Leahs Cafe

Almost three months of neglect, it’s overgrown with weeds!!

Time seems to go by so fast day by day. We are in the process of unpacking after the move last week! Just got the cable and internet hooked up yesterday.

With a few blogs running on several hosting plans, the cost of maintaining this blogs can add up to be quite a bit. However, it has not been costing me anything more than the domain registration in the last one year. I am able to host the blogs for free or almost free by taking advantage of the promotional offers of many of the hosting companies.

I just signed up for a first year free or almost free package. When the one year is up, I just move to another host. Since I have done the migrating a couple of times now, I have even learned to do it in a few simple steps, without involving the MySQL or any scripting whatsoever.

But, there are two lessons learned along the process. First, never take the “free” domain offered by this hosting companies if you plan to move out after a year. The “free” domain doesn’t register under your name and you need the permission of the hosting company that provides the “free” domain (the current registrar) to transfer the domain. Generally, they would lock the transfer of your domain one month before it expires and that would cause much delay when you try to transfer the domain and move your blog to another hosting company. It took seven days for me to be able to successfully transfer a “free” domain out.

The second lesson is: make sure the hosting company allows shell access. You cannot do a direct import of the posts, comments and categories from your old host if you do not have access to the root directory. This hosting company doesn’t allow access to their root directory for security reason. What lame excuse, don’t they heard of unix security software ? Luckily it is free for the first year, so I am still thinking should I get a new domain and start a new blog there, or just abandon it totally?

With pains of the wounds after surgery and the uncertainty of this cancer scare, my blogging mojo have been misplaced in the last week or so. Hope to be back in the swing, with deadlines approaching and pocket emptied by medical bills, sooner …:-)

Have been resting and taking it easy in the last few days, after the heroic act of driving around town to run some errands. Hey, even a simple movement like shifting the gears actually used a lot of the muscles around the abdomen, where the wounds are. Have to take care of the diet too, no Kim Chi and kava kava for now, as they both can potentially cause obstruction in me. The pelvic pain is killing me right now.