I’ve recently posted about the problems I experienced with webhost4life and why I had to change hosts, at the time I wrote that post I was still in a ‘dispute’ with their accounting department over issuing me with a refund for the remaining 6 months worth of hosting. That issue has now been sorted and I’m pleased to be putting it behind me. This post is about the final outcome of that saga.

To recap and summarise what has happened so far, I used to have my sites hosted at webhost4life but on 17th February 2010 they decided to migrate my account (without telling me) to their new platform. The migration didn’t go very well and I was without websites or emails for well over a week, after a point I couldn’t just sit around and do nothing any more - my opinion was that as their migration had been so terrible and their customer support unable to answer any questions it had left me with no choice but to set up alternate hosting that was able to handle my sites, and as such they should refund me for the months I had already paid for but wouldn’t now be needing.

In an online chat I had with their accounts department I was told that they could cancel my account, refund me but there would be a $35 cancellation fee. At the time I wasn’t prepared to say yes on the spot because I still needed to set up hosting elsewhere, but after I had set up my new GoDaddy account I was ready. So I contacted them and again said I wanted my refund and was then told they wouldn’t refund me because their new account system hadn’t billed me so there was nothing to refund.

Needless to say this didn’t go down well with me and I insisted the issue was escalated. Finally they agreed to the refund and the $80 has cleared in my account – I’ve been waiting until the money actually cleared before writing this post just to make sure that they weren’t playing one last mean trick on me and the transfer bounced or something. So I am now completely free from webhost4life, my account is closed all my data was deleted and I have things running on my new hosting. However it turns out I wasn’t alone in my problems in the comments to that post Francis recounts his own problems with webhost4life – but he’s taken things a stage further and started a blog to determine the extent of damages that have occurred to others – anyone else who has suffered with webhost4life I’d like to suggest visiting the site and adding your voice!

The .NET Framework Setup team have a favour to ask, Scott Hanselman has a post with lots of details (and some nice screenshots) about how to help test the Windows Update for .NET 4 Beta 2, so I won’t repeat them here – I’m just helping to spread the word.

However, so this post has slightly more substance than a link to someone else’s post, this is what you need to do if you want to test the WU install and help make the process run smoothly in future. I have installed this on my home and work computers and no problems!

This is copied from the post mentioned above

The .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 is up on Windows Update for a while for testing, IF you set this special registry key to "opt-in" for the test. Otherwise it won't get offered to you.

If you have a machine that doesn't have any .NET 4 bits on it, make a text file on your system with a name like "NETFX4.reg" and put this text in it:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\NET Framework Setup\NDP\v4B2WU]
"OptIn"=dword:00000001

Then double-click this new registry file to create the key. Then check Windows Update and install the .NET 4 Beta 2 Client Profile. You can also do this key manually if you like.

Don't worry, later in the year when .NET 4 is released, it'll install over the top of your installation and upgrade it. We'd like to get several thousand more WU-based installations in the next few days, so please try this out on any machines, VMs, or other machines you have lying around.

I got an email last night that I really wasn’t expecting. It was from Microsoft advising me that I needed to login to the MCP site at least once a year in order to keep the account open.

This was rather a surprise, I wasn’t aware that I had attained my MCP; in 2008 I started studying for the MCTS in Web Development and though I passed the Web side component I haven’t (yet) passed the Application Development Foundation exam and no one had mentioned the MCP before. So that’s a bit of motivation for me to hurry up and pass the foundation exam, not that I’m chasing certification but it would be nice to complete it!

I’ve been using Bing as my default search providers since June and for the most part it has been pretty good.

However I have now reverted to Google simply because the results there seem to be more in keeping with what I actually want. This isn’t necessarily anything done wrong on the Bing side of things, it might just be that, over time, I have learned how to search using Google and so when using Bing I’m not giving it a proper chance / comparison. However I’m not precious about who gets me the results, all I care about is that I get results that help me answer whatever it was I was looking for.

Wow, I just checked my archive and I’ve written over 100 posts… 102 to be exact! I’ve linked to the most popular at the end of this post.

I’ve learned a few things along the way, created a few tools to make it easier for me to post and restyled the site once or twice. Oh and my wife and I had a baby boy in the middle of all that .

Most popular posts

These posts have all been commented on a few times and that, I consider to be a sign that people cared enough about what I’d said to comment. To me a blog is about communication with others, so I look forward to more comments and hopefully I’ll be able to write some more engaging posts in the next year or so.

• How to Tame Google Chrome
• Delicious bookmarks plug-in for Live Writer
• Interlude theme for BlogEngine.Net – Update
• Build bespoke app or use 3rd party tools
• DataReaders vs DataTables
• Useful links (24/03/09)
• Useful links 17/03/09