My GoDaddy Meltdown

A long time ago, an internet eternity, in fact, I created a blog on Blogger called The DemiNerd. But I wondered about the limits of the platform when it came to specific combinations of being able to run advertising and some other things I wanted to expand into so I decided to use an account that was a "leftover" on GoDaddy and use the title The DemiGeek. A slightly more fitting title, I thought, and I already had the domain name. And I wanted to play around with really customizing the site and hosting it on a shared hosting system makes it more flexible.

So I had the hosting plan on GoDaddy changed from Windows server to Linux server because that's what WordPress runs on. It took three days. OK. I could live with that. Then it refused to install WordPress properly, producing a database connection error every time. I reported it to tech support. Apparently several database settings hadn't converted properly and were still trying to point to databases on the original servers the plan had been on. They fixed that problem after a couple of days. I installed WordPress and put a different theme on the site that wasn't anything complex or demanding. Added a couple of widgets. Added an Amazon Associates aStore widget. The next thing I knew it was taking over two minutes to load. So I got rid of the only "unusual" thing on the site, that being the aStore widget. Didn't make a bit of difference. I called GoDaddy tech support again. They couldn't figure it out but moved the site to a different server. That didn't help either. Then they completely reconfigured the nature of the shared hosting account. Hey, it was working! For a couple of days, that is. The site performance has been a constant roller coaster ride and today was the end.

I changed my Blogger web site to be The DemiGeek. I changed the domain records so that www.thedemigeek.com leads to the Blogger web site then exported the posts from the WordPress site and imported them into the site on Blogger. Now there's just some work to further improve the Blogger version of The DemiGeek.