After the big crash nearly 3 months ago, I thought I had this site purring along like a kitten.
Then the past weekend came along and I discovered old problems returning.
After spending days and days tinkering with this website and trying to get it to work properly on both the front end and backend, I’m about ready to give up and go back to my old Blogger blog. I can easily set up redirects and let my hosting plan run out, so that’s no problem.
My site looks great here, and I have so many options–but that does me no good when I spend more time troubleshooting than working on the content itself. I have some tech knowledge, but a lot of that code makes my eyes bug out.
They tell you, go self-hosted! It’s best, and you’ll never regret it! Well, I don’t know about that, when I’m spending hours upon hours trying everything, following every bit of advice I can find on the Web, and still get a goofy site that loads up white screens or stripped-HTML every other pageload.
These site problems have also caused my hits–usually 200+ a day–to TANK.
Even if it is the server and not me, good luck finding it out. This host used to be good at helping me out, but lately all I get is, “We don’t do anything with that, so you have to sort it out yourself.” Or they can take weeks to respond to a ticket.
My church website has tech support. I have trouble, they sort it out. Three years and that site has given me very few headaches. It’s also free.
I have trouble here, I sort it out. Maybe. I have spent countless hours troubleshooting this site over 3 years.
I didn’t have this problem with Blogger. I had a blog there for years and did very little to it other than posting/editing content. It didn’t go down, didn’t take 20 seconds to load for unknown reasons, and unlike WordPress.com, they let you use Javascript and tinker with the template code. So I could set up my own redirects or track stats just the same as I do now. I couldn’t block people, but these days I don’t care about that so much. I didn’t have to worry about hackers, either.
I have a novel I want to work on. I have a family, a house to take care of–and, I’m now told, I have emergency family obligations to attend to because of my dad’s declining health. I don’t want to spend days, my head aching, my arms aching, worrying about my site and why it won’t work no matter what the frick I do to it, and meanwhile barely see my family or enjoy my usual pasttimes.
Screw this. I’m going to start tinkering with my old blog, writing up code to redirect to it, and see if I can make this big site look good back there again.
I’m a writer, not a computer geek. Sometimes I think, Would I be good at coding/tech support/IT? Or am I just better at it than the other people in my family/church? I look at coding and all the stuff the professionals do, and think, no, code just makes my eyes bleed. I get along with techies, with computer geeks, but I’m a writer. I want to spend my days taking care of family stuff and nights on studying/researching/writing. I want to write posts, not code.
Keep that in mind whenever you read the sites that say, Go self-hosted! You’ll love it!–Maybe you will, maybe you won’t.
Oh, yeah, and it costs a lot of money. I never had to pay for hosting with Blogger. Apparently my host is one of the cheap ones, too, and managed hosting (where somebody else fixes it for you, like my church website) costs even more.
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