Some time ago I switched hosts. Now that I’ve experienced interminable load times with no sign of of a fix for a week while using Midphase / ANhosting, I’m back with lunarpages.

How not to impress a customer looking for support

• The slow load times are because of this specific WP plugin.

Okay, so I’ll just disable all of my plugins on all of my sites and shoot that theory to hell. You betcha.

• The reason our CPanel is so slow to load/freezes today is because we’re doing server maintenance. We’ve switched so many of our customers to your server that other users are hogging all of the bandwidth.

Right. But what about the past seven days with the same problems? Uh-huh.

• Google is taking up too much bandwidth by indexing all of the sites on your server during the day, so we’re limiting access to everyone until the early morning hours.

I didn’t even get up early in the morning to check that one out. Give me a break.

Bye bye Midphase. So long ANhosting. I don’t think I’m gonna cry.*

*With apologies to the Everly Brothers.

It’s a time waster.

I don’t mean to pick on this guy. I’ve viewed more than a few videos, and most of them were timewasters like this one.

• Three minutes to get the computer working.
• Another two minutes of wasting my time to get to the final product. Five minutes wasted.
• An un-viewable overhead screen.

Presenter comments: “It hurt my head.” “Blown away.” “Not a big fan of phpBB.”

Okay, so we know he doesn’t like bbPress or phpBB. That could have been covered by a single statement, not 15 minutes of video. So far, 15 minutes of my time has been wasted and I’ve learned nothing.

Audience members ask questions, but I have no idea what questions are asked because I can’t hear them.

Now he checks his phone. Is a nuclear attack imminent?

The speaker likes vBulletin, but the actual site is clunky. Welcome to the world of computers. When you can’t solve the site’s problem, why waste my time telling me about it for five or ten minutes? I’m smart enough to know that more than likely, I’m going to have the same problems.

He can’t get into his computer for some of the overheads. What’s the point of the process if he can’t demonstrate? Mind you, that doesn’t really matter because we can’t see most of them anyway, even when the camera occasionally focuses onto the viewing screen.

So far, I’ve burned half an hour and we’re nowhere.

Apparently, this thing ran for an hour but I shut it down after 37 minutes. I just couldn’t stand it any longer. Thank goodness there’s a sidebar link to notes.

I went with Simple:Press Forum. It too is a plug-in that integrates nicely with WordPress.

Earlier today I finished updating my fourth site, and they’re all good to go now. I’m surprised at how little effort it actually took. In the event of problems I had backups, but basically all it amounted to was chasing down a few misguided urls in a database file and re-doing a single page on another blog.

I have never liked switching DNS servers. Since I can’t actually remember the last time I did switch – it was probably seven or eight years ago – I was concerned, but WordPress made it all pretty pain-free.

Of course, I had pages saved from two sites that outlined the procedures they used, so I wasn’t completely in the dark. I followed them to the letter for the most part, and here we all are.

Perhaps I’ll work on the colors tomorrow.

And furthermore, I didn’t screw anything up – as far as I can tell. Propagation may take a little longer since changing DNS last night, but it appears as though everything is working.

One site left to do.

I just discovered this free site today. Feedbooks has plenty of grist for the mill, both from the public domain, and from authors who submit their own original works, all free. I’ve picked up several from there, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be back for more.

Zorba’s Guide to free ebooks.

Try manybooks.net for more freebies.

The MobileRead Wiki has a huge list of free eBook sites.

Did you get a Sony model? Their Reader Library store has free reading from Google books, all in the public domain. I’ve gotten some good ones there. Added bonus: lots of childhood memories provided by perusing the lists. The Reader Library interface is clunky: no arrow or wheel scrolling unless your mouse is on the sidebar; no back-arrow to previous pages; it’s slow. How 1980-ish.

There’s nothing free at eBook.com, but check it out.  Become a free member and you’ll get coupons for 25% off of certain publications. Even with the discounts, there are no bargains there.

And finally, here’s a link to some additional software for PC, Mac and Linux computers. With this software you’ll be able to convert books in other formats into ePub volumes. It’s called Calibre. Here’s a link to a discussion of the Calibre eBook management tool.

Links to eBook web sites

• A forum – MobileRead
• Want to create an eBook? eBook88
• Project Gutenberg  free books – ProjectGutenberg
• eBook technology reviews – epapercentral
• eBook reviews – ebookreadersreview

Do you have any gems you’ve discovered? Please do leave your finding in the comments section below.