Hello world, again, and again I am restarting my blog from scratch.

GoDaddy hosting has screwed me for the last time and I’ve moved all my web properties over to BlueHost. Here’s what GoDaddy did:

In July 2020, I had trouble installing a WordPress instance on my server. When attempting to “fix” this, they instead wiped out my entire root directory, with all logs, programs, scripts, notes, etc. that I had created over the last 10 years. I hadn’t backed up in years and they were unable to restore it.

In February 2021, one of my WordPress instances became infected with a virus. That was my fault, they told me, because I hadn’t purchased sufficient protection. I was unable to uninfect it and eventually had to delete several websites.

The last straw was in July 2021 when (while on vacation) they emailed me, telling me that I wasn’t using the hosting account “in the spirit” of hosted accounts, and listed 10 random directories containing weather maps & weather webcam archives, that I had to remove in one week to avoid the account being suspended. Although they couldn’t quote me over the phone what policy I had violated (I wasn’t maxed out on disk space or inodes, I didn’t have any malware or anything dangerous, the best they could say that “archiving is not allowed.”

I didn’t see the email in time, so they suspending my account, closing all my websites and email for a week until I was able to FTP in, retrieve the files, and get it unsuspended. Needless to say, I left GoDaddy. I decided that the archiving of weather maps and webcams was too expensive and risky, and it was time to cut my losses. At my new BlueHost setup, I will only temporarily archive the most important content.

NOTE: If you know of a way to store about 3 terabytes / 750,000 archived weather maps and webcams for free, please let me know.