I just got a $35 invoice from my web-hosting company IONOS, which supports both of my blogging platforms over the last fifteen years. I stopped posting to my WordPress blog BusDriverJim when I moved here, and created this Joomla blog, OldManJim.com.

Turns out they were both using PHP 7.4 as the code base, and PHP 8.1 is the current standard. Since I hadn't upgraded to 8.1, they were billing me for maintenance fees. You can destroy a blog and years of work if you upgrade and they're are issues, it was a risk.

So I talked to my webhost and they said they could create backups of both sites for a dollar a month, and after six months it shifts to twenty. I went for the offer and I'm downloading the backups to a thumb drive now.

I upgraded to 8.1 and neither site has crashed. If you're reading this, OMJ is good. It could have been gone...