For at least the Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday morning networking meetings, I need to prepare a 30 second “commercial” talking about my business and what I do. It is good public speaking practice pressure.
What worked last week was to tell a story. This week will be 1/2 the length so I have to be efficient but I have an idea that I think will work. It will have a little humor and tell about something interesting another client of mine is doing. It’s important not to talk about myself, but talk about what my client is doing. That implies me without talking about me per se. And it is talking about a result/benefit rather than a feature (i.e. me doing something directly). Subtle, I know.
Most of the day I was working on or waiting on a website/server update. I blocked out 4 hours for it and my part ended up taking over twice as much. I wasn’t working on it the whole time, more I was on call. I learned something new about web hosting and what can go wrong unexpectedly, though. I think the ultimate outcome will be for the better but it took a lot of time.
This would work better in the business blog I’m not doing yet but in brief, I’m not excited about “managed” WordPress hosting. The idea is that you pay extra and they do a bunch of stuff for you to make your site run better. However, in truth, everyone’s WordPress install is so specifically customized that no off the shelf 3rd party is going to make it run in a personalized fashion for $45/month including hosting. So what you get instead is backups included and some but not all of the moving parts taken care of.
I didn’t know about the “some but not all” part and that if I try to clone a server from my work into that world, that they don’t support such a thing. Where “they don’t support such a thing” means it will BREAK the site if you try to do that. There was a bit of arrogant stubbornness on my part that led me to not look into this in advance.
I’m a control freak when it coms to managing servers. I don’t want anything in my way. I don’t want any service to say they can take care of it instead of me and I shouldn’t worry about things. I want to worry about everything. But in this case, it didn’t work. The workaround was to migrate the site to another server in my world and that worked out fine.
I’ll do more due diligence in future about how my clients are hosted. At the least, I’m confident and able to fix things after they break.