Changes in the Digital Wind
Entry posted by Flack
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My problems began last month on a Saturday with a simple e-mail error. "Mail server not responding."
If you stop and think about the Internet, it's pretty amazing that it works at all. I mean, to get an e-mail from one place to another it has to hop across several routes. Each of these routes include switches, routers, servers and Internet connections, all of which must be up, functioning, and correctly configured. Your single piece of electronic mail may bounce through a dozen or so of these stops, and the speed in which this happens is measured in milliseconds. When I begin to think of all the things that could go wrong between point A and point B, I'm surprised that the Internet works as well as it does. This is a long-winded way to say that when my mail server quit responding temporarily, I didn't become too concerned.
Later that day when my website went offline as welll, mental alarms began clanging. After being offline for two days, I tried calling my hosting company. I got a voice mail message that said, "we are not currently accepting incoming calls. Leave us a message and we will call you back." This does not bode well. I left a message. No one called me back. Things were going from bad to worse.
The following Tuesday, four days after the initial outage, I finally received an e-mail from the company. The e-mail stated that their old webserver was old and running Windows and that their new webserver was new and running Linux. So you know, part of me found it hard to be too miffed over the outage, but a heads up before four days of no website and no e-mail would have been nice.
Unfortunately, this was just the beginning.
After the new server came online I got an e-mail from the new administrator. The new administrator told us all how glad he was to have our business and how excited he was to be working with us. If working with me excited him then he must've been real excited for a week and a half because that's how long it took to iron out all the problems they introduced into my world. First, I had to go to all my domains (seven) and update the name servers. No biggie there. After doing that, Wordpress (the "engine" that runs my blog) quit working. Oops! They hadn't given me rights to my own database -- that took another day to fix. There were several other hiccups along the way. For example, the new server which runs Linux is case-sensitive. The old Windows server wasn't. That means "pic.jpg", "Pic.jpg" and "pic.Jpg" are three different files. That caused a lot of stuff to break. Some stuff, I never did get working. My old file search engine I wrote is still broken. I don't know what's wrong with it.
Somewhere in the middle of all of this, I was sent an electronic bill for my hosting. That's when I discovered my hosting fees had QUADRUPLED. Yes. I would now be paying 4x what I was paying. After e-mailing the new administrator (I'll bet he was excited!) I informed him of my old rate. He said he would meet me halfway, which he felt was fair, and which meant my rate would "only" be doubling. And while it's still a decent rate, it's kind of like someone telling you they're about to break two of your fingers, and then trying to get happy when you find out they're only going to break one.
The icing on the cake came last week when, out of the blue, I quit receiving e-mail. No error, no nothing, just no e-mail. After doing some troubleshooting I realized that the old mail server had been moved. After figuring THAT out on my own and setting up a new account, I was rewarded with 1,723 incoming messages. Yeah, that took a while. Frustrated over multiple problems and the increase in fees I decided to make some calls. One of those calls was to Cox Cable's Business Internet Division. Turns out, for about the same price as hosting seven domains elsewhere, I can have my home Internet upgraded to a business account, and run everything from the house. One fringe benefit to this is that my home Internet connection will double in speed -- plus, I'll be able to host seven, seventeen, seventy or seven-hundred websites for the same price.
So calls were made, paperwork was filled out, and a date was set. Tomorrow, robohara.com will be moving to it's new home -- *my* home. Although the average web visitor won't notice the change, there's something about this migration that seems exciting to me; something about people pointing their browsers to a website and ending up in my home that seems kind of techy, kind of neat. I've run websites at my house before, but nothing on this scale. I'm kind of looking forward to it in my own geeky way.
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