Bilegrip's ISP, SmartyHost, has been having server problems of late, making it somewhere between agonisingly slow and impossible to make any postings. Answering my recent email of outrage and despair, they say the problem should now be fixed. But they've said that before. Googling "SmartyHost problems" presented other sites 'n' blogs having problems.

As well, Melbourne's number one IT blog, Bleeding Edge is pulling up SmartyHost stakes and moving to a new host. As I followed Charles Wright to SmartyHost, so shall I follow him to the new service. Except that I just signed up last month for another year, at a price, I now see, that is significantly dearer than just about every other web host in the world. What a silly bunt. Not only that, Smarty took over as domain registrar from another company, with the proviso that those who signup (me) cannot change ISP's for 60 days.

Apparently Smarty has switched from Primus to Optus hosting services. This move could be the cause, i.e., teething problems. Who knows, I'm a ranter not a techie.

Hopefully the problems will be ironed out in the second of these two months. Of course, I could always rename Bilegrip to Bilegripe and start all over again with another host day after tomorrow. I hear transferring thousands of files from one server to another via FTP is loads of fun.

Maybe we'll be back to normal Monday. Whether that's this Monday, next Monday or a Monday in June is not certain.

--Chet LaMerde