Peoria Pundit

For those so inclined, please click on the PayPal button on the right and contribute to The Blog Peoria Project. Your donation helps defray the not-inconsequential costs of dedicated virtual private server hosting, technical support and and Internet access.

Bumping up

Yes, I know I said I was going to limit request for site donations to the beginning of the month, but circumstances have changed.

The billing schedule for my new host — the wonderful Idaho Web Company — is a tad different than the last server space provider,* who took payment at the end of the month, My new host bills in the middle of the month, and I find myself financially embarrassed for the next week or two. Since the owner has done a HUGE amount of work on my behalf, I’d rather not keep him waiting.

Also, the original Peoria Pundit site is down, and I’d like to renew it for another until I can get all the posts migrated to the Blog Peoria version, after which I will permanently redirect the domain to pundit.blogpeoria.com.

I know it’s a lousy economy in which to bleg, but it must be done.

The owner and the aforementioned Idaho Web Company spent a few hours on the phone talking about ways to use the Web to make money in support of citizen journalism. He had some good ideas, and confirmed for me what I have suspected, some some of the things I’ve been trying are bad ideas.

But until we get some of these ideas off the4 ground, I would appreciate some financial support. So, if you are so inclined, please clock the PayPal button to the left. Credit card donations are accepted, or contact me for an address to mail a donation to the cause.

* No. They have not refunded my money.

I got my bill from my host today. Actually, I didn’t get a bill. Apparently, they don’t send bills. They just charge your credit card without telling you.

$96.70.

For one month.

I am being billed for the regular hosting — which was supposed to be $20 per month. And they are charging me extra for a “container” to hold my dangerously massive data base. Plus, they are charging me extra for CPU usage.

I can buy get a virtual private server (VPS) for about $50 a month.

When you add up how much I have paid them for two months service, this nearly surpasses what I collected to pay them for one whole year in advance.

I picked mediatemple because they advertised their “grid service” as being able to handle the kind of high server loads that the Blog Peoria Network suffers from. Say what you want about the outages I suffered from under the old server company, they didn’t deduct a $100 bucks from my credit card at their whim, and they went me a bill every month and gave me a week or so to pay.

Needless to say, I’m going to be moving again, this time to a VPS. And I may put out the begging bowl again. Although I would much prefer to sell two $50/month 125×125 ads to cover the cost instead. Hint hint.

UPDATE: I notice that charged me $5.81 earlier this month for something else. I have no idea what it was.

Screw these guys.

And by the way: It’s sooooooo pretentious to not capitalize your name.

UPDATE 2: This is the ticket I just submitted to mediatemple:

My credit card was just charged $96.70.

Please send me an itemized bill for everything this $96.70 covers.

Thank you.

The screen indicated there was an estimated response time of 2 hours and 53 minutes. Mediatemple has NEVER responded to a trouble ticket within the time states without there being a corresponding phone call.

Well see.