Archive for the ‘Website Updates’ Category
June 18th, 2012 | 
Author: Over the next few days Ecuador Eco Volunteer and Ecuador Eco Adventure will experience downtime as we switch hosts from Godaddy to Hostgator.
We have used the web company Godaddy to host our websites mainly because Godaddy is one of the cheapest and widely used web hosts on the net for small traffic-websites like this one. But you always get what you pay for and where Godaddy may excel in price they balance the books with slow speed and poor reliability and our website has often experienced downtime.
Because of this I have wanted to switch hosts from Godaddy to a more ethical host like Hostgator for quite a while but have procrastinated because of the huge amount of work involved in switching. Reading articles about the owner of Godaddy spending his holidays shooting elephants sharpened my resolve and the straw that broke the camels back was Godaddys support for the Internet Censorship Bill SOPA.
Unfortunately we had several months left on our hosting contract with Godaddy when the boycott against them started. Now that time has run out and we have nothing stopping us from changing hosts.
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hey guys im sorry ive been a bit slow with emails and updating the blog recently, the disk drive on my dearly beloved macbook died about two weeks ago. What makes it worse is that when the disk drive died it took all my photos and 200gb of my music along with it! :(
Music is my lifeblood and so much of my collection was really ecclectic stuff from obscure minimal techno, psy trance, tribal house DJs to deep dark dirty and hypnotically beautiful prog house and bouncy DnB, mushroom jazz, and even atmospheric ambient music to world music like Latin Jazz, Samba, Tango, Salsa and traditional folk music from everywhere between Tibet, Lake Titicaca and Timbuktu! Im pretty gutted my collection is gone but i guess its a lesson in the nobel buddhist truth about attachment and impermanance
Finding a replacement harddrive for a macbook hear in Ecuador has proved a pain in the arse but at last I believe I found a macstore in Quito that can replace the drive and perhaps, if im blessed, resurrect my music collection! Until then I will have sporadic access to the internet but will try and answer all the emails as soon as possible.
As I promised in the last blog post below is a picture of Wlady and Jekka the moment they leave the church and get pelted with rice and below is a pic of my girlfriend and I at the wedding reception afterwards in a beautiful little hacienda by the river.
You may have noticed that the site was down since Friday, well let me vent here a little to the reasons why. We have hosting with godaddy (they don’t deserve a backlink) and I received an email saying that on Friday the amount for hosting was due for the year so we made sure we paid it two days before on Wednesday. I clicked the ‘renew now’ button on the email and decided to renew a domain I had as well and when I get to the checkout Godaddy had tried to charge me twice ($170 or so instead of what should have been $85) for two lots of hosting.
Now if you have used Godaddy before you will know this is not out of the ordinary, their non-stop advertising and ramming their products down your throat is part of their business model so you have to be incredibly alert that you do not end up buying something you didn’t intend to. I removed the second lot of hosting that Godaddy tried to charge me for and thought that was the end of it but I was wrong.
You may have noticed to the right that a Go Overseas! Top Volunteer Blog badge has been added to the page to the right. Go Overseas is a great online community for anyone considering studying, teaching, volunteering or absolutely anything else to do with ethical travel abroad. If you have any questions with regards to any of the topics above make sure you check out their forums and you are sure to get a quick reply.
Being selected as a top blog was a funny and very welcome synchronicity because the moment I started to draft an email asking them if they would consider my blog for the South America section of the site I get an out of the blue email telling me they have selected my blog for the Volunteer Work section which actually suits it much better!
It also helped me realise a great way to increase the traffic to this site is to submit the blog the various blog directories out there in the blogosphere. This is important because the more traffic this site gets the more volunteers will become aware of and sign up for our volunteer programs which ultimately means we can make more of an impact in Ecuador!
So if you are reading this now and want to make a difference right now without even leaving your computer then consider showing this site to a friend, coworker, or anyone you know who might be interested in one of our volunteer programs.
At the moment i’m trying to fix the comment page which seems to be broken because the twitter feed takes up the input box. I do however find it funny all of the kind messages i’m getting from Spam Bots proclaiming “I can see that you are an expert at your field!”
my favorite spam is this one:
“wow, awesome post, I was wondering how to cure acne naturally. and found your site by bing, many userful stuff here, now i have got some idea. bookmarked and also signed up your rss. keep us updated.”
i’ve installed a new anti-spam plugin that requires humans to enter the text they see in an image and as soon as the comment page is fixed any real humans out there should be able to comment hehe ;)