Well the bell has sounded. I’m done with ixwebhosting.com as my webhost. Frankly, their customer support is awful. It puzzles me that they are marketing themselves as the “business choice” for web hosting and yet their service is definitely not of business caliber. I guess if you’re a business that is just looking for a simple html page to give basic info on your business you’ll be okay but if you’ve got dynamic content running on your website - ixwebhosting is definitely not a good choice.

Over the past year and a half I put up with slowdowns, outages, and email problems as the normal “costs” of a cheap shared hosting plan. But the last straw for me was my experience in the past week. Here’s the breakdown.

1. Over the weekend (March 27-30, 2008), ixwebhosting.com moved all their servers (and customers) to a new data farm. I was warned well in advance of this move via email and also warned that this would mean downtime of about 48hours. There was nothing wrong with that - and they did their customers right by communicating what was about to happen. The move was done to put us on new servers and make things run faster and better - or so we were told.

All right - here’s another rant post. Our church bought an HP7410 All in One printer at the beginning of 2007 and prior to the purchase I wanted to make sure that any printer we got would be Vista compatible knowing that eventually the church would start using the new OS. Research indicated that this model would be Vista compatible. When we originally bought it the printer worked great and I never had any problems getting it working and working well (aside from the HP bloatware anyway their famous for…who designed their install program?).

Enter in my recent laptop purchase in August of this year which runs on Vista. I installed the correct Vista drivers as posted on the HP site and seemed to have no problems - but alas that was an illusion. For the past couple of months I’ve been experiencing the following problems:

1. Duplex printing doesn’t work properly: The printer has an automatic duplexer but portrait printouts have the reverse side printing opposite to what it should be (landscape duplexes print correctly). Thanks to some help from an HP customer who discovered a unofficial patch (from Microsoft!) that “fixed” the problem I’m able to resolve this. But…

For some time I’ve been looking for a way to reliably backup all my personal and work related files on both my home and office computers that is as maintenance and hands-off as I can get it.? This “holy grail” of start-and-forget operability has been elusive…until now.

Why backups?

Quite simply - as any computer guru will tell you (or someone who’s learned the hard way!) - hard drive failure is not an if, but a when.? No matter how well a hard drive is manufactured it is still mechanical and subject to wear and tear.? Eventually it will fail.? Backing up your data is just plain smart if you don’t want to lose any of your hard work. It is something that is even more necessary in this age of digital media - who really wants to lose their years of photo memories, or that cache of mp3’s they’ve been gradually amassing?? If you don’t have a backup system - there’s really no time to waste and it should be the first thing on your to-do list in the immediate future.

My wife and I had to take one of my daughters (Jenna) to London for a special test today at the Children’s Hospital. She’s undergoing a hearing threshold test to determine the degree of hearing loss she has. That isn’t the point of this post however (but do keep her in prayer!). I’m writing this from our hotel room and that’s the reason for this post.

I’m simply amazed with the capabilities of wireless networking! Back in January of this year our church upgraded our computers and we added a network and of course I had the fun job of installing everything :). Since the cost of wireless had come down so much I decided to go ahead and save work (threading wires through tight spaces is no fun) by putting in a wireless router and buying some cheap D-Link USB Adapters to plug in the computers. I learned alot in the process, not only about networking but also specifically wireless networking.