::: The EdTech Advantage :::

Well – I think it’s high-time that I rekindled this blog. My last post was OVER ONE YEAR AGO! talk about bad blogging habits. I’ll come up with the usual excuses:

• no time
• too many meetings
• not much to write about
• nothing interesting to blog about (!)
• don’t know what to write
• someone else is doing that for sure

And of course, the winner is: procrastination / general laziness in logging into my blog and posting. What added to the blog’s absence of activity was my very long process of moving from Hostmonster into Layeronline. I really liked Hostmonster — largely for its price. But after a year or two, companies started coming up with their own very affordable hosting packages. I was plagued with problems on my sites hosted at Hostmonster from around August 2008 to March 2009. I shouldn’t have waited that long — but I moved to Layeronline in March 2009. I hesitated to move and tried to fix problems with Hostmonster due to my large storage — but at one point, I just gave up on Hosmonster since they basically gave up on me. “Host with us for a very low price, but we won’t help you with your hosting problems,” that’s the basic mantra of Hostmonster. (Check out this site before you decide on which web host you’d like to stay with: Hostings That Suck…

I’m sure many of you out there are happy with Hostmonster – but this is my experience with them. Their initial advertisement was very misleading. They practically offered “unlimited” storage — gigabytes and gigabytes of storage. But really, the fine print says something different. You can only save so much on their servers — your sites cannot be “very big”, etc. And if you have any problems with databases, etc., you’re basically on your own.

So I gave up on the “large-company-with -an-amazingly-cheap-hosting-package-offer” and I began researching for smaller companies that can provide personal assistance. I’ve worked with SC Hostpro before, but their hosting packages are quite expensive. So I searched and searched. It was a tough process. There were so many companies to choose from. So what I did was narrow down my choices to the 20 most attractive packages — again, with STORAGE SPACE being my main consideration, and then CO$T and bandwidth. Then instead of just reading up offers on these websites, I searched for contact email addresses. I sent messages to the 20 companies I found, asking to provide more information about their packages. Most responded to me with links to FAQ’s which were not helpful at all. Others responded, most did not. SO I replied to those who responded and asked further questions. In the end, after about five email tagging levels, only one company prevailed. The responses I received from this company were very professional and personal.

With one more test, I emailed the company. I asked them if they would help transfer all my sites from Hostmonster and move them into their servers. I wasn’t able to move everything due to problems with some sites that I just went ahead and deleted on Hostmonster. But the most important sites I wanted to keep — this company was able to move over with very few issues (just dbase usernames and passwords I needed to change anyhow) at all. As I mentioned above, this company is LAYERONLINE. WEI LU – the main administrator at Layeronline was and continues to be VERY HELPFUL in helping me (and I’m sure his other customers as well) in dealing with simple to more complex issues with web hosting.

So, I’m with LAYERONLINE now. I recommend this to ANYONE who just wants to host their own, modest-sized personal websites/blogs. Wei Lu is very, very helpful. The company is located in Canada. Their price is great, although their hosting package size is not infinite like at Hostmonster, but enough for now; and the customer service / assistance / attention are simply priceless. Here’s a direct link to their hosting packages: LAYERONLINE hosting Packages

So – rekindling this blog … I like the feeling. Hopefully I will prevail!

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