User:Anno1404/mystory

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First $7 wasted
I already had a shared hosting site on godaddy, with one wiki, which I was paying $80 a year. Back on November 3rd I paid $7 to create a new wiki domain name, dead-rising-wiki.com. Companies always make payment extremely easy. Technical support is always much, much more difficult.

Godaddy has a nice button which allows a website owner to create a new mediawiki. I created a new mediawiki site. Easy so far. I was excited.

Transferring wikis is impossible
Then came the impossible part. Transferring wikis is extremely difficult for the computer illiterate. The instructions on mediawiki are made only for editors who are familiar with workign for computer coding. I have spend years trying to dumb down those instructions, but many pages are simply incomprehensible to most people.

I spent the first week trying to get wikidump working. An editor was helpful and extremely patient, but I was unable to get the PERL to work on my wiki.

Another problem with mediawiki is the technical support is almost nonexistant. I still have questions posted on mediawiki and mwusers.com which were never answered. My IRC questions were ignored day after day after day. Mailing list and talk page questions were ignored.

First $70 wasted
I needed mediawiki version 1.15 to upload my wikia's 9,000 images but godaddy software only automatically created mediawikis which were version 1.16. So, starting over, I erased my old wiki, and paid someone $65 (with a $4.95 paypal card fee) to install version 1.15. Great, things were turning around. I used this extension and over the course of two days used SmartFTP client to upload my 9,000 images. The problem was that godaddy would time out on my mediawiki when using this extension.

So, now I had all of my wiki's images, but Special:import continued to time out on godaddy when I was trying to transfer pages. It got to the point where godaddy would seem to throttle my website, and literally only allow me to upload one page at a time.

Godaddy lies
I noticed that I was getting server errors on my shared hosting website. I contacted godaddy and the person on the phone said the server errors were a server (godaddy) problem, but that they were "unable to duplicate the error" Emails were the same, godaddy was "unable to duplicate the error".

Using an online tool I found out that the "unable to duplicate the error" was a lie.

Googling the exact same sentence:
 * "unable to duplicate the error"

I realized that godaddy said this to everyone, and they were lying to me. I filed a complaint with the Arizona Attorney Generals office.

$88 more dollars wasted
During this time, I was getting help from another kind editor with programs which would upload my pages. We suspected that godaddy blocked many of these programs. I gave this editor $20 to say thank you for his help. I asked him what hosting site he was using, and he said linode.

With less than a month left with mediawiki, I was so fed up with godaddy and so I decided to transfer to linode. I was so frustrated with godaddy's lies and throttling, that in a moment of despair I decided to transfer to linode. The problem is, linode is made for computer experts.

After days of wanting to throw my computer against the wall, and lacking sleep, I agreed to $45 to transfer the wiki. In my tired mind I was thinking my whole site would be transferred, then all of these problems would be solved but I only said, "set up mediawiki". We agreed upon $45 to set up me mediawiki. That was my final? stupid mistake, one of many.

Again, it took the person less than 2 hours to set up mediawiki. But I quickly realized I had forgotten about my other wiki, and had not agreed to transfer my other wiki, the editor said "we will talk about this later", I suspect this meant I would have to pay even more to do something I could do with one click on mediawiki. I had no idea how to access FTP. Basically I had got into an agreement to spend hundreds of dollars for someone else to do what I could do myself on wikia and godaddy.

Anno1404 19:00, 27 November 2010 (UTC)