My Inhospitable Host
In these frustrating times, I decided that it was worth it to spend a little money to try to keep at least something normal. I rushed to design this new blog before taking at least a short vacation on my spring break.
I’ve had a love/hate relationship with the hosting company where visibledarkness.com currently resides. I liked the low price of one2host but there have been some really distracting outages for the last year and half or so that I’ve used them. They were okay for the first year, though it was disconcerting that their site and the e-mails I received from them were written with language and spelling at about the sixth-grade level. When this last problem occurred, support was totally inaccessible. After I splurged on an ipowerweb domain that costs twice as much, one2host finally contacted me.
As is typical, I got two replies which contradict each other. The complaint lodged with tech support informed me that my hosting had lapsed, and I needed to pay them again—that is why my domain is down. According to my records I’m paid up through August. The last-ditch complaint I filed with the sales department (before I heard from tech support) prompted the response (dated about 12 hours ago) that visibledarkness.com should be back online within 24 hours.
We’ll see. This new domain has a lot more server-side goodies, and it if proves to be more reliable I hope to eventually move everything over here and change the DNS. I’ll let you know. I refuse to risk any more content to the old host. I’ll be placing any new posts here. Hopefully, I can do a full import of the 2.0 blog to this site in a little while (if it ever comes back online). This address is safe to link.
I own the name visibledarkness.com until 2007 and I don’t plan on surrendering it. It’s just a matter of sorting out where it lives.
Glad you are back. Site looks very nice.
I agree with The Happy Tutor – site looks really good and yes it’s good to have you back. And thanks to Mark at Wood’s Lot for repointing me to your new site too 🙂
Full sympathies, Jeff. Isn’t it peculiar that internet hosting services operate at so crude a level of business practices (and with so little customer review)? I’m thankful that Mark Pilgrim mentioned CornerHost when I was looking for a host.
Where in the World is Jeff Ward?
If you’re a fan of Jeff Ward, otherwise known as Visible Darkness, otherwise known as This Public Address, be aware that he had server problems, and he’s moved his weblog to a new domain and server at http://www.thispublicaddress.com/“. His old archive…
Whew. Good to see you haven’t disappeared. Like the new look, too! Your buddies Burningbird and Wood’s Lot pointed me here, so they deserve a shoutout of gratitude. Keep fighting the good fight and writing!
I found you via Parking Lot. It’s good to see that you haven’t disappeared from the Web completely.
My sympathies regarding your hosting woes. I’ve been having nightmare of a time with my hosting company, Feature Price. They never did fix whatever the problem is. It’s apparently something to do with MySQL or something like that that I don’t understand. All my manually coded pages display just fine but I can’t use MT or anything like that. As far as Feature Price is concerned if any of my pages are okay then there’s no problem. I’m reduced to doing everything “the hard way” but for the most part it’s not all that hard. I’m starting to prefer it.
Ironically I chose Feature Price because they were helpful and responsive. I almost signed up with iPowerweb but I emailed both companies with a couple of questions and iPowerweb sent one of those annoying automated replies. The reply from Feature Price was from a real person so even though I had to pay considerably more to get the MySQL and all that other stuff I thought it would be worth it for the “personal service.” HA!
Let us know how it goes with iPowerweb. I am stuck with Feature Price until December but then I plan to switch. I’m worried that I’ll lose my domain name. I’ve read some nightmare stories about FP stealing domain names.
Sorry to butt in, but I have had several clients on iPowerWeb – not good. In fact, I paid a year in advance to host my forum on iPowerWeb, but left after 2 months because of all the server time outs.
In my opinion, iPower is one of the worst.