Tag Archives: gradwell

All gone, all gone

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So that’s it – all my sites / domains are moved off gradwell now.  Just waiting for them to action my request to cancel my outstanding services.  I’m in two minds whether to reconfigure Thunderbird to use Nildram for usenet or whether to just wave goodbye to NNTP entirely.  I was really only using it for the gradwell private groups and haunting long abandoned places as a by-product.  Hard to let it go totally though, I moved from FidoNet to Usenet and it was that which got me involved in lots of things which eventually led to where I am today.

So yeh, hard to let it go.

Gradwell have re-branded (personal opinion of their new website is that it looks horrible) and appear to be far more focussed on servicing businesses than individual technical users.  I’m sure there’s a much better future in that direction, but it would have encouraged me away even had the service not stunk and had I not received sales calls at the same time.

Gandi have been great, and 1and1 have been entirely invisible, other than a single brief outage a couple of months ago it’s been fine.  All-in-all it took longer than I hoped (near 4 months) but less time than I feared and wasn’t painful at all.  The only complexity was related to the .com registrations and changing owners (from me, to me).

Finally moved

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So, I finally moved the site away from Gradwell (the last stage was the domain, registered with them, which moved today).  It’s been served by a different server for a little while but all the bits are moved now.

So that leaves me with two domains on Gradwell, one which I run for a bunch of EQ’ers which will take more planning to move and the original one I used to open the Gradwell account which has a few things hanging off it, which will take longer to move in stages.

Typically their service has improved now, but it’s too little too late, I was tired of the bad performance, bad communication, bad planning and bad technical implementation and just couldn’t justify giving them my money to provide that service, or lack of it.  I know no where is perfect, and I have no illusions that the current hosting platform isn’t ideal, but now I’ve taken the time to split the hosting and the DNS management, it’s a hell of a lot easier to move sites around in future.

Downtime, sorry.

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Gradwell (my web host) is having some major issues with its infrastructure.  The net result is periods of slowness, no response or broken page loads.  I’m sorry.  It’s not just affecting this site, but the other sites I host, and some of those are hosted for other people.  I apologise to all those people.  I am considering alternative arrangements, but inertia is a bitch and while Gradwell is having issues isn’t a good time to start trying to transfer things away anyway (unless it goes on).  They are rejigging their kit and making some pretty major changes over this weekend to try and smooth things out, we’ll see how it goes.

Until then, if you get issues with any of the sites I host, please wait a little while and give it another try.  Thanks for your patience.

Working again

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Gradwell finally read the ticket and fixed the issue (took 3 minutes from reading the ticket to fixing the issue, shame they took 12 hours to read the ticket).

It’s annoying that I really like the Gradwell setup for managing my domains / web sites and that moving anywhere else will be a serious and huge annoying pain (~10 domains, lots of mail forwarding rules, multiple sites on the domains, pretty flexible setup for controlling it all at Gradwell).  I don’t want a single domain web hosting solution, I don’t want a web hosting company to own my domains, I don’t necessarily want a ‘reseller’ account but I basically want the config flexibility that goes with reseller accounts.  The NearlyFreeSpeech.net setup is quite nice but they don’t naturally register / host UK domains.

I’d buy a dedicated server or VPS somewhere if I could be bothered to work out how to handle my DNS.

/sigh

So I’ll probably just continue to vacillate and moan about Gradwell (like I have for 3 years).  Better the devil you know …

Grrr and sorry

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Sorry if your feed reader got about 20 test posts to my blog, but something’s broken.  The automated posting of scheduled posts isn’t working along with pings and a couple of other features.  It seems to be related to Gradwell putting squid in front of it’s shared hosting infrastructure, but I can’t work out where the issue is.  I was making lots of test posts to try and work out where the issue lay.

Sorry about that.

Sorry (again)

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Well, the site was basically down from 1pm until 8pm, and it’s still slow now.  Hopefully Gradwell will finally fix this issue tomorrow when they’re properly in the office, although it’s been going on for a few weeks on and off, but this weekend has been the worst.

Every now and then I take a half hearted look at new hosting, but I’ve got a lot of effort invested in Gradwell’s setup, and I’m not sure how much I can stomach moving quite a few domains somewhere else.  This period of broken-ness is the closest I’ve come to moving, and I may set something up on another host when I have some spare cash to compare services sometime in the near future.  I’m used to the Gradwell system, and I hate change.

It’s early and cold

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Been awake since 06:30 when the cats declared war under the bed and spent the next hour fighting it out to see who could be the most annoying.  Finally unable to cope at 07:30 when I got up and let them out.

Boy it’s cold this morning. Yeh I know, curious during winter.

Gradwell’s shared hosting seemed a little quicker yesterday, maybe someone fixed something, although they still haven’t updated my support ticket (technically they weren’t in the office after 1pm yesterday but it seemed to get a lot quicker after 4pm, I just wish they’d update the bloody ticket so I knew what was going on).