First off, I have to apologize. This so isn't fair to anybody.
This blog will be moving yet again. It won't be changing names or changing content like before, just moving.
I finally bit the bullet and bought out PixiemamaDesigns.com. But shhh! That's a secret.
On late Sunday night/early Monday morning my store, Scrappity-Doo-Dah, completely went down. Disappeared off the face of the Internet. I only noticed it around 9AM Monday morning when I went to check the forums and make my "normal" rounds in my creative team forum.
It had me worried, I have to be honest. It's normal for a website/store to go down every once in a while due to either hiccups in my internet or hiccups in their host's server. But after the last couple weeks that I and my store owners/community of designers at SDD had, I was worried.
Sometime around mid-day April 29th, SDD went down. Shortly after, about 30 minutes to an hour later, my friends Tiff and Jaya noticed that several other stores were down also, including My Life and Scrap, Scrap Orchard, Digi Scrap Addicts, Inspiration-Lane, Scrapable, Designs in Digital, Divine Digital, and many others. These are well-known names, so many customers noticed also. Posts started coming up at DigiShopTalk (the hub where many of us designers go for networking/business-related things, and practically the whole digital scrapbooking community goes to talk about digital scrapbooking, find products to fit their needs, find freebies, post their layouts, so on and so forth...) asking where the sites were.
After a couple of hours, store owners started questioning what was going on because they still couldn't get a hold of their webhost. They all used the same one, UCWebhost. They were not answering phone calls, support tickets, emails, or anything. There was just silence.
Now keep in mind what I mentioned in a previous post - April 30th-May 2nd this year was the biggest shopping weekend of the year not only for digital scrapbookers but also paper scrapbookers, as it was National Scrapbook Day. It was of extremely high importance that the stores be up those three days.
There was a lot of concern that Thursday, because a lot of us at SDD wanted to put out our specials (I had two grab bags, a personal use one for scrapbooking layouts, and a build your own where you could get any of my products for a certain price) early. Me, I was frantic. I was all like "No this can't happen! First my EHD goes down with my finished templates that I worked for three days on to get finished and I CAN'T GET TO THEM! And now all of SDD goes down! Why do you hate meeee?!?!" Yes, I was actually like this.
Let me explain something - to me, this is my job. This is not just a hobby. To some others it may not seem that way, because I don't make a lot of money off it. I knew this going in, and I made Heath aware of it also. But this is literally one of the only things I've succeeded in so far in life. I've made a ton of fabulous friends, and I'm good at it. I have such a low self-esteem problem that when I get an email from a customer or a blog post from another designer that I've given products to, that says "She is just so fabulous and talented, I love her, you must go check her out," it's like you just told me that I won Mother of the Year. That wonderful.
Well sometime Friday everything finally came back up, but we had very little answers about it all. Some people vowed then and there to move to another host, but they didn't immediately take action on it.
Then this happens, two weeks later. It was a nightmare.
SDD was down a total of 5 days I believe. That 5 days we lost out on so many sales it's not even funny. Yvonne, the store owner, was almost crying to me on Yahoo. I felt so bad for her. It wasn't just that the store was down, it was the fact that there was 2-3 days with no communication and she was afraid all the designers and customers would leave. When there was communication it was obviously all lies and just really poor damage control.
It was during that time that I went researching for new hosts to try to help Yvonne out. Instead of doing that (because it was more difficult than it seems) I ended up finding a good deal on a company that had very good reviews and was totally in my price range. I figured up what I had in my Paypal from the week after NSD (which was my biggest sales week, go figure lol) and when I put just a couple extra dollars with it, about $5 actually, I had enough to pay for a domain and one month of hosting. So Heath and I discussed it and I bit the bullet on it.
I make enough in sales each month that I should be able to pay for it on a monthly basis very easily. I didn't have the money to pay in advance and anyway, after what's happened lately I worry about signing a contract. So month-to-month is better for me, although it does cost a bit more. But I feel much better paying a couple dollars more a month knowing that if something happens, I can bolt out of there as soon as I get the chance. Now I just have to hope that nothing happens.
So like I said, the blog will be moving but none of the content or anything will change. The design will, because it's a different type of blog, and the address will also, but everything else will stay the same. I just can't see having my design blog on my domain but having my personal blog still stuck on a Blogger account. It's so restricted. Until then, I'll stay here and post like I normally do, because it probably won't be coming until the next couple of weeks, if not longer. First and foremost I have to focus on moving all my designing stuff over because I want that all done by June 1st.
You can see the domain by the link I provided up there. As long as the Coming Soon sign is still up, nothing is up yet lol.
I'll let you know when the blog will move over.
This blog will be moving yet again. It won't be changing names or changing content like before, just moving.
I finally bit the bullet and bought out PixiemamaDesigns.com. But shhh! That's a secret.
On late Sunday night/early Monday morning my store, Scrappity-Doo-Dah, completely went down. Disappeared off the face of the Internet. I only noticed it around 9AM Monday morning when I went to check the forums and make my "normal" rounds in my creative team forum.
It had me worried, I have to be honest. It's normal for a website/store to go down every once in a while due to either hiccups in my internet or hiccups in their host's server. But after the last couple weeks that I and my store owners/community of designers at SDD had, I was worried.
Sometime around mid-day April 29th, SDD went down. Shortly after, about 30 minutes to an hour later, my friends Tiff and Jaya noticed that several other stores were down also, including My Life and Scrap, Scrap Orchard, Digi Scrap Addicts, Inspiration-Lane, Scrapable, Designs in Digital, Divine Digital, and many others. These are well-known names, so many customers noticed also. Posts started coming up at DigiShopTalk (the hub where many of us designers go for networking/business-related things, and practically the whole digital scrapbooking community goes to talk about digital scrapbooking, find products to fit their needs, find freebies, post their layouts, so on and so forth...) asking where the sites were.
After a couple of hours, store owners started questioning what was going on because they still couldn't get a hold of their webhost. They all used the same one, UCWebhost. They were not answering phone calls, support tickets, emails, or anything. There was just silence.
Now keep in mind what I mentioned in a previous post - April 30th-May 2nd this year was the biggest shopping weekend of the year not only for digital scrapbookers but also paper scrapbookers, as it was National Scrapbook Day. It was of extremely high importance that the stores be up those three days.
There was a lot of concern that Thursday, because a lot of us at SDD wanted to put out our specials (I had two grab bags, a personal use one for scrapbooking layouts, and a build your own where you could get any of my products for a certain price) early. Me, I was frantic. I was all like "No this can't happen! First my EHD goes down with my finished templates that I worked for three days on to get finished and I CAN'T GET TO THEM! And now all of SDD goes down! Why do you hate meeee?!?!" Yes, I was actually like this.
Let me explain something - to me, this is my job. This is not just a hobby. To some others it may not seem that way, because I don't make a lot of money off it. I knew this going in, and I made Heath aware of it also. But this is literally one of the only things I've succeeded in so far in life. I've made a ton of fabulous friends, and I'm good at it. I have such a low self-esteem problem that when I get an email from a customer or a blog post from another designer that I've given products to, that says "She is just so fabulous and talented, I love her, you must go check her out," it's like you just told me that I won Mother of the Year. That wonderful.
Well sometime Friday everything finally came back up, but we had very little answers about it all. Some people vowed then and there to move to another host, but they didn't immediately take action on it.
Then this happens, two weeks later. It was a nightmare.
SDD was down a total of 5 days I believe. That 5 days we lost out on so many sales it's not even funny. Yvonne, the store owner, was almost crying to me on Yahoo. I felt so bad for her. It wasn't just that the store was down, it was the fact that there was 2-3 days with no communication and she was afraid all the designers and customers would leave. When there was communication it was obviously all lies and just really poor damage control.
It was during that time that I went researching for new hosts to try to help Yvonne out. Instead of doing that (because it was more difficult than it seems) I ended up finding a good deal on a company that had very good reviews and was totally in my price range. I figured up what I had in my Paypal from the week after NSD (which was my biggest sales week, go figure lol) and when I put just a couple extra dollars with it, about $5 actually, I had enough to pay for a domain and one month of hosting. So Heath and I discussed it and I bit the bullet on it.
I make enough in sales each month that I should be able to pay for it on a monthly basis very easily. I didn't have the money to pay in advance and anyway, after what's happened lately I worry about signing a contract. So month-to-month is better for me, although it does cost a bit more. But I feel much better paying a couple dollars more a month knowing that if something happens, I can bolt out of there as soon as I get the chance. Now I just have to hope that nothing happens.
So like I said, the blog will be moving but none of the content or anything will change. The design will, because it's a different type of blog, and the address will also, but everything else will stay the same. I just can't see having my design blog on my domain but having my personal blog still stuck on a Blogger account. It's so restricted. Until then, I'll stay here and post like I normally do, because it probably won't be coming until the next couple of weeks, if not longer. First and foremost I have to focus on moving all my designing stuff over because I want that all done by June 1st.
You can see the domain by the link I provided up there. As long as the Coming Soon sign is still up, nothing is up yet lol.
I'll let you know when the blog will move over.
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