John’s Crawlspace

I have several web-based proxy sites that I run to earn a little AdSense cash. I’ve had them for several years now.

My proxy sites require minimal maintenance, but the hosting is expensive (proxies are extremely resource intensive) and as such don’t end up earning me a whole lot. Most hosts don’t allow proxy sites on their servers for this reason.

I’ve been with 4 different proxy hosts over the past few years, and all of them have ended up disappointing me. I always end up experiencing an unacceptable amount of downtime – We’re talking multiple days per month, sometimes weeks.

Anyway, I switched to FusedHosting.net with the promise of unbeatable uptime and fast servers. For the first few months, this seemed to be the case.

And then the downtime started.

My sites would go down for days at a time. I’d send an email to customer support, only to receive a response days later (when the sites were finally back online) saying that they had zero downtime and that it must be on my end.

I realize that even a day of downtime is unacceptable and should be more than enough reason to make someone switch hosts, but switching ~10 sites to a new host can be somewhat of a pain, especially when you’re as busy as I am.

Communication always sucked with Fused Hosting, but sometimes the downtime was so bad that even the FusedHosting.net domain would be down for days at a time, and emails to their “support team” would bounce back entirely.

When I started to experience downtime that went on for almost a full month, I decided it was time to switch to a new host. It almost seemed like a practical joke, or as if they were testing the limits to see what they could get away with. With extensive downtime comes a serious decline in traffic and a loss in rankings comparable to flushing countless hours of SEO work down the toilet.

On March 17th, I got in touch with someone at Fused Hosting and let them know that I wanted to cancel, and would also like a refund for the obnoxious downtime. They told me, of course, that they would not provide a refund, but that my account had been cancelled. Thank god.

This past month, I was looking at my PayPal account and realized that I was still being billed by FusedHosting. Surprise surprise! They billed me for 4 additional months of hosting for a total of $120.

I attempted to contact them several times regarding this “oversight”, and I wasn’t making any progress. They took days to get back to each email and clearly this was going nowhere. I called several times. Finally I got ahold of someone on the phone.

He took a look at the situation, aka pretended he wasn’t familiar with me, my account, or the situation at hand, and that he had to look it up and familiarize himself. He told me that my paypal account would be refunded, and that it would take 2-3 days to go through. Near the end of the call he also sounded pretty sarcastic, and actually laughed at one point. I wasn’t sure how to react to that, so I just thanked him and decided I’d wait and see what happened.

Well here we are, almost a month later, and nothing. I haven’t been able to get in touch with anyone over there either – They’ve ignored all subsequent calls and emails.

I’m not the only one who has had a bad experience with (or was straight up “scammed” by) FusedHosting. Here is someone else’s story.

I doubt that many of my regular readers are in the market for a proxy host, but I felt obligated to get this out there. Hopefully no one else will get screwed over or scammed by these guys.

This week has been rough. I was in Philadelphia all of last week, and my flight home arrived at LAX on Sunday night. I’ve been recovering from my trip ever since.

While I was back east, I went to Camp Bisco (for the 4th year in a row) with a bunch of friends. I had an absolute blast… Perhaps I had too much fun? I’m not sure, but my body is covered in some sort of hive/rash thing. It’s slowly but surely spreading, and as of today it’s on my face. My eye is all swollen up. Awesome. WebMD, what’s going on?

This is fantastic, too, because I just got over the most ferocious case of poison ivy/oak/whatever that I’ve ever had in my life. That came to me compliments of some hiking in Monterey, CA. I probably leaked enough pus from that to fill a bathtub. Who’s hungry?

Anyway, Camp Bisco was a blast, as usual. Definitely some of the most fun I’ve had all year, despite an insane lightning storm (with tornado warnings) that brought the music to a screeching halt on Saturday afternoon. Brothers Past were about 20 minutes into their set when the death clouds rolled in, and the music was interrupted with a stern warning to “return to your cars and seek shelter immediately”. Another camera was ruined in the process. That’s number 3 this year, which actually isn’t too shabby considering my track record.

I doubt many of you are into The Disco Biscuits, but if you’re interested, I got some halfway decent videos. This one is my favorite (especially right around 8:16) and there are more here, here, etc. I also got some footage of Ween, LCD Soundsystem, and more… Check ‘em out in my YouTube account if you’re interested.

Alright, I need to get back to scratching myself like a crackhead.

Have you ever found yourself walking away from a social interaction, and the perfect comment/compliment/response dawns on you after the fact?

Perhaps someone insulted you, or maybe you were chatting up someone of the opposite sex. Your response to an unexpected insult or compliment was a little less than witty, and you don’t think of something satisfactory to say until after the fact… I think that this happens to all of us every now and then. I’ve never spent a significant amount of time dwelling on these situations, but they can leave you with a slight feeling of regret.

Did you know that there is a name for this phenomenon? I was poking around on Wikipedia, when I came across an entry for “L’esprit de l’escalier”, or “staircase wit”.

This name for the phenomenon comes from French encyclopedist Denis Diderot’s description of such a situation in his Paradoxe sur le comédien. During a dinner at the home of statesman Jacques Necker, a remark was made to him which left him speechless at the time because, he explains, l’homme sensible, comme moi, tout entier à ce qu’on lui objecte, perd la tête et ne se retrouve qu’au bas de l’escalier: a sensitive man like me, overwhelmed by the argument levelled against him, becomes confused and can only think clearly again [when he gets to] the bottom of the stairs.

Anyway, I thought that was pretty interesting.

Remember Michael Bower, aka “Donkey Lips” from Nickelodeon’s Salute Your Shorts? Did you know that he’s a rapper? Check out some of his hot tracks here. I wish he had more than 2 songs… Because both are absolutely amazing.

According to his Wikipedia entry, he’s led quite an interesting life so far. At one point, he was a scientologist. He has a passion for saving llamas. He’s an Eagle scout… And in 2009, he entered rehab for PCP addiction.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted on here. I’ve been spreading myself pretty thin lately. The past 2 weekends in a row I’ve had friends visiting from out of town, and this coming weekend I’ll be flying back east for a fishing trip with some friends from college. This is the 3rd year in a row that we’re doing this… Fishing in Wachapreague, VA. The town has 1 bar, zero grocery stores, very spotty cell phone service… Exactly what I need.

It’s Tuesday… So you know what that means, right? Cowboy Monkey Rodeo Night! Whoooo! I’m pretty sure I can’t top that video, so I’m just gonna quit while I’m ahead.

I was reading an interesting article on NYPost. The article was about the CIA and their testing of LSD in the New York subway system in the 50′s. Interesting stuff, and as such, I wanted to share it with a friend.

Normally I’d just copy the URL and IM/email it to someone, but this time, I just highlighted a paragraph and copied it to my clipboard.

When I pasted it into the IM window, I noticed that more than one paragraph was there. In addition to what I had copied, some extra text had made it’s way onto my clipboard. It said “Read more” and provided a URL to the story. Slick, huh?

It’s definitely an interesting link building method. How many people that paste that from their clipboard wouldn’t notice the additional appended sentence? I would be willing to bet at least 30-40%, especially if they’re copy/pasting multiple paragraphs. So when these are being pasted onto social networking sites, forums, and blogs, backlinks to the site are being generated with no effort on the part of the webmaster.

I looked into how this works – actually, my buddy Andy beat me to it. They use a service called Tynt Insight to do this. Javascript is used to send whatever you copied to Tynt’s servers, where a backlink to the page that you’re on is added. There is some speculation that not only is what you copy sent, but also everything that is selected.

Invasion of privacy? Some would say yes. Slashdot says you can block this using Ghostery.