'hybrid moments'

so you heard about the first day the site was down. joyous.

i got to work on thursday, ready to throw that post up, only to find the site back down. work was busy, as is usually the case and it was lunchtime before i could afford to be on hold for any amount of time.

i got through, eventually, and was told 'i'm sorry sir, i'm very sorry, but we have no information from admins about when it will be back up, i'm sorry.'

telling this fine fellow that this was an unacceptable answer changed nothing and i quickly hung up. and began shopping for a new host for mog.

nick pointed me to a few places, i read a few lists, matthew offered a server at his work. in the end, i decided to go with a2 hosting. a decent price, an excellent set of features and local to san francisco.

i signed up. and as the afternoon ended, i called the old host back. and was on hold for about 47 minutes. and when the hold music stopped and i was about to speak to someone, i was cut off. i called back, was on hold for 15 minutes and then had to leave to catch the train.

here is a complication:
i was ready to move the site. but because mog was down, i couldn't get to the actual files. i could log into the site through ftp off and on. it meant i was logging in, grabbing a handful of files and then being kicked off — so i had to keep trying to log in until i got back in.

finally, on friday morning, i had all the files. and up they went on a2 and i moved the domain to point at the new host. friday afternoon, the site started showing up on the new servers for people.

meanwhile, i had called 1and1 (the old host) back. surprisingly, they had basically disconnected their phone system. seriously, the recorded message told me to try again later because of high call volumes and then disconnected me. and the site was still down. it had been 42 hours by then. from 30 minutes to 30 minutes to 24 hours to unknown. which had landed us here.

anyway, the 'new' site was showing up, so i stopped worrying as much. i did call back at the 48 hour mark. i was told: 1. the admins had been done, there was no clear reason my site wouldn't be working, 2. it would show up in no more than 12 hours from then — and that's when i could expect ftp to begin working again and 3. oh, wait. there was no 3.

never, in the entire process did someone offer me any sort of compensation. never did i get a straight answer, only apologies.

and when i got up on sat morning, a good 18 hours later, the site was still not working. though i did get email from csr's telling me the site was working. in broken english. and it wasn't working, because i checked. so i was wrong, they did get in touch with me. its just a shame that it turned out to be a lie.

so i made the right choice. but tons of my time was wasted. and it sucks. it sucks to move hosts, it sucks to not have a working site. cause there were plenty of things i wanted to post in the 3 days we were down. i didn't realize how badly i would miss the space.

but here we are and it's up and everything should be much better.

now nick has warned me that canceling a 1and1 account is a nightmare, so i look forward to closing out the account with them. but i figure i can deal with that next week, i don't need to be in a rush. and that will be an insane story itself.

so to summarize:
the server was turned off, admins did stuff, the site was down for close to 72 hours on their end. and i will never ever use them again. 1and1 can suck it.