A quick tale on the recent and drastic changes to this site.

It was the early evening of New Years Eve and I wanted to throw up a quick post saying “Happy New Year” to everyone. I went to my site and tried to login and immediately saw that the service my site runs through, Scriptogr.am, was down or, to be more accurate, was simply unavailable. I then hit Twitter to see if they’d posted something and lo and behold, they did. twitter.com/scriptogr… So I waited a bit (a few hours) and then saw this come up. twitter.com/scriptogr… twitter.com/RonnyLam/… Attached to this last tweet was a domain name registrar notice saying that Instagr.am literally hadn’t paid the bill yet for their domain name. Now, to be fair to these guys, the story has to be more complicated than that, but at face value? They definitely had a bit of PR nightmare on their hands.

So with their apparently self-inflicted DNS issues causing my site to be down (as well as others on the planet) for, at the time, several hours, I knew that my grand “Wouldn’t be awesome if I could somehow use Dropbox to host my web site?” experiment was done. It was a free service that, for most part, worked quite well (forgiving the occasional laggy load times), but with the direction my life was going, I knew it was time for something more reliable and stable. So I did a quick search on top hosting providers for 2012 and was thrilled to find one that I happen to walk by everyday, heading into work: “A Small Orange”.

I took an hour, perused their services and found them to be really affordable for my needs (Plus their ideals were really in line with mine. Not a prerequisite, but always nice to see!) so I signed up.

Long story short, I had a self-hosted WordPress blog up and running in less than an hour! I even had the barebones of my content restored as well. This all couldn’t have occurred if it wasn’t for A Small Orange’s service, which was really exceptional, with live chat support available and prompt on the night of New Years Eve!

So if you are looking for a hosting provider, definitely check them out! It’s early in the game, but I can already tell they are a cut above the many companies out there vying for your business. It is important to note that my circumstance went as well as it did because I know what I am doing as far as setting up a web site is concerned. But I am confident that the same opportunity would be afforded to a novice as well.

And no, I don’t work for these guys! I just like letting folks know when I encounter good service is all.

So, that’s it! Welcome to thaddeushunt.com, version 2.5! It was an unfortunate glitch in the Matrix for sure but, in hindsight, it was a move I needed to make. In the end, Scriptogram’s service was down for 3 whole days I think, which had to have sucked for them. The idea behind their service is amazing, it’s just the implementation of it still needs some work. I’ll be interested to see where Scriptogram goes in the future!

It also appears that I’ve taken the right amount of time away from WordPress, as they’ve added a bunch of improvements and customization options that I really love. It still seems like over kill for my needs, but I guess at this juncture too many options are better than being stuck with none. I really like the site’s new theme too (it’s a slightly tweaked version of WP’s most recent default theme), very responsive for all of you gadgets' screens. So have a look around and leave a comment if you want (yep they are back)! I’d love any feedback you wanted to share.

Oh yeah! HAPPY NEW YEAR! :)