Well, here goes...
Back in January 2001 a local company wanted an Internet presence so they called me in as a consultant and designer. We got everything up, running, and tested, and the site went public in February.
The site was working great, and began getting quite a few hits from local residents of this ever so lovely area, pronounced mud-hole... Quite a few hits for this area is about 500 per day, but in a non-technology enhanced area that is pretty good.
We had a lot of local business owners asking about both banner advertisement on the site and single page advertisement describing their business.
A few people signed up for banner advertisement, and at least 10 others were interested and had meetings scheduled to discuss plans.
Suddenly, on 20 June, we check the site at the start of the business day, and there was a mySQL error stating that the mySQL server could not authenticate the user.
I instantly picked up the phone and called the hosting company, pressed 2 for technical support and was greeted with the lovely message "At this time, technical support will not be accepting telephone inquiries."
After a few profane words, I decided to e-mail support. I sent them a cordial e-mail explaining the problem and asked if they could look into matters quickly. About an hour later, a message came back stating that they had to forward the message to a level 2 tech and should be back with us shortly...
Three hours later I called back and pressed 0 for an operator. I was not as cordial on the phone, as two of our banner partners decided to drop service. The operator connected me with technical support directly and I spoke to a technician who sounded as if he was 15.
The technician stated again that he would get with his superior and call back within an hour. Thirty minutes later, he called back and said "we fixed it, everything works fine now."
We pulled up the main page in IE, and it displayed correctly, so we thought nothing about it.
Later that evening we went to check the site and found out that a large portion of the dtatbase was corrupted. I immediately "dropped" the database, added the database, and attempted to re-create the data rapidly. Needless to say, months of information can not be re-created as fast as it needed to be so we lost all local affiliates, as well as lost face in the area as visionaries with an Internet Presence.
You need to realize that this are believes that an Internet Presence is just a fad and a waste of time. Of course, remember, this is coming from people that shop almost weekly online at the same "fads."
The next morning, I made another call to Hostway and after a lot of complaining was able to get a technician. The technician kindly informed me that they "do not make back-ups of their sites." I informed him that the plan that we had signed up for stated clearly that there was a daily back-up. He said it was a mis-print.
Needless to say, myself as well as the company that I was contracted to work for are both in the process of raising that roof at Hostway, and hope that they can "find" a site backup.
I know, I should have made back-ups, and did contact the company back in February asking that they set up a cron to dump the database on a weekly basis to the home directory, however they must not have had the time... The site itself is not the problem as it is very easy to re-create and can be back up within an hour. The problem is the database. If the database server was on the same machine as the site, I could have simply telnetted in and dumped the database myself. However it was on a remote machine with all addresses denied except those on the machines at their company.
Does anyone have a suggestion of any decent hosting companies to move to that offer php/mySQL as well as a decent uptime, daily backups with a monthly rotation, and pop/smtp mail?
-=Update=-
Well, I finally got a robot in their sales department that kept stating that their support team does not touch users files. He was able to "find" backups of the site, and began the restore... Then stated that oh, there is a $99.00 charge for restoring from backup.
I do believe that I will be making a call to the credit card company and letting them know that not only do I wish to refute the current charge, but also any charge to hostway as they did not provide the servie that they advertised.
Back in January 2001 a local company wanted an Internet presence so they called me in as a consultant and designer. We got everything up, running, and tested, and the site went public in February.
The site was working great, and began getting quite a few hits from local residents of this ever so lovely area, pronounced mud-hole... Quite a few hits for this area is about 500 per day, but in a non-technology enhanced area that is pretty good.
We had a lot of local business owners asking about both banner advertisement on the site and single page advertisement describing their business.
A few people signed up for banner advertisement, and at least 10 others were interested and had meetings scheduled to discuss plans.
Suddenly, on 20 June, we check the site at the start of the business day, and there was a mySQL error stating that the mySQL server could not authenticate the user.
I instantly picked up the phone and called the hosting company, pressed 2 for technical support and was greeted with the lovely message "At this time, technical support will not be accepting telephone inquiries."
After a few profane words, I decided to e-mail support. I sent them a cordial e-mail explaining the problem and asked if they could look into matters quickly. About an hour later, a message came back stating that they had to forward the message to a level 2 tech and should be back with us shortly...
Three hours later I called back and pressed 0 for an operator. I was not as cordial on the phone, as two of our banner partners decided to drop service. The operator connected me with technical support directly and I spoke to a technician who sounded as if he was 15.
The technician stated again that he would get with his superior and call back within an hour. Thirty minutes later, he called back and said "we fixed it, everything works fine now."
We pulled up the main page in IE, and it displayed correctly, so we thought nothing about it.
Later that evening we went to check the site and found out that a large portion of the dtatbase was corrupted. I immediately "dropped" the database, added the database, and attempted to re-create the data rapidly. Needless to say, months of information can not be re-created as fast as it needed to be so we lost all local affiliates, as well as lost face in the area as visionaries with an Internet Presence.
You need to realize that this are believes that an Internet Presence is just a fad and a waste of time. Of course, remember, this is coming from people that shop almost weekly online at the same "fads."
The next morning, I made another call to Hostway and after a lot of complaining was able to get a technician. The technician kindly informed me that they "do not make back-ups of their sites." I informed him that the plan that we had signed up for stated clearly that there was a daily back-up. He said it was a mis-print.
Needless to say, myself as well as the company that I was contracted to work for are both in the process of raising that roof at Hostway, and hope that they can "find" a site backup.
I know, I should have made back-ups, and did contact the company back in February asking that they set up a cron to dump the database on a weekly basis to the home directory, however they must not have had the time... The site itself is not the problem as it is very easy to re-create and can be back up within an hour. The problem is the database. If the database server was on the same machine as the site, I could have simply telnetted in and dumped the database myself. However it was on a remote machine with all addresses denied except those on the machines at their company.
Does anyone have a suggestion of any decent hosting companies to move to that offer php/mySQL as well as a decent uptime, daily backups with a monthly rotation, and pop/smtp mail?
-=Update=-
Well, I finally got a robot in their sales department that kept stating that their support team does not touch users files. He was able to "find" backups of the site, and began the restore... Then stated that oh, there is a $99.00 charge for restoring from backup.
I do believe that I will be making a call to the credit card company and letting them know that not only do I wish to refute the current charge, but also any charge to hostway as they did not provide the servie that they advertised.
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