Y'know … I hate web hosts. I really do.
Feel free to stalk our every post with the f*cking c*nts RSS feed, subscribe to f-ckingc-nts.com by email, follow our new posts and random comments on Twitter, or become a fan on facebook. Go on. You know you want to! All the cool kids are doing it ...
You sign up with a hosting service for your website (or your half-dozen websites, or what have you). They offer some spectacular uptime guarantee. Your friends say they've never had any problems with their service. Their response time when I need an upgrade or have an isolated problem with my account is fantastic. But when they have an outage, it all goes to hell. They make a little post on their company blog, and then fail to update it, or answer any requests for more information, or really do anything whatsoever. It's like they go blind, deaf and dumb as soon as there's a problem.
In the past three years, they've had three major outages … not once have they credited me a month's fees for breaking their uptime guarantee, or done anything else as a "hey, sorry, here's how we'd like to make it up to you" gesture. The rest of the time, sure, they're great. Love 'em. Have recommended them to lots of people. But FOR FUCK'S SAKE, if there's ANY time you ought to be keeping people well informed, it's when there's a fucking problem! Don't post a message on your blog saying everything should be fixed in 20 minutes, and then update it two hours later, saying "Hey, some of the problems are fixed, but some of 'em aren't, so we're still working on it." That is not helpful. We KNOW you're working on it … we want to know what "IT" is, and how soon you think it will be fixed. And if it's not fixed in time, we want a fucking UPDATE on the repair status.
I really don't think that's too much to ask.
So, I'm shopping for a new host. I'll keep my cheapo account at the old company for my low-traffic sites and random crap, but f-ckingc-nts needs something better methinks. Bye-bye Dreamhost, hello pair.com … the site should be moved in a day or two.
Sounds like typical web bullshit. You have the same problems with internet service providers. I used to have a problem with bot my computers coming up "network cable unplugged"
I spent hours on the phone with tech support numerous times until I got one guy that said "that's the weirdest shit I have ever heard of." The problem mysteriously cleared up a couple days later. We have 2 computers running off a wired router. We even had the problem when we plugged the modem straight into either computer. Same shit different company.
25th March 2008 at 8:51 pm | permalink |that explains the outage a couple days ago when trying to read the china olympics post, it kept loading a blank page for two days.
25th March 2008 at 9:50 pm | permalink |@jim: Yeah, I had a dialup account go down once. I spent a total of about three hours on the phone with support, was told it was my modem (nope, works fine), and never got a callback. I switched ISPs too. ;-)
@wolfdog: Yeah, there was a planned outage Friday night, through Saturday morning. That was very unthrilling too … they announced it on their blog, but didn't think it was worth shooting an email to any of the affected account holders.
25th March 2008 at 10:22 pm | permalink |Yes I know the situation well. My hosting service once lost my whole website and it's forum as well… Since I didn't have backup all was lost on the forum and it never recuperated. I still keep them as my hosting service as my host (as I have too much stuff to takeover) but I'm keeping backups now and using an uptime web utility to check that my sites don't stay down.
26th March 2008 at 12:12 am | permalink |@fabrulana: Yeah, I'm not sure what I'm going to do there. They're fine for most of my sites … nothing critical or hugely popular on them. But for my email service and this site? Yeesh.
26th March 2008 at 12:45 am | permalink |Oh that explains why it was blank yesterday, well I am pleased, my family too (yes of course I encourage my sons to read here, plus my dad) that you did not go for good. Nocturna / Lunatica - forever addicted to f*cking c*nts!
26th March 2008 at 1:35 am | permalink |@nocturna: LOL … the whole family? Hooray! :-) Yeah, I'm not planning on going anywhere. What I want to set up now is a failsafe system that will redirect to a mirror of the site if my new host has any downtime. But my employer's site has been hosted at pair.com for almost 8 years now, and I only remember two downtime issues that were actually their fault, so we should be good once I switch over.
26th March 2008 at 1:53 am | permalink |I have a rackspace.com machine and at one point they had some sort of melt down at their noc, yet my machine was completely uneffected. Yet I got about a thousand fucking emails daily updating me on something I whole heartedly didn't care about. It was really odd to get updates on an outage I wasn't experiencing, I guess over all being to verbose is better than becoming mute.
I'm just happy my machine didn't go down, my users like to flip the fuck out when that happens.
26th March 2008 at 9:57 am | permalink |I had Dreamhost for years with no problem. So when the company I work IT for were looking for a hosting company for our sites and email I convinced them to go with DH. No sooner do we finish getting everything migrated over, there service goes to shit. I do not think a week goes by without some sort of disruption.
26th March 2008 at 10:12 am | permalink |@undead charles: I've heard good things about rackspace, but I don't think I really *need* a dedicated machine at this point. But yeah, nice to know if I ever do go that route, they're good with customer communication!
@eric: The friend who recommended me had never had any problems, but the week I first signed up, they had a total meltdown. If that was the only one, I'd still be a satisfied customer …
26th March 2008 at 2:09 pm | permalink |