A 'lil HooHaa

Messing with the blogging world since 2005

web host

When webhosting goes bad, one must move on

I don’t like to cover the same sort of topic too many times in a row because it can become super redundant.

But I feel after my shorter posts on Thursday and Friday, I needed to elaborate a little bit.

I divorced my last web host.

For as long as I can remember, my website(s) have been hosted by Webhostingbuzz. For years, they have been a good web host to me. If I remember right, I was one of the early adopters of the service and I saw it grow. I always felt like I was part of a cool family. The hosting was solid, the support was excellent and everything was great.

A few years ago, I saw a serious outage and some down time. That seemed to be a downward spiral of things to come.

In November 2011, apparently my site was hacked. And they had to use a backup from two days prior to put my site back up. I had to go through some old cache things to get back a few posts I lost. Little did I know that it would be just the beginning.

Please realize that it wasn’t all bad between then and now. But periodically, things would happen — such as in December 2011, when my account got suspended.

You see, they told me something happened and I was putting illegal things on the server. This, of course, was news to me.

Things were figured out. I was back online. We were good to go – until April 2012. That’s when I was again suspended for suspicious activity. This time, I blogged heavily about it and it drew a comment from the company’s then-CEO. After a few days, things were seemingly fixed and I was again on my way.

Oh, and during this whole time period, somewhere, I also saw a significant jump in my cost. However, after going back and forth, they did give me a lower cost and it was frozen at that price. So I will give kudos when deserved, too.

Over the next few years, I’d see some down time here and there, but it never seemed to be some massive crazy thing. Don’t get me wrong, there were prolonged ones and I know I was switched to different servers more than once, such as in October 2015. That time, though, killed my theme and made it so I needed to find a new theme. That’s great and all, but I was basically down for nearly 4-5 days because of things that were fully out of my control.

The issue here was I had just upped my 1-year deal again a few months before and didn’t want to lose it, so I stuck it out, like I normally do.

And then there’s this year.

Such as in June.

Or the meltdown in July (post 1 I post 2)

That was the final straw for me. A good price is great, but if you don’t get service with it, then … is it really a good price? To be fair, the customer support was usually OK. But they didn’t always have grade-A service.

Then when I got notice that my package was coming up for renewal, I knew it was time. That July setup was awful. More than two days down. And in the end, no real explanation or apology.

That, to me, is unacceptable.

So I did what any smart person would do – I divorced my web host. I wasn’t going to pay for another full year and then see things go all wonky again. It isn’t worth it.

Let’s put it this way, since JetPack (through WordPress) started monitoring my blog in about April 2015, I have had more than 75 known outages. Some were just for a few minutes, but others were much longer. Some were hours. More than a couple went nearly full days.

For a company that guaranteed 99.9 percent uptime … it didn’t work out.

And never did we get anything back. The normal “sorry for any inconvenience” was fine the first time or two, but then it got old. Never a “we’ll credit you an extra month” or something like that. There were always excuses.

But now I’m done.

Though Webhostingbuzz gave me the ability to have multiple domains, the reality is I didn’t utilize all my other domains. And I’m not sure when I will have time to develop them. I like my blog and that’s good for me right now. So, a few of my domains will point to that domain. Also, the reason I originally had hoohaablog.com was because I wanted to do more with hoohaa.com. Unfortunately that never happened, so when I made the switch of hosts – hoohaa.com became the main domain of this blog, which is fantastic.

The first part of my stay with Webhostingbuzz was positive and worked out well. The past few years? Not so much. I feel it was the right time for me to leave and wipe the slate clean.  I wouldn’t be able to recommend them to a friend anymore, that’s for sure. Instead, I move on and wipe my hands clean. I’m a very loyal person and tried to hang on as long as I could, but it was time.

The funny part is when I went to cancel my account, I finally got that “personal” apology for the downtime. The best, too, was when I was filling out the form and this part came up in regard to switching hosts:

Remember: WebHostingBuzz will work with you personally to resolve any concerns you have with your webhosting plan. Why should you bounce from host to host?

You shouldn’t, and that’s why we differ from the other hosting companies out there. We care about our clients. Please consider discussing any account issues with management, and we will work hard to be sure that you are happy.

Too little, too late.

My new hosts (SiteGround) moved my blog over to the new server and everything seems to be working well. I can’t complain as of now, but I hope this continues and I have a long and fruitful relationship with this company.

I realize that things happen in the technology world. I really do. But there are times when you have to just move on to somebody else who you believe understands things just a bit more. I believe I’ve done that and look forward to the future.

Feel free to leave a comment, or e-mail P.J. at hoohaablog@gmail.com. Also, please “Like” A ‘lil HooHaa on Facebook!

The rest of the hosting nightmare

It ended after more than two days.

Two-plus days.

For more than two days, my website(s) were down. The only updates were through the company blog, or if I went to the live chat help. And, honestly, those poor people were on the front line – taking the complaints and such but with nothing they could do.

It ended by this being posted on their emergency blog:

[UPDATE 10:42 EST JULY 7TH]

Most services are now back online and operational. There is still additional maintenance being performed to restore access to additional internal resources but this does not affect any public facing services. We are working individually with clients for issues unique to their environments in tickets. If you have any ongoing issues please feel free to reach out to us via ticket, or livechat at and we would be happy to assist you further.

Thank you for your patience with the issue and we apologize for the downtime.

[UPDATE 08:26 EST JULY 7TH]

Hardware issues have been resolved. Nameservers will be operational shortly and sites will start resolving over the next couple of hours.

We thank you again for your patience during these issues. We will update this post again when we have full functionality restored.

[UPDATE 01:10 EST JULY 7TH]

We are still awaiting for nameservers to come online. Our technicians are on the site and working to get the servers up as soon as possible.

We would like to thank all our clients for their patience during this emergency maintenance.

And that was it. Those three posts were the final updates customers got. To my knowledge, there hasn’t been a blanket e-mail with a short explanation and another apology. There hasn’t been an offer of anything else – such as a free month and such. I know from the chatter on Twitter (the few people I saw talking about this) that there are some angry people (rightfully so) who used this hosting as part of a business etc.

That’s where this is all unacceptable.

Amazingly, I remained calm through it all. I knew there wasn’t anything I could do. I took the time to start looking for new webhosting (I think I found the company I am interested in using) and just realized there was nothing I could do about this at the time.

So, I think it’s time for a breakup. Despite being a customer with this company for more than 10 years (I think I’ve been with them since 2003/2004), my disappointment and worry just really takes over here. Things like this happen too often. And though I don’t make money off my site, I do challenges and other things that doesn’t work with having any issues.

The company can promise all they want it won’t happen again, but this is the second time this year that I’ve been down for a day or longer. That, to me, is unacceptable.

I don’t want to leave. It’s going to be a pain to deal with, but thankfully I don’t have to rush as it’s not like my account is coming up too soon. It still has a few months. I’ve given this company many tries and such, and there is a time when things just have to come to an end and I believe this is likely the time.

Feel free to leave a comment, or e-mail P.J. at hoohaablog@gmail.com. Also, please Like HooHaa Blog on Facebook!

When your web host keeps blowing it

(backdating to July 5. My webhost blew it big time — I’ve been down 2+ days. This post was written and ready… so not losing my streak because of them. I’ll have more detail in another post… this was before I got back up)

Disappointment.

That’s about the one word I can use to express my thoughts over the website issues I’ve had the past couple of days.

Look, I fully understand things happen. Apparently, what happened with the company that hosts my website is a massive failure of something.  I don’t truly understand techspeak that well, so I’m not exactly sure.

But at some point Tuesday, my site went down.

This is what was posted on their blog at 11:13 Tuesday:

Our hardware SAN in our cloud environment has failed unexpectedly. Replacement hardware has been emergency rush ordered from the vendor to replace this, however the current ETA is next day delivery at best. We are working on alternative solutions in the mean time to restore services. I apologize about the downtime you are experiencing.

I don’t understand what all that is, but the reality is … it’s something not good. That I get. I also realize things happen with technology.

I think what bothers me is the updates kept saying that they’ll be working to make sure our websites were up before the next day. And with a series of updates, it seems they were working that way.

At 12:29, it was posted that a temporary solution was going to be put in place – details to follow.

At 13:09, this was posted:

DNS modifications have been made and we are waiting for registration and propagation time. Domains will be resolving normally shortly.

A little more than an hour later, they posted they were waiting for DNS propagation. And that they’d update in an hour – which they did.

In that update, they said they did an emergency change to the Nameserver and customer’s domains should be resolving now or in the near future, as it clears a local ISP.

It never has seemed to work for me.

On the plus side, the new hardware is going to be arriving by noon on Wednesday, according to this update. Maybe sometime in the afternoon – after more than 24 hours down (tell me if we’ve heard this story before) – my site might actually be back up.

At 18:05, an update was posted saying things are still propagating and users should continue to have sites come up as DNS cache clears. They are spot checking some individual issues, apparently, to resolve things manually.

They said all pages will be available after the full hardware restore, but most should be back well before then (apparently mine isn’t one of them).

The last update came at 23:40 on July 5. Guess what? The DNS is still propagating and it will take some time for it to complete. New information will follow as soon as possible …

There have been a few updates, since. For one, they missed the noon deadline because severe weather apparently slowed the delivery, so they didn’t get going until like 1:40. Well, that’s when it arrived and it had to go through security and all that.

Note: My site(s) apparently weren’t on the ones that propagated as it’s still down. I don’t know if any other sites are actually up as I saw the twitter account for the company responded to a few people about things – and those sites were down.

This is well over 24 hours, though.

As I noted, I understand things happen. It’s technology. Nothing is perfect. Hardware failures happen. But for a company that promises 99.9 percent uptime, there have been numerous times something has happened that has caused my site to be down for an extended period of time. One of these days, I’m going to go through my past e-mails and see all the downtime I’ve experienced (Through WordPress, I get updates if my site is up or down).

I like what I get from this web host. I like the prices. And I’ve been with them forever and very loyal. But sometimes I wonder if it’s time to move on. I know I’ve said it before and then I stick it out. There’s the loyal customer in me. But apologies can only go so far. They need to start upping things a little more. For me, it’s a personal blog and isn’t income. But I imagine there are people who make money off their websites and this might adversely affect them.

Hopefully, I’ll get to post this before my site is fully down on July 6. We’ll see, of course.

There have to be plans in place for things if they happen. You can’t have your main business be down for more than 24 hours. If I was a company that relied on my website and this happened, I’d be leaving as soon as the site was back up and I could access everything. I wouldn’t even think twice because this could cost a company serious money.

I have looked around for a new host, though. It appears everything is pretty simple to move my WordPress blog to another host. Then I’d have until the end of my current deal with the current host to get anything else from other websites off the servers and call it good.

Feel free to leave a comment, or e-mail P.J. at hoohaablog@gmail.com. Also, please Like HooHaa Blog on Facebook!

Website issues are always fun

This is getting silly again.

There are times I can’t access my own website. Turns out it’s up for others, but for me – not always. I was told by my hosting company that they changed DNS servers and I needed to change them.

No problem. I changed them. Things seemed to be OK.

Then, it keeps happening. I’d say it was because of maybe where I access it sometimes. But I access my site in many different places over the course of a week. And when I can’t get it on my phone or elsewhere – and had been able to do so an hour or two earlier, that doesn’t jive with me.

It also gets annoying for if I need or want to fix something on the fly.

Alas, the answers I get back are just superficial things.

I honestly don’t want to change hosts. It’s a pain in the rear, especially with everything I have going on where I am. But it’s starting to get to the point where I need to think about it. I mean, if I can’t access my site when I need or want to – what’s the point?

Why is it so hard to have decent service at all times?

I need to figure out when my hosting package expires so I can plot and think about if I want to move to elsewhere. It’s just getting to the point where it’s silly.

Feel free to leave a comment, or e-mail P.J. at hoohaablog@gmail.com. Also, please “Like” HooHaa Blog on Facebook!

Notes from my Noodle: August 30 edition

It’s good to be back and have no worried about hosting issues…

For that last line to make sense, let me go backwards and tell the whole story.

When I post something to my blog, I have an application that automatically posts it to my Facebook wall as well as the wall for this blog (please hit the like button on the right side of the page! Shameless plug, I know!) When I have posts written ahead of time, the application still works.

I had Sunday’s post ready to go at like noon and it never posted to my Facebook wall. That seemed odd to me. So, I thought I might have put the wrong time in and I went to check my blog out.

I was greeted with a mainly white screen and these words…

“Bandwidth Limit Exceeded” (in large, bold typeface).

“The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.”

As you can imagine, I was shocked. I had never reached the limit before. It was several days before the end of the month and I didn’t want to wait it out. I needed to figure something out and fast. One think I’ve thankfully seen is a small growth in the number of visitors who come to my site. When I started doing this on a more regular basis, I would celebrate 20 or 25 visits. I’ve since grown and have seen that number go up by quite a bit, which is nice.

So the last thing I wanted was new readers to come and see that.

Panic mode set in, but after a few deep breaths, away I went to figure this out.

I went to the live chat with my host and discussed possibilities.

Let me say this — I have been with this host company since it was in its infancy. My price plan was excellent because I had done many things back then to get some special perks — such as unlimited add on domains etc. That was their way of saying thank you for writing reviews and such. The company has been excellent to deal with for more than 10 years, so I figured we could work something out.

The person that I chatted said he or she understood my loyalty, but the hands were tied. They couldn’t do partial upgrades. The reality was, I only needed some extra bandwidth. I didn’t need full upgrades.

The bandwidth increase with their basic package would have been way more than I needed. But it took away a lot of what I had earned and apparently the company couldn’t do anything about that. This person kept insisting I needed to upgrade to the “Silver package,” but didn’t understand that I couldn’t afford that big of an upgrade (to be fair, the price isn’t bad… but I didn’t need everything it offered) and I didn’t think it was fair that I had to pay for things I had been rewarded in the past, just to get an upgrade of bandwidth.

After 30 minutes of this, I decided it was going no where, ended the conversation and took it to support.

Tech support was much better to deal with, as they always are. They sent me to billing and the person there understood what I was saying. This person apologized that the company had the policy and he couldn’t do anything about it. That still meant for me to keep everything I had already, I needed to go to the silver package.

Argh!

Alas, this got better as the person I was dealing with offered me a loyalty discount of 30 percent, which brought the price down to almost the basic package. I was also told that price would remain with me. In the end, I decided to accept that offer and my site was soon back online. It also gives my site the ability to really grow as the bandwidth allowed is incredibly more than I had before. Let’s say this, I was on a plan that allowed 3.5 gigs of bandwidth per month and for the first time ever, I went over that. This new plan now allows 15,000 gigs of bandwidth per month. Yeah.

In the end, this host came through again. I have another host that doesn’t have a lot of bandwidth on it with one of my other sites. Though I don’t update that much, it has gone over bandwidth the past couple of months (that one is even lower than the 3.5), so I think I will be canceling that account and bringing that site to this account with the added bandwidth I now have. In the end, I’ll be breaking even on the price for the most part.

***

I'm going to miss covering football on nights like this.

Labor Day weekend is upon us.

In the past, that usually meant I was prepping for the high school football season. Previews needed to be written. Schedules and rosters typed in and proofed. Special sections needed to be done and then there’s the rush of the season. Friday night games with 30 minutes to write a story. Those things I will miss.

Since being laid off in February, this was the time of the year that I wondered how I’d feel. And it stinks. I always looked forward to high school football season and it was one of my favorite beats.

I still plan on going and shooting some photos. Maybe I can freelance for another paper or two. We’ll see. But it will be odd knowing I don’t have to go to a game. Or that I can just go to any game I feel like going to. That’s going to be one perk for sure. If I feel like watching this game over another, I can just head over and do so.

I will say this — I won’t miss the games where I’m standing under a downpour on a really cold Friday night. That’s what radios are for!

***

The waiting game in the job hunt is the worst.

I had a phone interview a few weeks ago for a job that I would love to have. It would be one of those where I think I could make it a career and be happy as can be. I’m not sure how the interview went. Unfortunately, though I thought I was very prepared, a couple of questions caught me off guard. I’m hoping I didn’t ramble too much or give bad answers as I think if I got an in-person interview, I could do really well.

I keep hoping and waiting, so we’ll see.

In the meantime, I keep the job search going and hope for the best. It’s a tough market out there and it keeps getting tougher. I am not sure what I need to do to secure good employment. So goes for that master’s degree really doing wonders for me.

I did send something else out today, so let’s see what happens. I’ll keep pushing along.

***

I’ve been having a good time with the blog as it’s been a way for me to keep writing and such. As it grows in size, however, I know I have to start doing some other things with it. I am working on some features and some journalistic-style things to have soon. I want to do a few series of stories on some things that I have been slowly trying to figure out. I have contacted a few people for each subject, so hopefully it will work out well in those parts. These series of stories, if done the way I have envisioned, will be posted in several installments over a few days.

I’m also working on making the HooHaa 9 stories a weekly thing until I fill the team (and likely keep going). But before I start releasing them, I want to have a couple written so I can be working ahead. Therefore, those probably won’t start until a week or two after Labor Day. There is, of course, the weekly Snapshot Saturday. I don’t want each day to have a “set item” as I do still like having the freedom to write about whatever. But I will be having two or three “set things” for a few days per week.

I have some other ideas for contests and such that I want to start running, so as soon as I get those figured out, I will post them as well.

If you have any good ideas for some topics I can blog about, or a series of stories I could work on, please let me know. Drop a comment or send an e-mail. I’m not looking to break news, rather I’m looking to show a different slice of life.

***

I made a booboo with Postcrossing.

I have wondered why none of the 10 or so postcards I sent recently had arrived at their locations. Well, it turns out I had forgot to send them. Ugh! They have been sitting here on my computer desk, covered by a few other papers and notebooks. I will be getting these out ASAP so they can get to where they need to be!

I have a good pile of postcards here, too. I need to start scanning them and doing some blog posts about them. There are some really wild looking cards and some nice stamps, too.

For those of you who haven’t heard of or have never tried Postcrossing, I highly encourage it.

Feel free to leave a comment, or e-mail P.J. at hoohaablog [at] gmail.com. Also, please “Like” HooHaa Blog on Facebook by clicking the button on the right side of the page!