Tropical Blogging

So I have — er, had — this client. Let’s call him Mr. X. I didn’t design his website originally; I inherited him from a colleague who had designed it and was hosting it, and who wanted to get out of the business altogether. The colleague had Mr. X’s domain registered in his own account, and he transferred the domain to me. So I was hosting Mr. X’s site (at a very reasonable cost), and a couple of times Mr. X contacted me to make minor updates to his site, which I did. Other than billing him quarterly for his hosting and annually for his domain renewal, and those couple of minor updates, I didn’t have any other contact with Mr. X. Next thing I know, Mr. X calls me to tell me that he’s hired someone else to develop a new site for him, (more…)

Poor hosting companies waste time and cost money. I needed to set up a MySQL database for a client recently. The client hosts their website with a large and well-known hosting company, which advertises MySQL available with all hosting packages. It should have taken just a few minutes to create the database and assign the db username and password, and then I could get on with the backend programming for the site. Several days and several billable hours later, I was just getting started. (more…)