Welcome to my new blog!

This is my very first post at my new site

Some of you may be familiar with my previous blog beginningprogrammer.com.

Why a new site?

• I didn’t plan on creating a new blog and actually I hated losing all my old content but some things happened suddenly and I will explain?
• The old name had been bothering for some time. At first beginning programmer seemed like a good idea but I felt that it was not really advertising the true core of the site.

As I said, things took a sudden turn. As I was preparing to go on vacation a few weeks ago, I decided to check my personal email. I used that email for so many things that I tend to not check it as much as I should. So… as I was browsing through my updates. I noticed an email from GoDaddy that said “Thank your for your renewal”.

I did not realize that my site with GoDaddy was setup for auto renewal. I should have. After all, that’s normal business with GoDaddy. So… when I signed up my hosting with GoDaddy the price was something like $250 for 3 years for a premium account. I thought it was a great deal back then and it sort of was until later I started noticing that my blog was really slow responding during administration and I believe even during visitation.

When I opened the email and read the renewal amount I had been charged I couldn’t believe it. I had dropped the ball big time. The renewal invoice was for $1250 for three years. Now I don’t know about you and your earnings but for me an unexpected $1250 withdrawal from my account is a lot of money.

I immediately contacted GoDaddy to ask about it. Apparently they had sent me emails days in advance that the renewal was taking place soon. Since I am not constantly in my personal email inbox I missed those emails.

Being that I was in panic mode I told the GoDaddy rep that I wanted to cancel my subscription which they would do. In the process though, I would lose all of my content. They asked me if I would also like to cancel the domain name registration and I said yes because I thought it was part of the package. In retrospect giving up the domain name was a good idea because I think it was not befitting of the brand I want to pursue.

I had backed up my site locally about two weeks prior. However, I only backed up the site and not the MySql database. The database is where all the posts are stored. So… my old content is gone forever. I will miss it because some of that content also serves as a reference for solutions I need from time to time. But oh well, out with the old and in with the new.

Here we are with a new site and whole bunch of ideas for the direction I want to pursue with my fresh new blog.

No bad experience should ever go to waste. There are a few things that I have learned from this experience.

From now on I will make sure that I backup my entire site. By entire site, I mean the static content as well as the database.

Also I will make sure to use something other than PayPal and my bank account for automatic renewals. With PayPal even though I cancelled before the cancellation could go through the payment had to go first. That process can take days and it did. As a result I ended up throwing my checking account out of balance and getting a bunch of unnecessary overdraft and insufficient fund fees. It was not my primary account and as a result it was not prepared to handle that transaction. Even when I tried to pad it, I forgot about one other auto withdrawal and still got hit with ridiculous overdraft and insufficient fund fees.

I will also make sure to be more diligent about scanning my personal email at least daily for anything avoidable surprises.

With that said, thanks for reading my blog and I hope that you will subscribe so that I can entertain with fresh new content periodically.