Site hosting update, March 2007

[jwedehase]

Since everyone's curious as to what happened, and so Jeremy doesn't take all the heat:

The reason the site isn't up at this time is because of the company who's hosting our site. At this time, our site is hosted by godaddy.com, because they're cheap and offer a lot of bandwidth. For the last 3 years, we've lived on Whodah's server, and he's always hosted for free, so there are many things we've taken for granted... like paying the bills.

We decided to pay for this new host month-by-month, to see how well they'd work out for us. Apparently, they have an odd billing setup, and tried to make phone contact with Stoker two weeks ago. Their records show a "failed contact." No other contact was attempted, as far as we can tell. So... "2 weeks delinquent," (though it wasn't actually delinquent until March 1) they simply shut off the site. However, instead of just closing access and waiting for a response, they actually delete the entire site from the server, and re-assign the server to someone else.

34 hours ago, we were told it would be back up in 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, we called to see what was up, and we were told "Oh, no way! It will take 4 hours!" We called after 4 hours, and they claimed someone didn't know what they were talking about, and it would take 24 hours, which is now. I just called again, to see what's up, and was told "Oh, you have a dedicated account, not a shared account. It will be 2-4 days, because we have to re-install the server from a tape backup." When they get the site back up, it will look like whatever it did the last time they happened to back it up, which could be a couple weeks ago.

Are you kidding me?! TAPE BACKUP?! How about... you simply close access to the site to see if we respond? Apparently, it's godaddy's business practice to simply wipe the server clean as the first step.

Obviously, I'm not happy with godaddy.com's "service." I'm very disappointed that we never got any sort of warning, or even a second attempted contact. Stoker's called me several times, extremely upset with himself for not paying and with godaddy for such drastic action. He offers all the apologies he can.

Right now, we're dead in the water until we come up on the "first come, first served" list, which is 2-4 days. We've considered moving to another server with less of a monopoly on hosting, but that would take 2 days, anyway. We'll still consider that action once the site is back up and returned to 100% of what it used to be a month ago.



Thank you for all your patience, and we're really sorry about such a silly mistake and what a wide-spread nuisance our host turned it into.

- Jason
"Sherman"