yarbroughs dot org

When we last left our hero, he was swimming in a sea of unresponsiveness while a hostage situation was in progress with his data…

The events in this post take place between Thursday and Monday.

Thursday

I figured out that my friends were on the East coast.   My ticket was updated at about 4:11am Pacific, simply:  “What wordpress plugins do you use?”

Now, frankly, I saw red right then.  It’s been ten hours since I told them to move the data, and it’s been seven hours since I was told the move was in progress… and now we want to discuss my data?  What?  Really?  OK.  “Well, since I don’t have access to my data, it’s pretty impossible to remember everything, but here’s what I know is active right now.”  Provide a list, then I have to go to work.  Now, I have two offices in two buildings on two separate networks, with two separate sets of sysadmins.  I happened to be in the office with the more draconian system administrators, and was unable to check on anything, at all, while at work on Thursday.  So we skip to the end of the day…

I came home to a pleasant surprise, it had only taken them 40 minutes to respond to the ticket this time.  The simple response was to the effect of “We can turn your account back on, but you need to deactivate some of these plugins.  Wordpress is unfortunately poorly written and very resource intensive with lots of plugins.”  I disagree, but I think it’s a combination of wordpress being somewhat resource-intensive and inexpensive web hosts who “oversell” their servers — sell more accounts than a server could reasonably handle, under the assumption that not every account will receive heavy traffic simultaneously — it can be a “perfect storm” that can really caise problems if more than one account get traffic spikes.

Anyway, so the new offer is to deactivate some plugins and I get to keep the same server (reduced website functionality), or — wait for it — “we can upgrade your hosting to a business plan, which we really think you should do if you want to keep your blog running the way you want it to.”  Jesus, this again?

“Please proceed with unsuspending my account.  I will deactivate some plugins.”  Being no dummy, I went ahead and pinged billing via chat and told them to get tech support on it.  I was told 2 hours.  Keep in mind, I had decided Wednesday night to get a new host.  All I wanted was access to the data.  Data in crisis, hour 66!

Now, to their credit, they actually acted quickly enough.  The icing on this cake, though, is that they didn’t simply unsuspend my account, like they had offered to do; they went on and moved the data like they had originally told me they were doing.  Not really cool, considering that wasn’t what they had offered last, but at this point I had run out of feelings for them.  I had been doing my research all evening, found a hosting solution that should work for the next year, and was ready to run.  I made a full backup of everything, downloaded all the emails and mySQL databases I had out there, and got everything set up.

Friday

Simple… got the site back online, set up the email accounts, and sent a cancellation request to my old hosts.

Saturday and Sunday

Regaled you with tales from the dark side

Monday

Woke up Monday to the pat response to cancellation.  “We are sad to see you wish to cancel.  Please tell us what we can do to reconsider!”

My reply was short enough… “You took 66 hours to unsuspend my account.  You offered me a choice of two solutions, I picked one.  You then offered me another choice, and continued to try to up-sell me a business account for a simple blog and some picture hosting.  I took the third choice; then you went on and ignored that and went for my first choice.  All the while, my responses were ignored until I contacted billing and asked THEM to tell tech support to act.  And I never got a definition for ‘continuous excessive usage,’ specifically looking for a definition of ‘continuous.’  Please cancel my account and refund my money for unused time.”

I never expected a refund, nor will I get one.  Two hours later, the hostage situation finally ended.

I can’t say I had a bad experience overall with Webhostingbuzz, and the price is not bad.  I won’t tell you to avoid them like the plague, either.  I did not need support very often; however, when I needed them, they weren’t really there.  I’ll tell you to go with them, but only if you’re not running something PHP-intensive, like nearly any blogging application out there. 

I’m safe and secure now, in the hands of Bluehost (this is a referral link).  I don’t have the highest of expectations; maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.  I’m already putting wheels in motion for what I hope to be my final move, next year.  And I’m reminiscing about Blogomania, but that’s a different story.