This blog is now clouded, yo. And I have a new domain name too.

Thanks to my newly gained experience in cloud and networking magic and, more importantly, my longtime webhosting provider jumping the shark I finally migrated to technology’s latest buzzword.

Philwebservices Started Sucking

I loved PWS. They did an excellent job despite being cheap. I didn’t hesitate recommending them to other people. They were very helpful when this wordpress blog got hacked. Things were going well until…

One day, they started migrating to the “cloud”. Maybe it was their sales team receiving an AWS webinar invitation. Or their CEO getting left out in this year’s Web Hosting conference buffet.

First, my .php files stopped working. I checked and they were gone, removed. As if some staffer did an “rm *.php”. I filed a report and then restored the site from my local backup.

Then, I can’t do file transfers anymore. Even the CPanel locked me out. I tried emailing their customer support but they did not reply. Their live chat support doesn’t work. Even their social media stopped updating mid November. I tried calling them but they weren’t answering.

I only received a reply when I emailed sales instead and told them I’m cancelling my account; the reply had 3 paragraphs of upsell followed by “Your account is still active. Why do you want to transfer?”

What Was In My Head:

… because I’m losing the advantage of using simple FTP to update my site and having you guys have my back when things go wrong, and I’m technically capable of running my own cloud apps anyway.”

My Polite Reply:

… because I want more control in my domain and hosting. And customer service hasn’t been that good to me, lately.

They asked for my phone, expecting that they’d call me immediately after. I ended up missing their call twice (I didn’t know they’d call after office hours). I tried calling back but they don’t answer. I tried asking them for a time to expect their next call but no response.

Codeanginamo.com goes to limbo

This went on until my domain registration expired. Turns out I can’t transfer my domain now that it’s expired. It will be in limbo for 3 months where it will be auctioned by enom (their domain provider). If no one buys the domain, its freed back to the market and I can buy it then.

“Sir, there’s a high chance other people will buy your domain, unless”, said sales/customer service girl, “you renew your domain with us. It will be safe with us for 3 months until you can transfer the domain.”

Forget the domain, man

Lesson learned: keep your domain and web hosting separate. They really shouldn’t be controlled by one company. You can keep an instance of your website on different webhosts and have your domain point to one instance and have the others as backup. If main host goes down or gets hacked or whatever, just point the domain IP to the backup. D’oh. It’s an easy mistake to make especially when I was young and didn’t know a lot about the internets.

On the up side, I now own nginamo.com (non-Filipino speakers should pronounce this as en-gee-na-moh). And I can subdomain the shit out of it!

Anything from:
http://app.nginamo.com
http://beta.nginamo.com
http://mail.nginamo.com (ako@nginamo.com)
…
…
to the obvious:
http://ta.nginamo.com

I am the proud owner of the internet domain equivalent of a Batas song.