The Long & Winding Road of Web Hosting

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:

1. Old hosting company breaks up with me for undisclosed technical issues.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.”