Hiatus

Yesterday morning friends began emailing me that my blogs, this one and informl.com, were down. I called my ISP’s tech support. A fellow told me they were aware of the problem: the control panel server was down. This apparently severed the connection between my blogs and their MySQL databases. Not to worry, they expected to be back up in a hour.

Four hours later I called again. They didn’t know what the problem was. The guy wrote an incident ticket. I took down the number.

Last night, site still down and no email from support, I clicked into “Live Chat.”

Ulises A.: This is an issue with the software and configuration itself. WordPress is a third party product which we do not provide direct support for. You will need to refer to wordpress developers for further assistance. I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

jay: Don’t go quite yet.
jay: This has worked perfectly until now. I am not requesting WordPress support. I’ve missed several thousand visitors today. I don’t really think you want to blow this off too casually.
jay: My request is that you folks return your system to the state it was in yesterday.

(Full transcript of chat session here.)

My blogs reappeared this morning. No explanation from the ISP. No email received.

When my wife, a computer novice, asks me why her email account has gone goofy, I tell her that’s life in a complex world. Stuff happens.

“Support” reps who blow off customers with bullshit answers (e.g. This is your problem, not ours) will be outed. It’s not a good idea to lie when you’re in a fishbowl. My ISP would be better served by telling me “Stuff happens,” and endeavoring to fix the problem.

Can anyone recommend an honest ISP? I need someone savvy enough to help me transfer three MySQL databases and a couple of gigs of web pages.

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