I rode the quarter pipe yesterday on rollerblades, slipped, fell, and sprained my knee a bit. Every time I straighten or fold my leg, I get a sharp pain. It is so annoying.

The day before yesterday, I got into a huge verbal combat with my wife. Yesterday we argued some more, but made up last night. With my sprained knee, I was in no mood to fight.

I was going to spend more time skating over the long weekend, but I am spending time in bed instead. I need to catch up on my readings since I haven’t read much.

I was thinking of registering for figure skating lessons next week, but I won’t be able to because of my knee injury. I checked the website last night and only two students signed up. They’ll cancel the class if they can’t get five students.

The kids started school for two weeks. I need to be more proactive with checking on their assignments and homework. I don’t want any surprises when their first reports come out. They spent way too much time playing video games. I am losing them over video games and it frustrated me.

I think of my mom often. I cried remembering the time we lived together in Poughkeepsie. I drove home from work at noon each day to have lunch with her. I took her to the Asian grocery store a few times a week. Life was slow but beautiful. I miss her dearly.

I need to reach out to family and friends more, especially during this challenge time dealing with Covid. I keep telling myself to do it, but I keep putting it off. OK, I am going to end this post so I can make some calls.

The following exchange between myself and an account manager at HostPapa had prompted me to migrate all my sites off HostPapa. If you are in a similar situation, you can take our sites elsewhere. I also hope that
HostPapa will back off its up-saling strategy. I am not revealing the account manager’s name because I don’t want to get them in trouble.

Hello Donny,

My name is GB from the HostPapa’s Solutions Team. I’m contacting you concerning the email storage of your web hosting plan.

As you know, LunarPages was acquired by HostPapa a year ago. All hosting accounts originally purchased with LunarPages have been migrated to our HostPapa servers. It now shares the same resources as all of our other shared plans.

As a hosting company, it is our main priority to provide a stable and secure server environment and make sure that the hosting accounts provided by us are not used for data archiving. To help you with the transition, we have provided you with a higher storage limit than our most basic shared hosting plans for the past year. However, because storing large volumes of email on your account has a negative effect on your account and the server, it is not feasible for us to continue providing unlimited storage for your email accounts.

That being said, our system administrators notified me that one or more of your email accounts has exceeded that limit allocated to your plan by using 1GB or more per account. You can learn more about the limits we have for our shared hosting plans here.

Please reply to this email with the best way to reach you (email/phone), so we can find a way to resolve this quickly and find a more suitable solution for your needs.

I look forward to hearing from you!

My respond:

Hi G,

Thanks for reaching out to me about my email usage. I actually don’t use any hosting email. I only use email forwarding; therefore, there shouldn’t be any issue with usage storage. If there’s mail on the server, please let me know how I can delete them.

Thanks,

GB replied:

Dear Donny,

Thank you for your reply. Our administrators have detected that the website regularly receives CPU faults and I / O faults (see below).

It can be due to many reasons, malware / viruses / bots / unoptimized scripts / heavy images etc.

When these spikes occur, it means that your visitors cannot access the website properly (for example, they may experience huge load times or a complete inability to open the site). It also destabilizes the system and may endanger other users.

In this regard, it is extremely important that we resolve the issue as soon as possible.

Option 1:

You can try to optimize your website scripts and traffic as much as possible to reduce your account’s resource usage and try to bring it back below the limits of your hosting plan. (1) Make sure your apps are updated to the latest version, (2) Remove unnecessary plugins and themes, (3) Review your traffic through AWStats and block IP addresses you deem illegitimate through IP Blocker.

How to minimize the use of your shared web-hosting server

Option 2:

If you prefer to deal with this issue transparently, I can also offer you a solution that will resolve your issues immediately, without you having to spend time reducing your account’s resource usage. Time is the most precious resource we all have, so if you want to go with a solution that ensures long-term sustainability, you can upgrade to a Business Pro plan that will better meet your project requirements. A Business Pro will provide dedicated resources, removing any limitations you face in our shared hosting environment.

I personally recommend an upgrade to Business PRO if you are looking for a long term solution that will provide you with the power and flexibility to grow your business. I have worked with clients who have faced similar issues in the past and they have found it to cost them more (short term patchwork) to regularly optimize their site than to upgrade to Business Pro.

Please let me know if you have any questions or need further help with this. If you are interested in upgrading to a BP, I would be happy to send you more detailed information on the pricing terms available and calculate the credit you would receive for the unused portion of your current plan.

Kind Regards,

I replied:

Hi G,

Thank you for following up on the issue. Is the email storage limit still an issue?

I use CloudFlare to help with the bandwidth. I only use a couple of plugins for WordPress. I am not sure where the spike comes from.

I am on vacation at the moment. I will take a look to see what I can do with option 1. As for option 2, I cannot afford a Business Pro plan because I only run a small personal blog and a few small personal projects.

Thanks once again,

GB responded:

Dear Donny,

Thank you for getting back to me.

I apologise about the confusion, the email storage is not an issue with your account.

The only issue is the resource usage.

Please look into the potential optimisations and I will scan the account afterwards.

The reason I’ve recommend the upgrade to BP is because it is similarly priced to your current plan.

You are currently paying $155 per year (or $465 for 3 years), while with the BP if you were to prepay the 3 year term, the price would be $466.20.

It would be roughly the same as you are paying right now, but with the benefit that it will provide you with more resources.

I look forward ot hearing back from you and if any questions arise along the way, I am here to help!

Kind Regards,

GB followed up:

Dear Donny,

I hope you’re doing well!

Have you had a chance to evaluate the situation and decide how you’d like to resolve this issue?

I wish you a great day and I look forward to hearing back from you!

Kind Regards,

I replied:

Hi G,

Thank you for following up with me. I have decided to move my sites to cloud hosting.

I paid HostPapa until January 2022. Do I get a refund on it?

GB replied:

Dear Donny,

I hope you’ve had a great weekend!

Unfortunately, a refund is not available, as it can only be acquired in the first 30 days after the purchase.

If you don’t mind me asking, why have you decided to move your websites to cloud hosting?

Kind Regards,

My last respond:

Hi G,

I understand about the refund not available. Would you please make sure that I won’t be charged automatically in January 2022?

As for my decision to move my websites to the cloud, I was concerned with the constant up-sale from HostPapa. I hosted my sites with Lunarpages since 2003 and I was satisfied with it until HostPapa acquired Lunarpages in 2019. My plan was increased from $8.99 to $14.99. Since two years with HostPapa, I had been asked to upgrade. With the recent spike of CPU and I/O usage, I was asked to upgrade to $23.99 a month. With the pattern of up-saling, I worried that I will be asked to be upgrading again in the future.

I tried to to solve the CPU and I/O usage by deleting all the mails on the server, compressed all my files, prevented hot-linking to my images, deactivated my WordPress plugins. Nothing seemed to bring down to 1G of CPU limit and 1MB/s of I/O limit; therefore, I think it was time to move on. Furthermore, my decision to migrate away from HostPapa was reaffirmed after reading similar complaints from numerous ex-Lunarpagers.

You have been patience and responsive and I respect that, but I can no longer be hosting with HostPapa.

Regards,

Today I washed all the windows for the first time after living in this house for 12 years. I started at 10 am and finished around 6 pm. Removing the windows was easier than I expected. I was also surprised that the windows weren’t as dirty as I thought.

Although washing windows was such a mundane task, it felt good to accomplish something. I still don’t like doing home maintenance, but I can’t afford hiring someone else to do it. A man knocked on my door and gave me a quote for $2,800 to fix my driveway. I am not going to spend almost three grants just to park my cars. I’ll patch it up myself. So that will be my next project.

Now that the kids aren’t into ice skating anymore, I might as well spend more time maintaining our home. I still enjoy rollerblading in skate parks. I am not sure if I will continue ice skating lessons. Will see.

Over the summer, I enrolled Đạo and Xuân to private lessons for ice skating. I wanted to see how they do with one-on-one coaching. From what I have observed, they have a lot to relearn. Their coach is detail-oriented and meticulous. She takes the time correcting their footwork and their posture. They spent five weeks working on basic crossovers, which they had learned in group lessons a year ago.

Despite the repetitiveness, they still wanted to do private lessons. The problem is that they don’t want to practice. When I wanted to take them to practice, they resisted and moaned. If they don’t practice they won’t get anywhere in this sport. If they don’t want to practice, they don’t have the passion for the sport. I am fine if they just want to do ice skating for fun. They can go skating once in a while or take group lessons.

Between the coach’s fees and the freestyle ice rink sessions, the private lessons are pricey. I wouldn’t mind paying if they put their heart into it. I do not want to pressure them into it. I want to offer them the opportunity. If they decided to quit, I would honor their decision. I asked both of them again and again, they both said yes that they wanted to continue private lessons. Maybe they do want to continue. Let’s keep them going for a bit longer to see how they do. Will they be able to compete?

As a voracious reader, I often ran into an issue called “too many books and too little time.” To help me figure out which book I should delve in first, I would read the first few paragraphs or pages. With Michelle Zauner’s memoir, she pulled me in right from her first sentence: “Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart.” Whether writing about her favorite Korean food or her complicated relationship with her Korean mother, Zauner’s prose is just impeccable. The story of her mother battling with fatal pancreatic cancer is heartbreaking. The pain and the suffering reminded me of my own mother who lost her life to Covid-19. I cried and salivated reading Crying in H Mart. It’s a beautiful, soulful memoir.

After hitting the CPU limit on the shared server at HostPapa, I knew I needed to make the move for the long run. I am so glad that Thủy Nguyễn, a long-time reader of this blog, recommended DigitalOcean. I hesitated at first because DigitalOcean is a cloud-hosting service and I do not have much experience with cloud servers. Fortunately DigitalOcean has tons of tutorials to help me make the move. From setting up the LAMP stack to virtual hosts to SSH keys to Let’s Encrypt, I was able to follow along. I had to destroy several deployments and started over. I hadn’t worked with the command line in a while and it was like rediscovering an old love.

I created two Droplets: one exclusively for this blog and one for my static sites including Vietnamese Typography and Donnytruong.com. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect Vietnamese Typography is the cause for the CPU shortage. The site hosts tons of web-font files. I was thinking of limiting the number of fonts being served on the site, but it would ruin the purpose of the book. I wanted to showcase as many Vietnamese typefaces as possible. Now that the web book is on the cloud, I hope the traffic won’t blow up my budget.

Migrating this blog was a huge challenge. Transferring the database over was time consuming. I tried SQL dump, but it didn’t work too well. I finally just use the export and import tools provided by WordPress. I can’t believe it worked great. I still have a handful of things to take care, but I need to get some sleep. I hope to get back to regular blogging schedule soon.

Our summer vacation has swiftly come to an end. I enjoyed rollerblading on the street, jumping the waves with the kids on the beach, swimming in the pool, eating tons of food and ice cream, drinking a few bottles of beer, and spending some quiet moments with my lovely lady late at night. I was having a great time until an account manager at HostPapa contacted me to let me know that my website was hitting with CPU and I/O faults. He recommended that I upgrade my plan to Business Pro.

I stressed myself out over such a minute issue. I should have just made the upgrade to get it done and over with, but I worried much more than money. What if I lose my digital presence? I put years of work into this blog and now my work is depending on this hosting company.

After reading my previous post, a reader wrote to me recommending DigitalOcean, a cloud-based hosting solution. I spent some time playing around with it. I deployed its one-click LAMP stack, but there is so much work to do after the server is up and running. I need to spend more time with it.

To fix the immediate issue, I did some optimizations on my end. The CPU and I/O are not spiking up anymore. I can’t help but wonder what if I lose my entire blog one day. Will I be OK without it? It has been part of my life for such a long time. Will I be able to move on? All these thoughts put me under stress, but my lady had made me feel better. I am very grateful for her. I think I will be OK as long as I still have my family.

From 2003 to 2019, all of my websites were share-hosted by Lunarpages for eight bucks a month. I was happy with its service for 16 years. I even recommended my clients to host with them. In 2019, HostPapa acquired Lunarpages and I was concerned.

An acquisition is never good for the customer, but I stayed on. I just don’t have the time and the resources to research and to migrate my sites. Because I am running multiple sites, which was fine with Lunarpages, I am paying $15 a month.

The new business plan was already double what I paid before, but they are constantly trying to up-sale me to the business pro plan for $25 a month. That’s more than what I am willing to pay for my personal sites. I might need to start looking for a new home for my digital properties if HostPapa keeps trying to rope me into their higher plans.

Yesterday a big wave knocked my glasses out of me. It took a split second and my whole world has become blurrier. We’re vacationing in South Carolina and I didn’t bring a spare pair of glasses with me. I took my vision aid for granted. I depended too much on my glasses. Now I am trying to navigate my world without it.

For the most part, I am doing fine. I woke up early in the morning, made myself a cup of iced coffee, and went rollerblading on the street. I almost ran into a truck for being careless. After a mile of skating, I went back to the vacation house, ate breakfast, and took the kids to the beach. The water was warm and the weather was beautiful. The kids loved jumping and surfing the big waves. We then headed back to the rental property and jumped into a small swimming pool. The kids enjoyed the pool just as much as the beach.

Everyone gathered back into the vacation house for lunch. After a full meal, everyone rested or took a nap. I took my kids to the skate park, which was half an hour from the rental property. Driving was a bit of a challenge without my glasses, but I just needed to be more cautious. The skate park had low ramps; therefore, it was nice to skate without too much risk. Once we were back to the rental property, the kids wanted to swim in the pool until dinnertime. We ate together. The adults chatted while the kids watched TV. All three of our families agreed on no iPads or digital devices for the kids. It worked out well. They played together more rather than each kid on his own device.

This is our last summer vacation. Next week the kids will go back to school and I’ll go back to the office for the first time since the pandemic. The challenging time is still not over. I am still concerned about the surge of the Delta variant.

Since I will be on vacation next week, I took my ice skating test for Freestyle 1 ahead of schedule. I thought I would have done well since I nailed all the required techniques and I had been practicing frequently. To my surprise, I passed with the minimum scores. My coach wanted me to practice more before taking Freestyle 2.

My posture was terrible. My arms weren’t coordinating with my legs when I did backward edges. I jumped too early on the waltz jump. I didn’t lift my leg far enough for the spiral. My half-flip was decent. My spin was good even though I practiced it the least. I didn’t like spinning because I would get dizzy after 2 spins.

After the test result, I am not sure if I should go to the next level. I want to focus on my posture like my sons, Đạo and Xuân, who are taking private lessons and their coach scrutinized their every move. They are relearning from the beginning. After six weeks, Đạo only passed forward crossovers. He still needs to work on his backward crossovers. I don’t know if I want to go that far back in order to learn proper posture. I don’t skate to be a professional. I just want to have fun.

Should I sign up for Freestyle 2 or should I learn on my own using Coach Julia’s YouTube instructions? I am exhausted. I am taking a much needed break to clear my mind. I will spend my vacation thinking things through.