I'm switching hosts from Arvixe to... some other host, probably A Small Orange, because that host looks awesome.

I got a bill from Arvixe back in June or July for $96. Not a bill really--it had tried to auto-renew and failed, since I'd replaced the credit card last summer. I saw it as a good thing that it failed because it gave me time about what I really wanted to do: renew for 2 more years, or figure out what else to do with my site? I knew there were other options out there. Maybe I want to host my site again on my own server. Maybe there's a hip new solution I don't even know about yet.

Time to figure out what to do with my site. Well, I didn't even want to think about it much, because I had so much to do and I hadn't even done anything with my site recently. Eventually I got a suspension warning, which I just lol'd at for some reason. 2 days and my account was suspended. Well, whatever. This blog still loaded on the blog.nuggit.nu subdomain, and the main site had almost nothing on it anyway. And a few weeks went by and no shits were given.

I woke up with a start this morning at 10:30 after 6.5 hours of sleep--not enough sleep, so I was grumpy, but I was grumpier at myself. "Am I an idiot?!" I kept thinking as I made a beeline for my computer and opened Filezilla. I never backed up my site before it went down... most of the stuff didn't need backing up, and one project was in git, but a few other folders were important to me on principle. I couldn't connect to FTP. I couldn't log in to my billing account on Arvixe--forgot the password again. Couldn't log into cPanel, didn't think I'd changed the password. I opened live chat support and waited a while.

Here's a boring dump of what happened: I talked with Anoop who took like 10 minutes to say anything, and he told me he'd make a ticket to get my site backed up and any additional questions should be sent as a reply to the support ticket email they'd send me... eventually, and left the conversation. Later I got a ticket email saying "The customer want to take the full backup for his account "nuggo" .Please check and updaet the customer". I got an email back from a different support rep Nivin with a link on how to make a backup through cPanel. I replied I couldn't log into cPanel. Most of the day went by, then another support rep Sameer emailed a polite email saying my account was suspended and I should update my credit card. I replied sheepishly that I wasn't planning to, I just hoped to download my site. He politely lamented the cancellation and offered a backup for $25. I asked if I could pay for a month of service so I can just log in and do it myself. I got notified of a $7 bill from another guy Raghu, I paid it, and then another rep Sreenath let me know I was unsuspended.
**tl;dr I bought another month of Arvixe after a day of customer support confusion/game of hot potato

I'd always liked that Arvixe had 24/7 live chat support. They should keep that. I hear A Small Orange has that too, and I have heard nothing but good things about how helpful their live support is.

Arvixe is also cool because it's got unlimited disk and bandwidth. Sold me. But I hardly use any, so something limited is okay.

Anyway.
While I was waiting for support replies and such, I thought about other ways to retrieve what I wanted from my site. I went to archive.org. The last time it archived my site was in 2009, though.

Seeing what the site looked like back then, I got a funny feeling about it, and went back to 2008 where there were even more snapshots of the site. That was about when I was finishing my senior capstone project for high school - a blog site that people could sign up on, (badly lol) coded entirely from scratch in PHP. One snapshot had managed to catch it in its most finished state, which was still pretty simple, but working enough to impress people at the time. It was a project I'd worked on for almost an entire year, along with administrating the home LAMP server it lived on. I had my share of frustrations, but for the most part I had big passion in that project and loved working on it. I even had a version of the blog just for myself, at ego.nuggit.nu, which was also archived. I even used to have more passion in blogging back then. I posted fun, interesting short things instead of annoyingly long rambles like this. I wasn't as afraid of speaking my mind, whether it made me look silly or not--just because it was me.

I miss that. I used to be cool. (Yet so uncool if you'd met me IRL...)

But I'm not sure if getting all nostalgic about this is productive. Should I back up and be more like I was back then?

I feel like I've ran off the path a little bit. I don't need to backtrack, but I can try to return to the path ahead of where I am. I can get that passion back if I give myself the time to create. Often I lie to myself, but I do have the time.

It was a whirlwind summer that crawled to a close. We lay captivated by the spider on the ceiling, watching it dart closer and closer to us, then farther away, stopping, staring at its legs as it hid behind a ledge

These last moments
we spent them slow but so fast. A whole afternoon flew by on flickering screen fantasy, a whole evening chasing satiation, part of the night watching that damned spider,

and as the night was closing I found the peach I had bought and quartered that morning on the small kitchen counter sitting out drying out. All day peaches. But we ate them, and it still tasted as sweet as any other peach.