AdesBlog.com

My notebook is 1.8 years old, which means its warranty had long expired. It’s a Dell Inspiron Notebook. I should say it worked quite well for me. But since it’s getting old, things like keyboard buttons and battery life started to deteriorate. One keyboard button (D) came out, after my 2 year old son plucked it out. I had fixed it DIY style myself, but it has lost its soft touch since ;)

Another thing is the battery life. It barely lasts 45 minutes now. Also every time I start my notebook, it suggests me to get a new battery from Dell Center (smart huh?).

Lastly, my DVD drive is not opening and closing properly. It gets stuck half way when you are opening it.

The question arises, should I extend my Dell warranty so that I can get these things fixed (and maybe other things in the future as well) or should i just hire other laptop repair services to get them fixed? Dell warranty varies depending on your notebook model and age. I am guessing it will be about $100 a year. What do you suggest?

If you follow me on twitter, you might already know that yesterday my wife gave birth to a baby boy. He was born afternoon around 2.00pm. He weighs 3.47kg and I think looks like his daddy ;) Both my wife and son are in good health and condition (if not little exhausted). I myself feel little tired too. I was present in the delivery room at the time of the delivery. I haven’t been able to get a good 7 hour sleep for the past 2-3 days. But, Alhamdulillah everything is behind now and most importantly my wife delivered safely. And I am grateful to God for that.

Now you know why this blog was not updated for the past few days… :)

So, why I have chosen Pair.com out of all the other hosts? Because it’s environmentally friendly! ;) Well, not really. (But they should be commended for that) That would be the answer of Miss World who happen to be a blogger… But I have chosen Pair for other reasons.

My relationship with Pair goes back to early 2000, when I was still in University and my first website was on geocities.com (still remember geocities?) Then my website (now adesdesign.net) was mostly on photoshop tutorials and tons of other webmaster things. One fine day, someone writes me an email saying that he visited my site and liked what he saw, and that he wants to sponsor me a hosting at Pair.com under his account. Upon hearing it, I was ecstatic! Of course I agreed.

Since my website was hosted on a sub folder of my sponsor, I had used www.cjb.net as a URL shortener. He hosted my site for about 2 years until when I could afford my own hosting and domain name. At the time when I was leaving his hosting, I had thanked him greatly for his good deeds, but I wish I had his contacts to thank him now. Those days I was using hotmail… now hotmail is a history… so do many contacts of mine which were in my hotmail account…

So, since 2000, I have been a regular customer of Pair. There were times when I shifted to other hostings but found myself back in Pair just after few months. Because those sites were not reliable, I often had downtime problems and my support tickets were left unanswered. With Pair, I had no reason to open support tickets, because my site would run years and years… without any problem.

Here is an interesting story why I love pair dot com…

Going extra mile for a customer

About 2 years ago, after my adventure with other hosts, I came back to Pair dot com. And chose their webmaster plan. As you can see to the right, it comes with plenty of harddisk space and bandwidth. So I decided it will be enough for my needs.

I was right, space was enough and the my site’s bandwidth was within the limit. But apparently my site was too heavy for their shared web hosting, it was overloading the whole server. So they asked me if I wanted to upgrade my plan to dedicated server. I said there was no reason for me to upgrade to dedicated server since my site was running within the “webmaster plan” limits.

So, what do you think they did? They transfered my site to dedicated server at the price of webmaster plan (dedicated servers start from $249 per month). Since then my site has been running on dedicated server. What a service right? I know… Now I call that CUSTOMER SERVICE!

So, that’s my story about my special relationship with Pair.com. That’s how I became regular customer of Pair.com. Maybe you should too!

Note: Pair is consistently among the most reliable hosting providers in the world.

Shifting blog to a new server went smooth without any major issues (i will write step by step instructions on how i did it on the next post). However there were times when my blog went down with server errors, as a result I had to delete everything and re-install it on a new database and with fresh wp files. This issue was caused by plugin called subscribe2, basically it was flooding the mail queue of pair.com.

Subscribe2 is a plugin that notifies people who have subscribed to be notified when there is new post on the blog. I am not sure if it indeed sent out emails to subscribed members, or was just overloading the server. If anyone received emails from AdesBlog.com during this installation, I sincerely apologize for it.

Good news is that, I am no longer using comment2 plugin anymore. So you don’t have to worry about anymore email problems.

This was the message I got from the support momentarily after the installation:

This script was launching numerous sendmail processes, driving load up on the server and flooding the mail queue with over 7,000 messages. Please review the usage policies on the following page…

Luckily, Pair has a 24/7 support team that monitors all the servers. They disabled the script and notified me about it. I quickly deleted everything and re-installed the blog without this plugin.

The source of the problem was not because of the “activation” of the plugin, but it was caused during the data transfer (posts, comments, various plugin data) from my goDaddy to new server. I guess somehow when transferring the data (inserting into db) the plugin started sending emails.

Other than this issue, overall process was fairly simple and straight-forward. Of course, it took sometime (24 or more) for all the DNS to update completely. During this DNS update, the blog was going back and front between the two versions: goDaddy version and Pair version.

In the beginning there were some plugins which were not activated yet, but their code was already in the blog theme. This might have caused the blog to run slower than its actual speed. Now all the plugins are activated and working correctly. So you should be seeing a better loading time after this. I have also implemented WP-Cache plugin, this should further improve the blog speed.

Overall, I am happy with the result and with my decision to change the hosting.

P.S Changing to new host allowed me to update my WordPress to 2.3.3 too, so that was a good thing.

Finally moved to a new hosting at Pair.com! My blog is now hosted on a dedicated server, sharing only with my other site www.adesdesign.net. So, no more sharing with other 700+ sites or 2K+ sites on goDaddy ;)

How is the loading time for you now? Please let me know by voting on the poll to the right.

I am pretty exhausted at the moment, so I am gonna take some rest (it’s 9.48am). Do let me know if you see any bugs or errors in the blog.

SEOlogs has a tool called Reverse IP DNS Domain Check Tool. This tool allows you to enter your domain name and find how many other sites are hosted on the same server as yours.

Checking my own domain (adesblog.com) I found that there are 727 other sites hosted on the same server! (no wonder my blog is so slow). Many of the sites might be not functional, but come on! 727 sites on one server? goDaddy must be kidding. When I complained about the slow connection to the server, goDaddy said that there was no problem on their side. I think 727 sites on one server is a huge problem!

How many other sites share the same IP with your blog?