Changing Hosting Providers

Yesterday ... the entire day was spent moving our website from Domains Priced Right to our new host HostMonster. As soon as I started calling for support purposes, the little doubt I had left in my mind about the move was swept away. Multiple support phone calls to Domains Priced Right's long distance number were answered in an average of 6-8 minutes. Repeated calls to HostMonster's toll free number were answered in an average of 1-2 minutes.

The main reason we decided to make the switch was that our payment gateway provider First Data needs port 1109 opened for the web server to establish a connection and transmit the credit card transaction data such as card number, CVV code, and expiration date to First Data. Domains Priced Right salespeople stated we needed to upgrade to a more costly solution in order to have this port open. HostMonster sales said all that's needed is for us to purchase a static IP address and then they will open port 1109 for us. This solution resulted in only approximately a 50% increase in monthly costs, whereas Domains Priced Right's solution would result in approximately a 700% increase in monthly costs!!

Unfortunately during the transfer process I missed a crucial step to ensure greater uptime. Best practice dictates that you should change your DNS servers to your new host's addresses before you initiate the domain registrar transfer. One step missed equals an important lesson learned and now possibly up to a week of unreliable DNS info which may cause service interruption!! So... anyone who is thinking about jumping ship from one host to another please learn from my mistake!

Windows 7

So after pretty much completely skipping an install of Vista after hearing most customers complain on and on about the OS, I've decided to skip getting to know Vista intimately and just dig in to Windows 7. Waiting on my hardware to arrive via snailmail... ever so patiently. :-)

RNC St.Paul, Minnesota State Fair, and Google Chrome

What an embarrassment. Google... the giant of search engines releases its new Chrome browser, and it can't be downloaded. Am I wrong in this statement? Trying to download the new browser with IE and with FF brings errors in both browsers!
This is the link I'm using but ... anyone else having the same issue?
gears.google.com/chrome/?hl=en

Hopefully this will be corrected within the hour.

And ah yes... once again... the Minnesota state fair. Anyone else want to wade through this mess?
Amy tried the spaghetti on a stick and was quite impressed I believe. I may post some videos later.

Waiting for the protest in St.Paul at the Republican NationalConvention to get ugly... is anyone else? Why is there no local news coverage of this? A friend of mine is attending in person and says there's a million cops around keeping watch. That's not news worthy???

-Matt
4MCC.NET

Down Time

Surfing for broken laptops and PCs to repair and sell at a profit is getting tougher. I think more and more guys out there are getting the same ideas. The labor which is 90% of my usable income is somewhat scarce lately... so the "dumpster surfing" is getting the best of my down time. Alread done with my homework... so not much left to do after that. Ah well, onward and upward right?! Keeping my nose to the grind stone.

-Matt
4MCC.NET

Remote access is such a great thing. Saves me so much time , and that valuable commodity (approaching $3,274.91 and 9/10ths of a cent) that we call gasoline. How would we ever provide support without it again? :)

-Matt
4MCC.NET