Being that this is a family friendly website, I don’t have the words to publicly describe the past 24 hours. To say it’s been a bit stressful would be an understatement.
In short, a couple of days ago, our server, hosted at serverbeach.com started to act flaky. Over three or four days, site performance slowed to a crawl, then finally gave up the ghost yesterday. We made a couple of requests to repair or replace the failing hard drive. These were never directly answered, instead we were told that the server had been restarted and appeared to be working. That was acceptable after it stopped once. Even after it stopped twice. But after the 4th restart the hosting company should have pulled the obviously faulty drive.
The drive was finally yanked yesterday. It took almost 24 hours for a new drive to be installed and properly configured. Every request for help would result in a 2 to 4 hour wait for a response. In 80% of the cases, the information in the responses was either incorrect or incomplete. We’d do as instructed, discover it didn’t work, then have to wait for another 2 to 4 hours for the original request to be fixed. The errors involved things like not plugging in the drive correctly, not installing the control panel software, and overwriting a bunch of files. These are very basic problems that would have been easily avoided if the tech people had taken a moment to test their work.
This didn’t just affect theblogstudio.com, but a number of our friends and client’s sites as well. To those folks I deeply apologize.
We’ve changed server companies, and so far are very impressed with mosso.com. Not only are they literally half the cost of serverbeach, they have actual human beings in tech support you can reach 24/7.
That’s it for now. I’ve got a couple of days worth of work to catch up on, and a beer somewhere calling my name…
Peter