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To all that may have had an issue getting to the website, I'm very sorry. We have moved... well, I have moved. For a number of reasons, the hosting company that I was using, Bluehost.com, was not meeting my requirements:

Their support personnel, though intelligent, have often been rude when responding to issues. They have straight up refused to help with an issue that was clearly on their end.
Admin work they were performing in an unannounced maintenance window actually deleted my website.
The shared hosting service that I was on was routinely overloaded and nothing was ever done to the load even after I had brought it up a number of times. There were times when my mostly text site would take nearly 40 seconds to load... in internet time, that was an age.

So what have I done? Well, I've taken action and seen an opportunity here. Not only will I NEVER DO BUSINESS WITH THEM AGAIN, I will be taking all of my properties over to Godaddy.com. I've had good experiences with Godaddy thus far and have even recommended them to clients and friends alike. Goodbye Bluehost. Take your slow service and unresponsive techs and keep them to yourself.

The new project is ambitious. I have left the traditional 'shared hosting' behind for the next step up in the evolution of my digital life. For the time being, all of the North West Wind Productions properties - jamesconnors.com, collegetechcentral.com, bualumni.org, and buakpsi.com - will be hosted on a virtual dedicated server. This move has started this past week and will continue through the next month. Each property will move on its own schedule depending on the critical nature of the content.

I'm proud to say that the old website, Jamesmconnors.com, is now relaunched as jamesconnors.com - hopefully this will be easier for people to find and get involved with. So far, so good. I've been able to make some good changes thus far and the site has never been faster. At the same time, I'm getting some amazing experience configuring in a linux environment and it's really nice to have the added horsepower of a virtual dedicated server.

Hopefully you're seeing improvements to the site as we're moving forward too. But, I'm curious. Where do you host your website/blog? Do you use a hosted service like wordpress.com or blogger? Do you opt for shared hosting? Virtual dedicated or fully hosted?

Why Choose a Dedicated Web Hosting Company?
Types of Web Hosting - Assessing Your Website's Needs
Determining the Appropriateness of Shared Hosting or Dedicated Hosting to Your Needs

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