Posts Tagged ‘support’
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008
Spc. Kenneth W. Haines
25 years old from Fulton, New York
2nd Battalion, 82nd Field Artillery, 3rd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division
December 3, 2006
Spc. Kenneth Haines joined the United States Army in September 2000 as a fire support specialist and had been assigned to his unit for just over three years. He deployed to Iraq in October of 2006.
During his time in service, he received several military awards and decorations, including the Bronze Star, Purple Heart, and National Defense Service Medal.
Spc. Haines was killed by an IED that was detonated near his vehicle while on patrol in Abu Hishma, Iraq.
All Information Was Found On And Copied From MilitaryCity.com
These brave men and women sacrifice so much in their lives so that others may enjoy the freedoms we get to enjoy everyday. For that, I am proud to call them Hero.
We Should Not Only Mourn These Men And Women Who Died, We Should Also Thank God That Such People Lived
This post is part of the Wednesday Hero Blogroll. For more information about Wednesday Hero, or if you would like to post it on your site, you can go here.
Tags: Abu, Army, Artillery, battalion, Brigade, Bronze, Cavalry, com, Copied, December, Defense, division, Field, fire, Found, Fulton, god, Haines, heart, hero, Hero Blogroll, Hishma, ied, information, Kenneth Haines, Kenneth W. Haines, Lived, Medal, Men, Mourn, National, New York, October, part, patrol, People, post, Purple, September, service, site, Spc, specialist, Star, support, time, unit, United, vehicle, Wednesday, Women
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Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008
Many of you know that I have been having major hosting issues as of late. From July till now, my sites have gone down daily, and Bluehost’s support has been less than helpful. I have used them for almost two years, so it was truly sad for me to have to even think about leaving. I have never had the problems I was having. If you read my blog, you will notice long absences (when I couldn’t even post due to not being able to even get to the backend of my blogs!), and I wrote about a lot of my issues. My final straw was when support finally told me to delete my old posts and put them on a static page. Well, that kind of defeats the whole purpose of a blog. I think I just outgrew them. I do have to say that to cancel Bluehost was super easy, super fast, and they were super nice.
I had asked around quite a bit about what other hosts were out there that people liked. One I heard a lot of good things from was Hostgator. Before I made my decision, I even online chatted with some of their sales people. The other thing that impressed me was that they are green. I personally believe that every little bit helps and that if I can help the environment with my hosting, why not. Granted, Hostgator isn’t running their own windmills in downtown Houston. Instead, they have bought RECs for 130% of the electricity used to power and cool its shared and reseller servers. What’s a REC?
Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) are tradeable credits representing all the environmental benefits of 1 megawatt hour of renewable energy. So when HostGator purchases 4,009 Texas wind RECs, it’s basically paying a Texas windfarm to generate renewable energy on HostGator’s behalf. HostGator doesn’t own the windfarm, but for every REC purchased by HostGator, that windfarm generates 1 megawatt of Texas wind power and puts it into the grid. When HostGator draws power from the grid, it can then claim credit for that wind power generated on its behalf.
Another thing I really like is that if there is a problem with one of your sites, they don’t pull them all down. That was a big grievance of mine before. They will also transfer your domains and your files to them for free! That was what really got me to come over to them. They saved me hours of time of having to move my sites! Every step of the way, I got an email letting me know what they were up to. The only thing you end up having to do is check to make sure that your site looks good and to change your DNS settings. It doesn’t get easier than that!
Any issues I have had so far have been dealt with quickly. When I didn’t get my welcome email (due to my own typo), they responded to my ticket in 15 minutes. I ended up sending in a ticket due to a WP hiccup last night (which I think was my fault too – lol) and had a response in about 2 hours. I love that kind of customer service! They have been nothing but nice and helpful. The thing I love the best is that I went from throwing errors on all my blogs to not throwing any. I am not sure how that happens, but I’ll take it!
If you are in need of new hosting, I highly recommend checking out Hostgator. They are very competitive in pricing, and they are everything I wanted in a host.
Tags: backend, behalf, bit, blog, Bluehost, check, credit, Credits, decision, DNS, doesn, downtown, electricity, email, energy, environment, fault, Granted, grid, grievance, hiccup, Hostgator, hour, Houston, July, kind, lol, lot, megawatt, mine, night, online, page, power, problem, purpose, REC, RECs, Renewable, response, step, straw, support, Texas, thing, ticket, time, typo, way, wind, windfarm
Posted in General | 27 Comments »
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
I am seriously upset/angry/frustrated, and I am not sure what other emotions I am feeling either (and no this isn’t about those cicadas that have decided to leave their casings on our swing sets). Instead, this is a post about my hosting company. I have talked a lot of great things about Bluehost. They have always done right by me until now. I sat through the CPU issues last fall that all of us Bluehost users were getting and being told by support that it was us and low and behold it wasn’t us. It was Bluehost.
Over the last several weeks, I have been dealing with Bluehost’s ticketing system and phone support. I have been getting CPU errors daily. Since I monetize my blogs, it is very important that they do not go down either for 5 minutes or for 5 hours. It is seriously frustrating. I have gotten to the point that I can read the Bluehost Error Log and CPU exceeded logs better than their support people! My frustration lies in that their support is a lot of times less than helpful.
I’m sorry, but I expect your phone people to know more than me. I also expect them not to have to refer me to the ticket people who take days sometime to answer their tickets. Also, if they don’t know what the problem really is, they shouldn’t be upselling me to the $20 a month plan. When I ask if I’ll still get CPU errors since the problem wasn’t fixed, I don’t know isn’t the right answer. I expect that after 3 weeks we would figure out what the problem is. I expect your ticket people to read my prior tickets and know that what they are telling me, I ALREADY DID! (and not close said ticket). I expect that when you need my license to give me permission for SSH access that the uploader thing works, so your customers aren’t waiting for a week with nobody telling them that you couldn’t open the file I sent!
Granted, along the way, I actually had some extremely helpful support people who forwarded me links and documents to try. However, my problem still isn’t fixed. My sites are still going down daily. At least the phone support person today was kind enough to tell me how to send in my ticket and have it escalated. Whatever my issue is, the phone person couldn’t even access my file manager without crashing his computer. I am running 6 WP blogs, so it isn’t like there is anything that is all that labor intensive or any special programming involved here.
I seriously could use some help here Bluehost. I really want you to come through, but it isn’t looking promising. I really need somebody to tell me why all my CPU errors look like this: used 1.06 seconds of cpu time for php5 or this: used 0.75 seconds of cpu time for /ramdisk/bin/php5 or this: seconds of cpu time for PROCESS : php5. If anybody can tell me how to fix this, I would appreciate it. In the meantime, I have started looking at other hosting companies, because I can’t let this go on to much longer. You are costing me money.
Tags: access, ALREADY, answer, Anything, behold, Bluehost, company, computer, cpu, DID, Error, fall, feeling, file, frustration, Granted, issue, kind, labor, license, Log, lot, low, month, nobody, permission, person, phone, php, plan, point, post, problem, programming, ramdisk, right, somebody, SSH, support, swing, system, ticket, time, today, uploader, way, week
Posted in General | 26 Comments »
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
As many of you may know, the Alzheimer Association is a cause that is near and dear to my heart. I know too many people that have had such a horrible disease. It truly steals who you are right out from underneath you. My mom figures that her dad (my grandfather) had it. I have several great aunt and uncles that have had it also. More recently, Bill’s grandmother had it. Bill and I have been together 12 years, and I never got to know her before she got Alzheimer’s. She passed away about a year or so ago, but I missed out on meeting one remarkable lady. She was blind; yet, she didn’t let it stop her. She had 5 children and she ran the Chicago division of the Guild For The Blind. She wrote many books too. I also have an uncle now that they aren’t sure if it’s Alzheimer’s or dementia that he has. His kids (my cousins) had to put him in a nursing home since he can no longer stay by himself. As you can see, this is a disease that certainly has hit close to home here.
Again, this year, the Alzheimer’s Association will be having their Memory Walk. This is the nation’s largest event to raise awareness and funds for Alzheimer care, support and research. They are putting the call out for people to walk and be team captains this year. The Alzheimer’s Memory Walk should be taking place in the fall somewhere close to you (they have walks scheduled all over the nation — 600 communities total). The walk is about 2-3 miles.
Please consider being a captain or a walker for such a great cause. If you are unable to do that, please consider donating to a walker who is walking for such a great cause!
Tags: alzheimer, Association, aunt, awareness, Bill, call, captain, care, cause, Chicago, dad, dementia, disease, division, document, event, fall, grandfather, grandmother, Guild, heart, home, lady, meeting, memory, mom, nation, nursing, place, research, support, team, uncle, walk, walker, year
Posted in General | 3 Comments »
Box Tops & A $50 Giveaway Too!
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008First, you need to log into the Box Tops site and create an account. You enter your state and your school or if you don’t know that, just enter your zip code. I personally entered the school and state. From there, you are able to see how your local school is going. Now, how do you increase that number? Well, you can collect box tops with that logo on it. They also have a Marketplace. Now, until recently, I did not know about the Marketplace. This works so awesome too! There is a list of stores that will give a percentage of whatever you buy from them back to the school. There are stores like Avon, Gap, Kohls, Best Buy, Leap Frog, Target, and Walmart (this is just a couple of them — the whole listing is on the site). All you have to do is log into the Box Tops Site, click on marketplace, then click on the store you want to shop it. That’s it. Once you checkout, the percentage you purchased will then be applied to your school. If you are Christmas shopping online anyway, why not help out your local school (and if you don’t want to help any of them out, I’ll tell you the school we are sending our money too, and you can use them).
Did you know that Box Tops has donated more than $250 million to schools nationwide since 1996? Would you like to help raise that number? Then start collecting Box Tops and use their Marketplace to do your online shopping! To help you get started, I am giving away a $50 gift card to Barnes & Noble (thank you Barnes & Noble for your support of such a great program!). What do you have to do?
Each one of these things will give you one entry:
1. Leave a comment on this post. I want to know why you want this $50 gift card to Barnes & Noble!
2. Twitter about this contest. Please leave me your username so I can verify.
3. Stumble this post. If you don’t know what Stumble Upon is, please read Lori’s post at Blogging Cents. She explains it extremely well.
4. Add this post to other social media sites like Digg, Kirtsy, Blogging Zoom, Reddit, Propeller, Etc.
For 5 additional entries,
1. Blog about this on your blog. Please give me the URL, so I can verify.
2. Add this to any forums you belong too. Please give me the URL, so I can verify.
3. Subscribe to this blog using either my email or RSS feed
4. Add my badge to your sidebar:
This contest will end November 26th at 8:00 pm CST and is for US residents. Good Luck!
Tags: account, amp, avon, Barnes, benefit, blogging, box, bunch, card, checkout, christmas, Click, code, Color, comment, contest, couple, entry, frog, Gap, gift, goal, Image, kohls, leap, list, listing, logo, Lori, lot, madison, marketplace, money, Noble, number, online, percentage, post, program, school, shopping, site, store, Stumble, support, target, tops, Twitter, URL, US, walmart, year, Zip
Posted in General | 659 Comments »