I nearly hesitate to celebrate but I think we're actually across the finish line

The site is all moved over to a new hosting service (with a snappy new domain, too) and I'm really happy so far! Check out the NEW Shop HERE! As promised I have reinstated the "GRANDOPENING" coupon code until the end of this weekend, so get 20% off while you still can!

With how difficult this shop has been I'm really happy it's not only functional but also how I envisioned aesthetically. It really feels "mine" and I'm proud of it.

For anyone unaquainted let's run it back

I made a site on the free, open source hosting provider neocities. At the time carrd sites were the craze and I wanted something with more customization. I was a total noob and all my coding knowledge came from coding character pages on toyhou.se but I did it anyway

The years went by and things changed. Art wasn't just something I was mildly interested in, it was becoming what I really wanted to do. I began wanting some sort of online store I could put art on but lacked the resources

I started experimenting with wordpress and realized I could make a store with it. I ran into my first major roadbump almost instantly since neocities doesn't support wordpress sites, but started working on one locally anyway and figured I'd cross that bridge later

Time passed and not much progress was being made. Frustrated with myself, I ended up researching hosting providers that do allow wordpress hoping that getting a beta version of the site online would inspire me to be more productive. I landed on infinity free and made some forward progress but stopped again

A combination of being bogged down in life with work and school and other projects and feeling frustrated with my lack of both coding knowledge and wordpress knowledge made the website essentially grind to a halt. I realized I would have to stop winging it and actually took some web classes

I was finally able to design the site how I'd envisioned for so long without feeling "held back". Unfortunately new problems arose: to start, infinity free was very slow. It's hard to complain about a free service but it would take full minutes for pages to load every time anything needed to be adjusted so working on the site was taking FOREVER. In addition, the site would have random downtimes and infinity free didn't really have transparent explanations on why or how to avoid

When I launched the site last week these issues bubbled over and it became apparent I would have to leave infinity free

The reason I was so hesitant is it's hard to find hosting services that allow adult topics and are affordable, for some reason

I came across Helio Host, what I'm currently using, by chance. They have free and paid for options, and the paid options are very affordable. They allow unlimited traffic to their sites which is great. So far I've been really enjoying using them

It's nice to have everything together under one domain as well. Admittedly, having the ".com" definitely feels more official- even though everything's the same

Of course this isn't the end. I still need to finish the gallery section and add commission info. I also have been chewing on the idea of recoding the main site pages. They're old and I know I can do better. It's not a priority at the moment, however.

As always thanks for reading and I'll see y'all at Furpocalypse!!