Walking Into The Gates of Hell.
Almost midnight on Saturday night and I am finally updating TheJackB for the first time in almost a week. I can’t begin to tell you how frustrating this experience has been nor will reading the last post truly highlight it.
You don’t need a play by play of what happened but it wouldn’t hurt to give you a quick summary so I’ll try to give it to you here:
- Old hosting company breaks up with me for undisclosed technical issues.
- New company tells me my account has a tech issue but they can’t understand why. Since I haven’t moved my site over and they tell me it will take 24 hours to solve I cancel my account and ask for a refund.
- A friend refers me to another company. I call and am told to leave a message because there is no one who can help me. It takes more than 24 hours to call me back, needless to say I didn’t hire them.
- I sign up with another company and pay another to handle migrating the site over. It takes a couple of days longer than expected. Not clear to me how much of that was just because and how much was shit happens but I held on tight and here we are.
24 Hour Response Time
I am still shocked it took the one company a full day to respond to my inquiry. It wasn’t unusual or different but in my mind they dropped the ball, albeit not as badly as the one who opened my account by creating a technical issue.
How does that happen?
Scratch that, I understand sometimes weird things happen but if you are supposed to be hosting my blog I have a hard time beginning my relationship with you by being told there is a problem and it will take 24 hours to solve because you don’t have enough resources to do it sooner.
I may not be your biggest customer but I should never be made to feel like I am your least important one either.
True Grit and Cremation
I am listening to Johnny Cash sing I’m Movin’ On (with Waylon Jennings) and staring at the wall. Got a spring cold that is kicking my behind and my head is spinning.
Some of it is due to the technical difficulties I mentioned above, some to the cold and some is tied into a conversation I had a short while ago with my son.
We watched the original version of True Grit. He humored me when I told him grandpa and I used to love watching John Wayne movies together, “hey look it is Dennis Hopper and look there is Robert Duvall, I need a consigliere son. Want to be mine?”
End of the movie comes and Rooster and Mattie (John Wayne and Kim Darby) are standing over a family plot and my son screws up his face and I realize he doesn’t understand so I pause the movie and ask him what is going on.
We have a short conversation about where people are buried and he is horrified because during the conversation he discovers some relatives plan on being cremated.
I understand his feelings because it is not my thing either. I can give you a bunch of different reasons but one of the big ones is that Hitler threw my people into ovens and I won’t help him but by having my dead carcass tossed into one.
Do yourself a favor and don’t try to argue with me about whether that is logical or rational because I can go through your life and pick apart all the things you do that are irrational.
Really, if you look at your life you’ll find lots of things that don’t make sense. Human beings like to think we act based on logic and reason but that happens far less frequently than we like to think.
The Long & Winding Road of Web Hosting
The process of moving the blog to a new host was far more complicated than I would have liked. Can’t say how much of it was because of the proverbial shit happens and how much was due to other factors.
It is a bit like the conversation I had with my son about cremation. We don’t have to like the choices that other people make but sometimes we have to accept them because our ability to influence them only goes so far.
So pick what is important and focus on that.
The important part of hosting for me is simple. Give me reliable hosting that provides great support and a solid framework so that I can focus on content and not spend so much time fighting technical issues I am less familiar with.
I did my best to make this part go smoothly but it didn’t work the way I wanted to so I tried to follow Churchill’s advice.
“Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes you must do what is required.â€
The free website hosts often make money in other ways, such as putting banners, popups, or popunders ads on your free webpages. Some free web hosting companies do not put ads on your site, but require you as the webmaster to click on banners in their control panel or signup process.
TheJackB michaelsuddard  So you bring your twenty speed titanium touring bike into the hipster’s bmx shop which mostly deals with one to three speeds and you tell them that the bike just doesn’t go… [grin]
michaelsuddard  Hi Michael, your answer is far more satisfying. Had they told me about the gerflinger and the whatchamacolite I would have gladly waited but those bastards blew it. 😉
You’re comments about appreciation and comfort are spot on.
Lori  You said it, faced the storm and survived indeed. Grateful for that too.
Glad everything worked out Jack.Â
Sometimes the internet is unexplainable including why something doesn’t work, doesn’t look right, or just plain doesn’t work.  The internet is made up a of a bunch of experts who are supposed to be able to solve issues.Â
Writers write content that is engaging (i.e. you) that fills our screens.
Web hosting companies are supposed to host the content on their web servers and help when there is technical issue.Â
Thus, a 24 hours technical issue without an obvious explanation is a stretch. They should have said:
“Give us 2 hours to investigate what the issue is and we’ll get back to you”.
2 hours later….
“Mr. B., it looks like the gerflinger is not working with the whatchamacolite. We can fix it in the next 5 hours, but it may not populate over to the thingamabobber for 24 hours.” *
To which you may have said:
“Sure go for it”.
But they failed to do that and thus you walked.
The main thing in business, as I’ve learned from loads of experience in a variety of industries, is to make sure the customer (i.e. the peeps that pay the bill) feels appreciated and comfortable with what your company offers. Otherwise, he may walk.
Isn’t it fun having to write posts like this explaining our absence from the blogosphere!? I think this means we’ve paid our dues, are no longer rookies (not that you have been for a very long time.) We’ve faced the storm and survived.
Damn, that was fun. 😉
Faryna  Now that sounds very similar to a discussion I had with someone about why illegal immigrants will always be hired in California because no one wants to pay $7 for a gallon of milk or $10 for strawberries.
But damn if I don’t like the idea of a team of ninjas running my hosting.
Julie Barrett  Just can’t burn my body, can’t do it. They can throw me in the ocean after I am gone, but only the Pacific or the Mediterranean.
Glad you are finally up again!Â
I am all for the cremation. A. The whole issue of claustrophobia wins over the fire issue. B. The zombie apocalypse. C. Generations have been sprinkled over the Atlantic ocean in spite of religion (see how deep it doesn’t run??) And none of that is logical, go figure 🙂
I’m glad to hear you may have figured out enough so that you can get back to writing!
One of the problems of hosting is that the technology situation opposes an effective, low cost, high volume approach. WordPress software was never designed to be a highly reliable, fault tolerant and extensible enterprise solution.
A killer blog hosting company would need a team of ninja WordPress code experts and that team would need to expand in correlation with increasing customers. Let’s say, three new team members (senior and junior programmer and technical CS support person ) for every 300 new customers. Or, put another way, that’s an annual operational cost increase of $240K (USD) or $80K with a six month lead time. All of which is doable and  profitable if they can charge a $100 set up fee and $60/month on a two year contract.
However, the market (me and you) is willing to pay about $10/month. Therefore, there is no ninja technical team to support our blog errors.