Paul's Comments

I decided I wanted to post an article here about something, so I go to this website and I'm informed I can't get through. My hosting provider is having trouble translating the domain name paul-robinson.us into the internal subdomain it is actually hosted as. Well, I try going onto NearlyFreeSpeech.net to check their control panel. Well, even they are having the same problem I'm having.

So I decide to go back and check whether my subdomain can be reached directly, but I need to find out what it is. So I go to my DNS provider, which is GoDaddy, and find out that my automatic password that the web browser generates is wrong. While I understand the need for security, the one real problem I have with GoDaddy is the "three strikes and you're out" penalty, that basically if you try to login 3 times in a row with the wrong password your account is locked until you call them for an unlock. I don't know what the right balance is but I think 3 is too low.

Well, anyway I go into my web browser's Password manager and there are different passwords depending on which service it has gone into - an indication that I've logged in at different places and different times - and so I don't know which is right. So I end up having to call them for an unlock, which, since it's 4 in the morning - call it 2 A.M. in Arizona - the wait is extremely short. So I get the guy on the phone to read me the password hint, and from that I know what it is, and it works.

One thing I find as an example of how stupid some people are, in that they see a number of disreputable organizations operating domains using GoDaddy that they figure anyone using them is also disreputable. They apparently have no sense. In general, GoDaddy is the cheapest provider of domain services in the world; everyone else is about 3 times or more as expensive. So those who don't need handholding or technical support will use them, as will anyone registering a large number of domains. Unless you're authorized to be a registrar yourself, anyway, they will be the least expensive provider for most services.

Now, this blog runs on NearlyFreeSpeech because their hosting is very inexpensive, and allows me to run this site without advertising. I figure it costs me about $15 a year to host this without ads; the cheapest I can get an ad-free site from GoDaddy is about $3.50 a month, or about 3 times as much.

Now after all this, I have no idea what I was going to post about!