From small acorns: do mighty oaks grow, but not every tree has a heart.

The never ending story: part one.

{ My old website, one day in August 2017. }

Previous (unknown) hosting mishap, – reducing my hosting plan to that of a parking bay for my domain name.

And that had the unfortunate side effect of rendering my WordPress site next to useless: with no web space available for traffic or file storage, but I didn’t know any of that at the time.

Now, it wouldn’t have been so bad: if my site that weekend hadn’t tried to update itself.

But it did, (and then the database fell over.)

All I saw that fateful Sunday night, (at the start of September 2017 btw), was a notification of a failed WordPress update in an innocuous email.

So digging in the dark underbelly of the web about a failed automatic WordPress update.

I was eventually forced to do a manual update of the site using FileZilla.

But every file that went to the site was zero length.

And then I was facing the white screen of WordPress death.

Querying what was happening to my hosting provider, was when I found out that my site had run out of space(??) And that’s a good trick, being as I hadn’t updated it since 2014.

Been busy, actually writing the books, and not promoting them as I should have been.

Muttering disdainfully: my hosting provider increased my allowance to 800 (megajoules or whatever), and then snottily said that I’d exceeded my allowance. Seems my static web site had used 313 megajoules and my allowance was set at 800 all along (??)

Yer, so how come I’d run out of space?

They didn’t answer that, but I was able to FTP a new install up to my site, and with *no* zero length files this time. Got my site back, but I still couldn’t automatically update it, and now all my Plugins were kicking off about being out of date, and they wouldn’t update neither.

Pointing this out to my provider: I was unceremoniously directed to use the Plesk control panel, and basically told to sort it out myself.

They did have my money after all.

Support, (??) — As well as taking your readies (??) — Are you kidding us (??)

Just be grateful that we deem to host your site. Now run along moron, and sort it out yourself.

And that’s what it felt like.

The never ending story: part two.

{ Plesk itself caused me no end of grief. }

Because the URL to the control panel didn’t work.

BTW: this is a problem with Goggle, and their instance of demanding everyone uses HTTPS certificates for normal pages.

This crap is going to hit everyone eventually, much like net neutrality, and that’s just bad.

But very good for the big boys, as in this customers typical response.

Fox news, (aka fake news) posted that article, and the world in general doesn’t believe what Trump’s mouth piece is spouting, and neither does this old girl.

What all this HTTPS certificates stuff meant: was that my hosts certificates were rubbish, RC4 and all, (they are very  expensive to maintain), and all my browsers, (across five machines), wouldn’t load the wretched URL provided, declaring it as unsafe, but my iPhone did load it strangely enough?

Confused by it all now: I then went over to Pale Moons web site, and had a nice long chat with them clever chaps there.

Now, at no time did I ever suggest that it was their browser that was doing it, and it wasn’t, because Microsoft’s useless Edge browser was doing the same thing as well.

But the Moonbeams did help me see the problem from a different angle, and I eventually found out that it was my antivirus program that was blocking the URL.

Tip: you can override the certificate warnings (as long as you know its safe), by entering http:\\xxxx.xxx into the address bar, and not: http(s):\\xxxx.xxx.

Note, the no (s), in the first example, which means that it’s *not* a safe link.

Doing that, your antivirus will go nuts, but you can force it to override the behind the scenes blocks.

So now into Plesk proper. I find there is no database icon on the control panel, anther email to my hoisting provider.

Another snotty reply, saying, (It’s back.)

(Whoopee!) On my part, but nothing from them.

And all this has been done by someone who knows *nothing* about what gores on behind the servers.

I feel that a normal bod would have given up ages ago, but I’ve got a Bulldog approach to this sort of thing, and I wasn’t going to let it beat me.

Going into MySQL DB: I easily reattach it to my sub-domain, and voila, my WordPress website is back, but then I had the unenviable job of updating it, whilst also deleting spam the links as well. 33 in all, ever since Akismet Anti-Spam, (a plug-in), had been disabled.

All this massive exercise had taken me over 2 months, and I was on my own doing it.

From that, I’ve been looking for a new hosting provider ever since. Because if I actually was selling my books, then it would have been a financial disaster.

This paying user, felt rather peeved by what I’ve been forced to do, because I’ve been with my old hosting provider for over seventeen years, and never once in that time did I need to contact them about a problem, but as soon as I did: then that was their balanced response.

Don’t think TSOHOST will be the same, they seem to want to help.

Here endith my first Blog.

Thanks for reading, Jessica: Praise be the ORI.