Courts of the Crane Clan

After a super fun experience with Hostservers, Domain switching, a few greenbacks, and a big load of tech support, Home of the Crane Clan is back in business!!!

Yay! Congratulations!

Hurray! And a big thank you!

So here is why the website went down.

Hostgator, the old hosting site, turned off access to the website. When I contacted them they said it was because we had "malicious software" on the site and would need to get it cleaned up by Sitelock or another reputable 3rd party anti-malware company. I thought it was suspicious, not only because they apparently think it is ok just to turn off the website whenever they feel like it but because they had been advertising this Sitelock company all over the place. They even included the company's contact number in the E-mail they sent me. On top of that, a Sitelock representative even sent me an email offering to fix the site.

Smells like a hustle.

So I did some research online. Turns out the Sitelock has a deal with Hostgator to do these strong-arm tactics to shake money out of its consumers. A lot of people have complained about what I went though. It's a flat fee of $200 to "fix" the website. Even better, their definition of "malware" is loose at best. It could be something as minor one of the users posting a link to a "blacklisted" website (one that may not even be guilty of anything. Just on a "blacklist"). For instance, it could be one the dozens of spambots me a Shiro delete everyday.

So I made the decision to switch hosting services to Go daddy (since the domain is already with them). First i had to wait until I had the funds to get a new contract. Then It took quite a while to transfer the files, first to my desktop then to the new servers. And I also needed to rebuild the database by hand. Finally, with the help of godaddy tech support, I needed to clean up a lot of the files. When I got this website from John I got everything, including a lot of old shell files from some of his other websites that I have frankly been to scarred to touch out of fear of collapsing the whole thing. But we managed to condense the 15 databases down to 2 and delete a bunch of the useless files to free up harddrive space. Even better, Godaddy has some really great tools that easily update Wordpress and PHPBB2 to its newest versions (notice the updates graphics?)

Now, Sitelock is a partner with Godaddy, but I have been assured that they are not in the practice of randomly shutting down websites. Even if they do, I now have a bunch of backup-files for the website that can easily be moved elsewhere if need be.

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle!

Well done!

Excellent work, and greetings!

That was a lot of work that you put in, Onimaru. We are most fortunate to have you.

And what a beautiful back you have.

Good, I was sad when I thought the site had collapsed.