With regret, I had to abandon Hurricane Electric to serve as the host for my bootedman.com website and migrate it to another web host. I say that I regret having to take this action because I have been very loyal to Hurricane Electric and they've been very good -- until now.
Originally, I started to create this website using so-called "free" hosting by my ISP. But I learned quickly that the ISP was very slow and cumbersome to use. After about four months of struggling with the ISP's hosting, I talked about it with Larry and his husband Bill of hotboots.com. Bill is a real whiz when it comes to this stuff, and gave me some good advice. Both Larry and Bill recommended Hurricane Electric to host a site. Hotboots.com is hosted there and Larry has had nothing but praise for their reliability of service. So I purchased web hosting from them in April, 1996, and "bootedman.com" was born.
Man, a lot has changed with that site over five and a half years. I also have learned a lot more in my self-taught manner on how to write web pages including HTML, PHP, and javascripts. What took me an hour to do in 2006 takes just a few minutes today -- and that's good because I do not nearly have as much time to tinker with it as I once did.
As of the time I am writing this post, the server at Hurricane Electric that hosted bootedman.com just came back on-line after a 60-hour-plus outage. Such a shame. By their own admission, they have never had such an extended period of having a server be off-line.
H.E. has about the best Customer Support in the business -- always available by phone and responsive to email. Even throughout our Labor Day weekend, they still had someone who would take a call, even if he could not help me much and did not have any answers as to the nature of the problem with their server.
Fortunately, I kept a complete off-line backup of the website, so I was able to upload it to another host. That took eight hours--it's a huge site with 500 individual pages that all are internally linked, over 360 pages on the "Boots Wiki" knowledgebase, and over 8,300 images.
Now I am doing a lot of background checks, correction of missing links and pics, and other details. The site is working again, as is my email on that domain. I regret having to make this migration and make it permanent, but I was left with no choice.
Life is short: don't let loyalty get in the way when it comes to making business decisions.
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