Tech support

For everyone who came here (or to the main site) in the past two days and got blocked out, I apologize, on behalf of my hosting provider GoDaddy who will never do so. It remains unclear what exactly happened, but suffice to say they were woefully unprepared for it, which is pretty inexcusable from a major hosting service.

Worst of all was their Tech Support, which was slow to respond and completely clueless when they did. I’ve hosted this site for 10 years now and, while not a webmaster in any usual sense, understand file systems and permissions, FTP processes, and DNS and mail servers. When I contacted them, I gave them everything they needed to know, what I’d already checked and where I was finding issues (for instance, that I was blocked out of their own clumsy FTP tools, and my external FTP program had come up with a blank directory tree instead of the 185Mb of content that should have been there.) Tech Support took nearly a day to get back to me and ask for my PIN “before they could proceed,” and when receiving this, took another several hours to say, “It’s because you have nothing in your directory.” Yes, “echo” has a different meaning in IP services, guys…

Nonetheless (because, seriously, you can’t get any less helpful than this,) they gave me their boilerplate directions to go find their directory archive to restore the tree to an earlier point, something that is necessary because their interface design is, shall we say, pathetic. The archive gave every indication that it didn’t exist as well, so I re-uploaded all of my content – thankfully I have a reasonably fast connection – to meet with the exact same issues.

Now, GoDaddy did actually have my site mirrored on their servers, as demonstrated by it being active now without changes. They just never bothered telling me what was going on through their tech support, made me waste a serious amount of time trying to correct their issue, and took their own sweet time fixing it themselves. Even their vague “we’re doing maintenance” notice, not to be found anywhere on their site but mailed directly, listed their “outage” times as starting seven hours after my site was down and ending 14 hours before my site was actually restored – that tells me that this was not maintenance and that they had no control over whatever happened.

So if/when it happens again, be patient – I’m working on my end to correct the issue.

« [previous]
[next] »