The Great Site Outage of 2007

Scott Hardie | March 1, 2007
I've put up with a lot of crap from my web host of seven years, but this is the last straw. The site went down at 7pm on Tuesday, and my passwords (ftp, email, cpanel) stopped working. I submitted a help ticket at 7:10pm, flagging it as an emergency since the site was down. It wasn't until seventeen hours later that tech support replied to me: "You need to change your nameservers to point to [new path]." That's all; no sorry, no explanation. In other words, they moved my site to a new server without telling me in advance to redirect the domain name, they didn't copy my site to the new server so I would have to do all of the uploading and reinstalling myself, they left me waiting on an urgent ticket for 17 hours, and they didn't even mention the inconvenience with a simple apology? In the words of Queen Elizabeth, fuck the fucking fuckers.

The site is now hosted at a new company recommended by Miah Poisson, and other than a few configuration kinks I had to work out, I'm quite pleased with it so far (all 3 hours I've been a customer). More importantly, we're back in business, and I was lucky to get all data off of the old site so we shouldn't have missed anything except time. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you notice anything that seems to be working incorrectly, whether large or small.

By the way, if you tried to email me between 7pm Tuesday and now, the message is lost for good. Please resend. I apologize for the inconvenience!

Kerry Odell | March 1, 2007
Bummer...I knew something was very wrong when we didn't get the nice little message that you have posted normally when there's an issue. That kind of communication reminds me of what I deal with at work, so I completely understand your frustrations!

I hope you have better luck with the new company!! :)

Lori Lancaster | March 1, 2007
[hidden by request]

Scott Horowitz | March 1, 2007
you should just host it yourself at your office :)

Anna Gregoline | March 1, 2007
Whew, I'm glad that all is well! I checked the site a lot yesterday wondering what was up...

Scott Hardie | March 4, 2007
Thanks, all.

Scott, I strongly considered trying to arrange for hosting at work, since we have a great server environment. But using company resources for this site is out of the question; it muddies the issue of ownership in the event of an acrimonious split. Besides, too many people I work with would see the answers to goos. :-)