RIP esotericbydesign.org - or - "What Happened To The Old Site?"

[esoteric]

I was asked earlier this week, "What happened to the old site?"


Well, despite being a bit embarrassed over the whole episode I think I should offer an explanation to all those people who regularly visited the old website and who even contributed from time to time.

Firstly, there were problems with my original web-host.  In the 18 months or so the site had been running I was double billed on 3 separate occassions. Now we're only talking about £4 a month here, but it was MY £4 and after the 2nd and then the 3rd time it happened I was starting to think it looked less like a mistake and more like a purposeful rip-off.

It was a simple enough job to get reimbursed, but the damage was done and I began shopping around for an alternative host. I stumbled upon 000webhost.com, and they seemed to be offering everything the original host offered, but for free, so I made the decision to change. I cancelled the automated payment from my PayPal account, knowing I had a month till my next billing date to make the swap.

So far so good. Except, everyone that really knows me, knows I can be a little lazy at times. Well I certainly dragged my heels over the move. I'm not sure what I was thinking of, all I had to do was copy some files off the old server and upload them to the new.

Unfortunately I left it too late. I just remember clicking on my esoteric by design tab, on internet Explorer, and seeing a message from the webhost asking me to get in touch. I quickly loaded up filezilla and attempted to get at my files, but my username was not recognised. I was going to email them but first I went to my AOL window and undeleted the last couple of unread emails the host sent me. Sure enough they were both threatening to erase my server space unless a new billing method was received.

At first I was furious with the webhost, thinking their action was a little extreme, but I had mistakenly believed that only 2 weeks had elapsed since the last billing date when really it had been 6 weeks since the last payment.

So in summary, it was my own daft fault. I should have acted sooner... I should have backed up my data... I should have read their emails... but I didn't.

I apologise to all those people who have contributed to these pages and have now lost the material they posted.

Ron.