Wow, that was a rough couple of days. In the end, I made way more work for myself than was actually needed! Bluehost pulled my hosting down completely, killing all of my sites. I called them up and they informed me that vudu.me was being spammed, and they didn’t allow link shortening services. So I pulled the index.php file for the front facing portion of the service. That got me back in Bluehosts good graces and they put my hosting back online, but my vudu.me shortlinks were dead. I assumed Bluehost was completely blocking the service so I hopped hosts.
Luckily Dreamhost had a free trial. I got things set up over there, and transferred nameservers for vudu.me. Then I ran into the exact same problem! Somehow, the removal of my index.php killed my Yourls install (even though it shouldn’t)! I reinstalled everything, relinked the database, made up a new, mostly empty, index file, and an .htaccess file. And everything worked great! Only problem, it was on a different host. I wasn’t sure if things would work on Bluehost. So I then transferred this new install to my old host (from Dreamhost to Bluehost) and switched nameservers again. This morning, once the changes had propogated, vudu.me was back in action! Now, I just have to kill off my trial Dreamhost before I get billed for a year!
In the end, I have vudu.me as a personal link shrinker. All the old links work, each new post gets a link automatically, from all sites. It’s a bit inconvenient, but if anyone needs a link, I can make and send you one! Just in case you need vudu.me/something, for an easy to remember link to something. Works great for Google+ profiles!
