Nick’s Vibe Check

The call is coming from inside the house. Since my last post, I’ve committed to the Wordpress switch. I wasn’t sure how that would go, given it’s been years (since my editor-in-chief days at The Mirada) since I’ve used it seriously. Even that was just posts, considering it was journalism-focused. But, ChatGPT let me know about “Elementor” which offered a lot of the same amenities I’m used to with the $167/two-year service. Of course, that pays for hosting too, but we’ll get to that. I’ve since cancelled the hosting plan for nalvarez.net , which now hosts a “Coming Soon!” page for whenever I get to that. Parallel to this, I wanted to rebrand my DJ website, from “me” to “Nightclub me” and “Private events me”, which of course requires a separate website. Naturally, I spun up another Wordpress container for the DJ website and began a faithful recreation. Over the last couple weeks, I slaved away, carefully replicating every element, text box, and photo. Now, with the 4th of July weekend,...

“There needs to be a website builder for the little guy. I feel like that’s an untapped market.” —Justin, my coworker Every two years, I’m faced with renewal options for both of my websites: nalvarez.net and djnicky.net . I built and host these with Zyro, which was recently bought by/merged with Hostinger. My personal site was purchased on a basic Zyro plan for $36 and that lasts two years. During my 2022 renewal, they grandfathered me in at that price, so once again my renewal cost was $36 for another two years. Then, this week, I get an email from Hostinger reminding me it is time to renew my website hosting plan. So you can imagine my surprise when I check the invoice to find a whopping $167 charge for the same two year plan . That’s a 363% increase in price. To my knowledge, there has not been any groundbreaking new features (unless you count the merger as a “feature”) and I’m even more puzzled as to why they wouldn’t honor a plan I was already using the past four years. Like ...

If you haven’t fallen down this rabbit hole yet, enjoy it. I was always a bit mystified at how one would actually get their own domain. GoDaddy commercials during the Nascar races were about as close as I came to figuring that out (but I was still too young to care). However, I decided marketing myself started with creating my own website, and I quickly settled on nalvarez.net via Squarespace ($20/yr, switched to Google Domains for $12/yr later). And, for a while, I was content. Playing with all the DNS records, seeing what I could integrate with my home server, and just having my own website was my entertainment. A year later, the domain itch came back… justifiably. My aspirations as a DJ had accelerated enough to the point I thought my own DJ website was necessary. Until that moment, I had been running everything from a subpage of my main site: nalvarez.net/dj . So, Google Domains once again received $12 from me as I purchased djnicky.net . This one had a bit of thinking involved...