I’ve had a web hosting account a very long time. The one I just left I used for roughly 17 years, about the length of time we’re lived at our current address. In that time domains have come and gone. Sites have changed and domains have been parked, unparked and parked again. This domain was once .com but in a fit of apathy towards gaming and with a flourish of disdain for silly nostalgia, I let it lapse. Later I had a change of heart (I no longer remember when or why) and I registered the .net version I have now.

My host of 17 years sent me an email in February to let me know they were updating the version of PHP on the servers “over the next few weeks”. A few months later I logged into my cpanel and it still said 7.4 which had been depreciated and was being flagged by WordPress as out of date. I reached out to see why the upgrade hadn’t been done. I was told just to wait, that they would get to me eventually. A few months after that I reached out again and asked them to upgrade me. I was initially told “No problem I can do that for you” but that quickly changed to “No I actually can’t. You’ll have to wait”. Based on that exchange, I started researching alternative hosts.

This week I was looking in my spam folder for something else and saw an email from them communicating a price increase for my package. I logged in and no, my PHP has still not been upgraded some seven months later. I switched hosts.

As part of that process I am also rethinking my collection of domains. I’ve decided to let three more lapse but not this one. Not yet anyway. At a minimum it will continue to serve as a memorial of sorts to my “golden era of online gaming” but it could be a place to voice certain thoughts on the state of things. I haven’t decided what those other thoughts might be yet but I have decided not to let this domain lapse.