And a little trashing of Arvixe hosting service.
A long time ago, I started hosting the old Landlord Toolkit site on the hosting platform “Arvixe.” It was hosted using a then-current version of the CRM, DotNetNuke. Yes, I know! Not many people have ever heard of it, but I found it easy to use and customize. I am a software engineer of several decades, and I am pretty versed in the programming language “C#.” I also have lots of experience with Microsoft’s SQLServer. Since DotNetNuke’s base language and data persistence is C# and SqlServer, I found it a natural fit for me. I developed several custom plugins or modules for the site, including the old Landlord Toolkit site.
One of the custom modules was a renter database. Landlords who registered on the site could search for a particular renter by last name and either SSN, driver’s license, or date of birth. If the renter is in the database, the landlord could read other tenant reviews and leave a review. It seemed a really good idea though it did take a while to code and test properly. I also developed some other modules for the site. I was having fun! Then Arvixe sold its operations or merged or something else. All I know is suddenly, the site started having issues, and the help staff was slow or unresponsive. Several times I would randomly go to the site and find it was not operational! The help desk could not get the site back up in one instance. I found the issue with their database and fixed it. But I still didn’t learn my lesson!
Once I found the SSL certificate was installed but not correctly. The site was without SSL for about a week. At some point, I went through some major personal events, and the site suffered from a lack of attention. After I weathered the personal storm, I returned to the site to find it was again down. Enough was enough! I found the hosting package was due to renew within five days and immediately canceled it. I started hosting at a new site but using a different CRM. DotNetNuke is not offered at this hosting outfit, and I cannot tell if DNN is dead or not. I am sure the hosting site offers support for “ASP.NET” and SqlServer, but why bother?
Where am I going with this? Arvixe sucks! I also miss my custom modules. My future path with Landlord Toolkit is to build it back out. I still have many of the posts from the old site. I do not know PHP and MySql, but I will also learn them to build custom modules for this site. I hope to have about as much doing it as I did in the past.

Leave a Reply