The RadicalRuss Show Returns Monday, April 13

Hey friends, long time no hear, huh? Yes, it’s been well over a month since I put out a new podcast. First, there was the issue of my website migration. Long story short: I was hit by GoDaddy with a sudden doubling of my monthly website hosting costs.

Long story long: When I created the new RadicalRuss.com, I specifically chose GoDaddy because the hosting they offered included unlimited storage. With my 160GB of archives, that was my number one requirement. And so it ran for years, until this October, when they decided that sites like mine are limited to 20GB of storage. I theorize that it was always 20GB, but since I had used FTP to upload all my archived podcasts to an /MP3 directory above the /wp-content directory, they hadn’t been seeing my 160GB.

GoDaddy helpfully subscribed me to two +100GB storage units, doubling my monthly cost. (I’ll spare you the rest of the tech support calls to GoDaddy where their proposed solution to my $33/month rising to $76/month was to buy a $54/month subscription three years in advance for $1,944 up front.) And since I get just one day off a week to work on these things, it wasn’t until March that I was ready to tackle a migration to a new host. A short search found me BlueHost, a company I had been using way back before 2008, when I first started using GoDaddy. Turns out they would offer me the same level of WordPress hosting as GoDaddy, but with 250GB storage included, and all for just $5 more than what I’d been paying every month since 2016 to GoDaddy.

Anyway, that process of transferring the 160GB website from GoDaddy to BlueHost was arduous, to say the least. I had to download the entire 160GB from GoDaddy to my laptop, then upload all 160GB to the new BlueHost. I live in a remote mountain hideaway using T-Mobile Cellular Internet. My download speed is just about 120Mbps while my upload speed is barely reaching 2Mbps. Between the slow speeds and the various timeouts and disconnections, plus my 60-hour/week work schedule, it literally took three months to finalize the transfer.

But now the new RadicalRuss.com is up, now with all sorts of fancy features! I’ve added a video list for all my @RadicalRuss Bass Play-Along videos. There are new sharing buttons for posts and podcasts. I’ve tweaked the headings and layout to better work on tablets and phones. I’ve better integrated Bluesky throughout, so comments on content linked to Bluesky will appear on the content.

It also means it’s time for me to start recording on Mondays again. Last time I recorded a podcast were were just starting a three-day war in Iran… how’s that working out?

Thanks for listening, talk to ya Monday.