Web Woes, Installment 1
Friday, July 4th, 2008So, as I mentioned in my last post, I’d noticed that my site was down a couple of days ago. I waited a few hours to see if it would clear up, but to no avail. At this point I emailed their technical support to ask them if they could tell me if the problem was on their end or mine and got back this gem - “you need to check the errors with your Web site by your own. If you do not wish to do so you can signup for a new account.”
Frustrated with this response, I called up to see what the problem was. Apparently my site was on a server that they shut down as part of their transition to a new, horrendously slow and aggravating platform. They could not migrate it because it is “too complex.” The customer service guy could not give me further information beyond that. My only “solution” was to backup my site, open a new account with them and set the whole thing up again. (The CS guy sounded embarrassed about this.) Also, I had to get the data off my webspace because it is going to be deleted in seven days. Here’s the kicker - I was notified about NONE OF THIS. There are certainly times when I won’t visit my own site for a week or two and it all could have been gone. I know that part of the fault would have been with me for not regularly backing my stuff up, but regardless, as a responsible webhost they should have notified me of all of this without my having to call customer support.
I was debating between staying with them and taking the “devil you know” approach (and having to deal with their terrible vdeck 3 platform with mysql/phpmyadmin speeds that make me want to pull my hair out) or switching and possibly running into worse problems down the road. Luckily, I learned a lot in the past couple of days because I found an amazing forum about web hosting that is a trove of information.
The company that can be credited for this debacle is ipower - aka Endurance International. I ended up choosing the hosting company Hawk Host, but more later.
