tekHedd – the blog

I have this idea to make a joke CAPTCHA generator. It would be just like a real CAPTCHA for verifying that the reader is a human, but instead of creating distorted letters with noise, it would just generate visual noise, and maybe some squiggles that might be letters. And it would have a button to click to “hear” it, that plays some scratchy background noise and a sound that is sort of like the sound of someone reading letters. And the joke is, of course, that there’s really no way to figure out what you’re supposed to type to prove that you’re human.

Oh wait, that’s what CAPTCHA does now. Never mind.

So I logged in to my new account at EasyCGI, to double check that all of my various hosting plans were indeed cancelled. No, I don’t trust them, they have the reputation of someone with a very bad reputation. And sure enough, in the interface I can see that they have all of my billing information and have scheduled automatic payments! Augh.

Of course, the person in support chat (“realperson-in-india.com”) tells me that, yes, my accounts are actually cancelled and I will not be billed. Do I trust that? No. Look, the summary page shows my estimated recurring charge. Great, I get to cancel my credit card again. :(

The last month has been somewhat traumatic, because the web host for several of my sites sold out, and I had to move. The good news is that I’ve moved all of the sites to one unmanaged virtual private server at fsckvps, at a great price and excellent connectivity. This wasn’t exactly a good time for me, but hey now that the move is done, I’m very happy. Now I am, anyway.

I wasn’t happy at first. They sold us out to EasyCGI. EasyCGI has such a bad reputation, I didn’t even have to look them up–I remember them from my previous research. Just to be sure, I did a couple of quick google searches, and found two kinds of forum posts about EasyCGI. Most were along the lines of “I had a problem, and they never resolved it, and now they’re still charging me”. The few that defend EasyCGI are unconvincing. Yup, I went from the best to the worst overnight.

So, enough bitching about the rumored lameness of EasyCGI! The wonderful thing about virtual hosting is the complete control. Now my email server will reject any connection that doesn’t support encryption. I define the policy! I set the rules! You will obey! Ahahahahaha!

Right. So anyway. FSCKVPS. We’ll see how this goes, but so far I’m very happy.