Sorry about that.
I’ve been away for a few days or, rather, the blog has been unavailable (to you and me) for the last couple of days and, as you can see, I’m back ……. sort of.
I’m afraid I’m missing a couple of comments. I’m sorry about that but the site went down before I could take a backup.
So, apologies to Cecilieaux and Lola for the comments that have disappeared but, at the moment, I have no way to get them back.
I have, of course, had to move to a different hosting company. It’s the problem with having to have free hosting. The last were, as you probably know, a bit hit and miss anyway. They seemed to get better once they had advertisements but over last weekend it spent most of the time down. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), I was away and could do nothing. By Sunday night it was back up and I had no way of knowing that it would be down (and stay down) by Monday morning.
Such is life.
Still, I have all my posts back and most comments, which is not so bad.
However, for those of you considering a free hosting company, I would suggest you avoid anything set up by Raymond. Koolserve.com promised the world – i.e. free hosting for ever – and then I saw this:
Look what I found on FreeWebSpace.net:
Quote From Raymond:
Quote
KoolServe.comKool Serve is a free hosting site launched in March 2011. Users are signup for free cPanel web hosting accounts and we generate revenue from users who purchase upgrades and from adverts placed on their sites among many other sources.
Kool Serve has done well in terms of traffic ( Alexa rank 27,059 ) and revenue. There is no cost in promotion. We have used the following free sources for traffic:
1. Free Hosting Directories
2. General word-of-mouth
3. Forum Threads
4. YouTube videos/FaceBook/Twitter/Blogs and more
We now have close to 10000 users and a very knowledgeable volunteer support team to assist in all manners of web hosting.
The domains ( koolserve.com and koolserve.net ), the support forum ( IPB software ), and iPanel are hosted on a personal server of mine.
The costs to maintain Kool Serve are:
Server Cost:
Free server : $215.00 /month
Paid Server: $8 0.99 /monthSoftware:
iPanel: $9.99 /month
Zamfoo: $7.95 /monthMonthly revenue:
$850+
The main source of revenue comes from upgrades to paid from free, ads on free users sites, and ads on the support forum.Will sell for $5,000
Contact me at raymond@urhostz.comThread: http://www.freewebsp…iques-per-Month
Feh, he did the same with ************com, and if anyone has noticed, he runs more than 1 host, like ***********.com, no different then here really, but NEWER. Which means no ads on pages still, and no paid, which I’m sure will come soon… ugh… and then be sold to possibly someone who has no idea what their doing and the host will be GONE, including all your sites and everything else. So good luck to all the users, you’ll need it!
So much for the promises! I nearly thought of going for their pay-for servers. Thank goodness I didn’t.
In my hunt for a new free hosting company, I found he also ran infiniteserve (I now always check the forum for how many times, recently, the servers seem to be down) and, of course, urhostz.com.
I did sign up for one hosting company OpenHost.org. However, once I had signed up, I saw the nameservers were Koolserve :-D, so I dropped them immediately.
I ended up with FreeHostingCloud. They seem quite good and the service seems up most of the time.
Now I shall always look at the forums for mention of Raymond (or Vlad, Justin, Dennis, etc.) and avoid those places like the plague.
Still, as I said at the start, I’m back and can put Raymond and his croney’s to the back of my mind, for now.
p.s. I shall be working to get all the links back asap – not least because I use them to visit your blogs!
Funny, I was thinking the other day about your hosting. I meant to send you an e-mail asking where you get your free hosting and yet a hosted WordPress blog from (I’ve discovered there is a huge difference between some thing when it comes to wordpress.com and self hosted wordpress)
Oh, and thanks for the updated link! I also meant to inform you of the move. I too got peeved with my hosting provider…
Ah, yes, there is a big difference between hosting a blog at WordPress and outside!
There are a few free hosting places – but most of them limit the size and having so many posts, I do have a problem with size. Eventually, one of these free hosters will come good and I will move to their paid hosting ……… maybe.
I like the layout of the new site but I couldn’t post any comment. I’ll check later to see if I can now.
I’ll check on that. Thanks for the heads up.
Cool. I don’t have time to look right now but I’ll try later if I get the chance.
No problem for the comments.
Why don’t you move to blogger? It is free and it is quite good but probably you wouldn’t have your personal url but rather vandainmilan.blogspot.com….
Hi Lola,
I’m afraid it would be closed down very quickly by blogger, I think. At least, this way, I get to move it wherever I want (or, wherever I can find a home for it).
To be honest, the new hosting company seem very good. The blog has only been ‘unobtainable’ one time (and only for about 10 minutes) for me compared to at least once a day (and sometimes for hours or days) with Koolserve. So far, I am impressed.
If you’re happy with koolserve it is fine. However I wonder why the blog would be closed down by blogger.
No, I’ve moved from Koolserve as they weren’t very good at all (hence the post).
It would be the posts on Serge Bodulovic and Rachel North that cause the problem. In the second case, she just sent a letter to the hosting company and it was closed, so that’s when vandainmilan started. Serge has tried to close it several times and succeeded a couple of times (from what I remember). However, I wrote the truth or what was fair comment and they are part of my blog. I would rather keep them and go through this hassle from time to time.
I messed up servers’ names.
Sure, Serge and Rachel.
Ah yes, of course you do.
Hi All,
Just to let you know that Koolserve.com is know under new management by Smarty-Boots.com as of this week and the issue’s are being sorted out know starting with a server upgrade and them removing old dead account and yes it will stay as a free hosting but we will be running it as if it was a paid hosting and yes you can upgrade to paid hosting.
So Andy I would like to take this time to offer you a free paid for VPS for your site and as the own now, I will be your direct support for your account so if you would like to take this up then please contact Me.
Hi Simon,
Well congratulations on your purchase of Koolserve.com.
OK Simon, I appreciate the offer. Let me mull it over for a couple of days (I have clients at work right now so don’t have the time to look at it properly) and I’ll get back to you one way or another.
Thanks for bothering to come here anyway.
My experience with koolserve: Totally unacceptable business behavior.
Administrators publicly claim that they take the right to suspend accounts, paid or not, at their sole discretion without notice to clients, and then want to be begged in a forum to resume their contractual obligations. They would not send an advance email to their customers as they have schoolwork to do.
Well, as a free web hosting company, some of them are like that. If they are the same when you have paid for the service then that is dreadful.
I’m sorry to hear that, after Raymond, they haven’t improved as the new owner promised me it would be better.
I’m glad I stuck to my move. Generally, the uptime (at my new place) is quite acceptable (it wasn’t with Koolserve) and, although they don’t respond directly to problems they do seem to fix them quite quickly. And, at least I’m not being told to ‘clear the cache’ and all that sort of nonsense!
And, you’re right. Any decent hosting company would warn you that you will be suspended – so you have the chance to fix things. But, then, if it’s being run by children, I guess it will never be a proper business *sigh*