January 5, 2007

Another turn around the sun …

Another year has passed by and another year is upon us. Time seems to go by so fast that we barely have time to catch our breath :p I’ve been meaning to make a post here for a while now but I was let go (as the euphemism goes :p) on the last day of the year and so, since then have been either searching for new employment, fixing up my resume or looking for a new host so that I can move my sites since I had been hosted on a free VPS given to me by my former employer.

I am still somewhat bemused by the firing. The reasons given made no sense because some of them were for "supposed" offences which happened before the company promoted me. So why would a company promote you and then fire you for something which happened before they promoted you? Wouldn’t/shouldn’t they have fired me when these incidents took place instead of promoting me? Plus, the "offences" that they list were acknowledged at that time as due to lack of training/documentation on the part of the company.

My manager told me in his e-mail providing me notification of termination that he didn’t want to terminate me because I was a good tech and the customers liked me. But apparently the rest of management didn’t feel that way 🙂 Weird … but then again, I have never really understood people or their motivations :p

Anyway, the job hunt continues at the moment though the hunt for a host is over. I was initially looking at shared/reseller hosts but after having been on a VPS, I find it difficult to go back to shared hosting where I don’t have as much control over what is installed on the server and what software I run. I especially like how I can tighten up security and spam-control on a VPS on my own. The issue of course was price. Since I don’t have a job at the moment, I didn’t want to have to pay too much for a VPS and while there are plenty of people offering VPSes for less than what shared hosting used to cost 4-5 years ago, none of those offerings were any good. I did find a couple of VPS providers who appeared to have fairly decent offerings for around $20 but on checking them up at the WebHostingTalk forums, I discovered that they didn’t have too good a reputation with their customers :p

So it was back to square one again. However, I found a pretty good deal on the WebHostingTalk forums themselves – it was from Select-Level Web Hosting and they had a VPS which had pretty much the same specs as the one that I had my sites hosted on. The regular price was $45 and that was way too much for me but they had a special going on where they discounted the price by 50% – for the lifetime of the account 🙂 That sounded like a pretty good deal to me, especially given the good reputation SLHost appeared to have at WebHostingTalk forums. I signed up yesterday morning and they had the VPS up within a couple of hours. By evening I had transferred my domains over, set up all my usual security and anti-spam measures and was up and running. So today, I’m free to post 🙂

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Posted by Fahim at 8:55 am  |  1 Comment