yarbroughs dot org

This was written on Wednesday evening.

Wednesday

This part is thankfully much shorter, though it’s not sweeter [note: It didn't turn out to be very much shorter, really]. At the exact time I write this sentence (8:42 pm Wednesday) I have had an epiphany.

I noted in one of the final paragraphs of Tuesday that I had replied to their support ticket at 5:20 PM, asking for clarification. Now, remember, the ticket was marked “urgent…” and THEY had opened the urgent ticket. It was so urgent that as of 12:43 PM Wednesday they still didn’t respond. So, with all urgency, I re-commented the ticket and went into “Live Chat” with a sales rep who let tech support know that this needed to be looked at.

The reply is… less than stellar. They claim I’m doing something resource-intensive by nature. Folks, I have a wordpress blog, image hosting, and email for precisely 1 account (my own). That’s it. Now, I know wordpress can sometimes, under certain circumstances, cause server overloads having to do with php. I know that php is the cause of my problem. What I don’t know is how long this has been happening. My account was suspended for “continuous excessive resource usage.” This is vague. I am not crazy about the description, especially since I have not modified the system in several weeks… is that how long this was going on? No one can tell me.

Now, back to where we were… the reply. My options are:

Upgrade to a business plan. Oh, no… that price is roughly 12 times what I’m paying for right now, at the cheapest. And here’s interesting side note #1: I would actually LOSE disk space and bandwidth to go with the cheapest business package. They tried to sell me a biz plan, and I said no, no, no.

Move to, their exact quote, “a special ‘high resource’ server, your hosting plan and pricing will remain unchanged (note - this is not a high-end server, it’s specially intended for customers with resource-intensive accounts who cannot afford hosting plan upgrade, so smooth site operation isn’t guaranteed).”

My first reply back was “tell me what went wrong, so I can fix it.” That went unanswered. I started thinking after work, though, and decided to log in via FTP and look at timestamps on some particular files to determine when I actually did mess with things last.

Um, no. They suspended my entire account. Website, Email, Control Panel, and FTP. Those FUCKERS. (yep, I said it.)

There was my epiphany: My whole site was being held hostage. The likely answer to the question “Why?” - they need the server I’m on for something else? Maybe. So for me, it was put up or shut up; I couldn’t get into my files and see if there was an offender, and I couldn’t get a straight answer (or much of one at all, really) as to how to fix the problem without moving things.

It was then that I got mad. I wrote back at 6:43 PM, cancelling my last inquiry and told them to move me to the special “high resource” server. The plan at this point was to get the site online, post a note for you to “stand by for updates,” back up EVERYTHING, and move. As of the time I wrote this, I had 3 good candidates for a new home, and a determination that only hardened with each second that my site was not back online. Not just the site, either, it’s my main email account that’s been frozen here.

At 9:28 PM, I got online with that sales chat type person and nudged them about the support ticket. Their very short reply was “Billing is doing the moving to the new server, please wait for their reply.” (WTF? Billing? Really? OK…) I quickly thanked the person at the other end of chat, and closed the window. This concluded my day with them, as getting overly agitated gets me tired quickly.

OK, so this post was nearly as long as the other one. We still have Thursday to go, and I haven’t really written it yet. The story is ALMOST over, but I’m kinda wanting to hold off until it’s completely done. Stay tuned for it.