UTC today, 13 October 2021, Deluxe or MacHighway had finally resolved the DNS issue, and I began receiving email again, and my websites have come back online! I may edit this post later with more details, but for now, I’m

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Moved to WordPress!

Drupal, Hosting, Websites, WordPress / By / / , , , / 1 minute of reading

After using Drupal for many years, I’ve decided to switch to WordPress as my Content Management System. My hosting company, MacHighway, uses cPanel to manage user sites, and it provides a default version of PHP and its associated modules, which I don’t have access to change. It seems that recently, Drupal has changed their system requirements to require additional PHP modules, which are not installed, so I have not been able to upgrade to the most recent releases. I found the FG Drupal to WordPress plug-in, which can migrate the content from Drupal sites which work quite well, so I’ve migrated this site to WordPress. I’ve done a few updates already, but I’ll try to review each of the pages to make sure that the graphics are there, etc.

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About This Site

Drupal, Hosting, Websites, WordPress / By / / 4 minutes of reading

This website is an avenue to help stay in touch with family and friends, and share information with other people with similar interests. This site is owned and authored by Brad Tombaugh. Contact Brad using the contact form on this site. 7 September 2021 I have revamped the site from using one of the default WordPress themes to the Astra Pro theme, and have chosen the LatinoType Rebrand font from Linotype. I like the flexibility offered by the Astra theme, and was drawn to the subtle character of the Rebrand font. 16 February 2020 I’ve decided to migrate from Drupal to WordPress. I was able to migrate the previous site content, but bear with me as I get everything adjusted. 28 February 2013After a long hiatus due to a tragic comedy of errors, causing the site to be offline for quite a while, I have everything back up and running, and am doing some updates to keep things current. 1 January 2011Updated the copyright dates. Added a page on Android, and favorite Comics. Updated Movies and TV Shows pages. Many other misc. updates. 3 January 2010Updated the site to use Drupal, importing previous content. 2009Various periodic content updates. 28 December 2008Updated copyright dates for 2009. I’ve stopped tracking individual updates, since I’ve done numerous minor updates through out 2008… 21 January 2008Updated copyright dates for 2008. Apparently, somewhere along the way I’ve forgotten to update entries in this page, as I’ve done numerous updates through out 2007… 1 January 2007Updated

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Moved to MacHighway

Computers, Hosting, Websites / By / / / 2 minutes of reading

As I noted in December, my former web hosting service, GoDaddy, announced in December that they were going to revoke access to us the Mailman mailing list manager that is included by default in their Linux cPanel hosting accounts. I use Mailman for my personal use, as well as to manage several discussion lists for the MacinTech Macintosh Users’ Group. GoDaddy claimed that it was due to spammers misusing the service, but I don’t really believe that for a second… First, I’ve gotten more spam while being hosting by GoDaddy than any other service that I have ever used, so I have a hard time believing that they take any actions to prevent spam! They also began advertising their own bulk email service just days after the announcement that they were turning off Mailman, which I can’t believe is a coincidence. I had moved my web sites to GoDaddy out of convenience when I was no longer able to host them myself after CenturyLink botched a DSL upgrade, leaving me offline for several weeks. In any event, in early January, I signed up with local Denver-based web hosting service MacHighway. There package is actually less expensive than GoDaddy. It’s also a bonus that they cater specifically to Macintosh users, so their instructions don’t reference Windows for everything, although they seem fairly platform-nuetral overall. So far, I am very pleased with MacHighway. The setup was easy. I have had to put in a couple of support tickets for things like requesting shell access, which is probably not

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GoDaddy Shutting Off MailMan, so I’m Shutting Off GoDaddy

Computers, Hosting / By / / , / 2 minutes of reading

This afternoon, I received this email from GoDaddy.com, my web hosting service: Important information about your hosting account Due to spammers abusing MailMan – a cPanel feature that lets you send bulk emails – we’re removing the feature on January 23, 2016 If you want to send bulk emails to your customers or clients we recommend checking out GoDaddy Email Marketing. Not only does this program let you email customers, it also includes more powerful features than MailMan, like opt-out management. If you have questions or need assistance, contact our Support Team at (480) 505-8877. Mailman is one of the services that I rely on for personal use, as well as for the web site and mailing list that I operate on behalf of MacinTech, a non-profit Macintosh User’s Group here in the Denver area. I’ve just spent a half-hour on the phone with goDaddy, and there is no exception to their decision to remove Mailman from the service that I’ve already paid for in advance. Their proposed solution is to pay them twice as much as I do now to add their email marketing program! There are other hosting providers, like MacHighway, that offer hosting packages for LESS than GoDaddy, which include a mailing list manager, Dada Mail, which is similar to Mailman. So, after many years at GoDaddy, I’ll be canceling my service and domain registrations with them in January, and moving to MacHighway.

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I hate SPAM, and GoDaddy is Useless!

Computers, Hosting, Security, Websites / By / / , / 8 minutes of reading

After the debacle with my CenturyLink DSL last summer, I had to make a quick decision on alternatives to hosting my own domain, email and web. I ended up being off the network for two weeks when CenturyLink couldn’t figure out how to restore my DSL server when they did an upgrade that I had already cancelled. Many years ago, I used a domain-hosting service called DomainDiscover that registered my domains and DNS, redirected web requests inside of a frame, and relayed email from a virtual domain to my ISP account. After I started running Apple’s OS X Server, though, I realized that I could provide most of those services myself, on my own home server. My ISP, NeTrack, who was later acquired by Indra’s Net, provided a static IP address, so hosting my own domain was fairly straight-forward. Once I started running my own services locally, I decided that it wasn’t necessary to be paying DomainDiscover for the other services that I wasn’t using any longer. All I really needed was a domain registrar. Checking on pricing, it seemed that GoDaddy was about the least expensive, and while nobody had a great customer service record, GoDaddy was large and established, so I transferred my domain registrations to them. So, when my DSL was down for an extended period of time, I did some quick checking, and discovered that GoDaddy had recently started using CPanel virtual Linux hosting, and had hosting plans on sale for half-price, so it was only about $5/month, as I

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