We’ve been online for over five years now, with just over three of those on our own domain name and externally hosted webspace. And out of those three years…we’ve only really paid for one of them. ShieldHost has been our host for the last three years, the original reason being that they were dirt cheap. Three bucks a month for five gigs of space (which we actually got kind of close to a couple times when we started using it as a file server for illegally downloaded mp3’s, Malaysian bear porn, and etc.), full PHP and a MySQL database (which enabled us to power our own crappy tagboard internally) to boot…that’s a pretty good price for so many toys to play with.

Even better was that you only needed to pay for one year, and then they would proceed to lose all your account information, yet still somehow keep maintaining your website for over two years, all the while ignoring all email inquiries and pretending that you didn’t exist. I’ve literally begged them to tell me how to pay them money many times over the years, just because I didn’t want them to erase all our stuff and I would have to set everything up again. Never once heard back from them, and so I was content just to let things work themselves out.

Thus, I’ve actually been living with this hanging over my head the last two years, just waiting for this day to come. And I guess now it has.

We have contingencies of course, but they take some time to get rolling. We still have the actual domain name hosted separately and of course Blogger holds all our posts and enables us to publish to their own hosted space…but it takes roughly 24 to 48 hours to repoint the .com over to there. So right now…until the changes go through, the regular WAMBAG.COM address just sports an “account suspended” page – which is probably what all of you are looking at right now – and this post is only viewable at wambag.blogspot.com. But hopefully everything clears tomorrow and we still have a functioning WAMBAG.COM plaguing the internet.

Unfortunately, the tagboard and its illustrious history are forever lost (unless we resign with ShieldHost and they’re somehow able to restore the database…but that is not really my preference at this time) and so I’m thinking we might go back to the comment system, and do a back to basics type thing now that we’ve had the opportunity to do so forced upon us. Or maybe just visitor input altogether, which is what I’m actually leaning towards right now.

I’ve been regularly backing up the entire site since that first year, so all the layouts and stuff would still be ready to roll out as soon as this is sorted out…but if I use this as an opportunity to put up a new layout or something, just don’t be particularly surprised. (This time around, I’m thinking…Nazi swastika theme.)

“You could always subscribe to a site like Perfect Ten. I mean that could be anything, it could be a bowling site.”
“Yea, but it doesn’t actually show dick going in, which is a huge concern.”
“Right, I didn’t realize that.”

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