I believe it was 1998 when I started my first web site entitled, ‘Oswald’s 6th Floor.’ A few months later I purchased a domain name and bought space at my service provider, The Loop. It was not long after that I outgrew my provider and was fortunate enough to stumble upon an individual who offered up FREE hosting with a fancy domain name, actionquake.com. My site was then linked from www.the6thfloor.com to 6thfloor.actionquake.com. Due to circumstances beyond my control and that of my friend who helped me with hosting I was forced to go elsewhere.

I landed at Planetquake.com, part of the Gamespy Network where I was happily hosted as part of their network. What made this relationship so great was the fact my updated news would appear on Planetquake, which helped me increase my traffic and followers to my site, which at the time was still focused on game mods such as Action Quake 2 and Urban Terror.

As all relationships do, I terminated mine with Gamespy and Planetquake, but left knowing their assistance had help me to grow my site. I ended up at IPOWER a number of years back as I wanted full control of all hosting, which this company provided at a relatively good price. After retirement from online gaming The 6th Floor was somewhat dormant, as I evaluated the situation and the direction I was going to take the site. Since I had very little knowledge of PHP, which helped power the last version of my site before switching to WordPress.com, I decided to focus the site on myself.

While gaming was such a big part of my life for some 10 years, there are still some followers, but for the most part I have moved in other directions. I now post articles about fantasy football, thanks to the guys at Fantasy Football Starters, as well as my radio hobby and operating activity as part of the Northern California Contest Club. Every now and then I touch on some of the other topics (home remodeling anyone?) as they occur.Recently I attempted to move from WordPress.com, where the blog is hosted over to IPOWER, but have been unfortunate. It seems there are functions that won’t work at a hosted site that work on WordPress.com. For example posting images in the right column, which I use for the 6th HamCAM shot. While I have not explored every option, there could be a plug-in that provides that functionality.I have considered leaving IPOWER this coming July and making the move to a recommended (by WordPress.com) host and running free of the constraints and prices that WordPress.com charge. One thing about many web sites are the ever increasing amount of storage space, especially if you post images, videos and more media files. I have a hard time swallowing the price of $49.97 for 15GB of storage space. Currently Blue Host and Dreamhost are the two providers who are leading the way.

While the transition was not all that smooth making the jump to WordPress late last year, I do hope to have no down time when I change hosts in the coming months. Thankfully I will be able to get the new site on line and running before it goes live, allowing a seamless transition.

Currently I am facing more problems, as I am nearly out of space at WordPress.com. All the images I once had on this, the current version of The 6th Floor are all missing or very limited, since I have wiped the IPOWER directories clean of any files. So, while the content is still there, you might experience some issues over the next few months until I am done with the housecleaning.