Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

The fol­low­ing post was ori­gin­ally pub­lished over on a tem­por­ary blog at WordPress.com.

If you are see­ing this post, then you my friend have stumbled upon my tem­por­ary online home.

Shit, innit?

Not as shit though as the chronic tech­nical balls-up that has occurred over at my host­ing account.

As you will remem­ber from my post in Janu­ary, my host was doing some “upgrad­ing”. This “upgrade” involved server changes, a revamped busi­ness model with astro­nom­ical price plans, out-sourcing tech­nical sup­port to goodness-knows-where and decid­ing to scrap the slick, feature-filled cPanel in favour for a GUI so fuck­ing dire that someone with Degree-level IT and Web Devel­op­ment exper­i­ence (i.e. me) can’t even fathom it.

I have hos­ted my sites with this com­pany for 4 years and in pre­vi­ous posts have sung noth­ing but praises in regards to their Tech Sup­port. I found it amaz­ing that a com­pany with staff on the other side of entire oceans who should be clocked-off, eat­ing their din­ner or even in bed, would instead be answer­ing all man­ner of my eejit ques­tions in a timely fashion.

Now? Com­pletely gone to the dogs. Sup­port emails go unanswered for 14 hours and the replies given are as much use as an ash­tray on a speed­boat. It’s like they look at what I’ve said, choose to ignore my ques­tions and requests and just paste some stand­ard answer that is sort-of-related to the topic at hand.

On Fri­day after­noon, the con­nec­tion to my data­base was dropped sud­denly without warn­ing and without me doing ANYTHING to pro­voke it. The Sup­port Team (herein referred to as TST) accused me of chan­ging my data­base pass­word and gen­er­ally fid­dling with the con­fig file. I had done neither; #1 the con­fig file was the same as it ever was and #2 due to their diabol­ical new inter­face and the fact that they’ve now taken away even the most fun­da­mental of func­tion­al­ity, such as PHPAdmin, I’d be hard pushed to even know how to change my data­base password.

I repeat all of this to them, provide my con­fig file (at their request) and am told to do silly things like change the value LOCALHOST to their.dbserver.tld. WHY? If LOCALHOST worked on Fri­day morn­ing, but doesn’t work on Fri­day after­noon, doesn’t that mean that it’s because they have made changes, rather than me?

Then, a 301 “Per­man­ently Moved” error strikes up for no known reason. TST say it’s down to my domain for­ward­ing and that I don’t have it set-up cor­rectly. Again, stand­ard mes­sage, their ver­dict: my fault. It was set-up cor­rectly for over a year and I haven’t touched a. fuck­ing. thing. What is going on?

Basic­ally, the account I signed up for 4 years ago meant that I could have up to 5 “add-on domains” in addi­tion to my par­ent domain: 6 dif­fer­ent web­sites with 6 dif­fer­ent domains, unlim­ited sub­do­mains, under ONE account and ONE con­trol panel. Now due to the “upgrade”, each add-on domain and even each fuck­ing sub­do­main has to be signed into indi­vidu­ally into their own sub-par con­trol panel (as if each is a sep­ar­ate account) mean­ing that func­tion­al­ity is again lost and that get­ting these frag­men­ted parts of my account to com­mu­nic­ate with one another is a fuck­ing nightmare.

I can’t see for the life of me why Claire.NU is not work­ing, des­pite sign­ing into the Claire.NU domain and its cor­res­pond­ing sub­do­main on my par­ent account. All seem to be pointing/forwarding accord­ingly. After but­cher­ing some URLs and using a bit of trial and error, I man­age to get to my Word­Press install­a­tion, I can’t get to see the blog itself, but I can get to the Word­Press Admin Panel and log in. Victory.

From the WP Admin, I can see that all posts and com­ments pos­ted after their “upgrade” are gone. This works out as 3 pub­lished posts, 2 mam­moth drafts and some 2 dozen com­ments. I sup­pose this is my fault too, right?

I have gut feel­ing that this “upgrade” has either created/exposed some secur­ity holes and that there has been a breach or there’s been a hard­ware fail­ure and they’ve resor­ted to back-ups taken before the “upgrade” occurred. Either way, TST are cov­er­ing up and don’t seem to want to actu­ally offer any sup­port.

I expor­ted all my posts and com­ments and moved them over here for safe keep­ing, for now. I also updated the DNS so that http://claire.nu will even­tu­ally redir­ect to this tem­por­ary blog within the next 24-ish hours. This means that any images, sound files, links and all man­ner of other carry-on in past posts will break. I have them backed-up and will restore them all to their former work­ing glory as soon as I can take more per­man­ent measures.

I am going to double and triple-check my backed-up files, kiss good­bye to the data held in the data­bases I can’t get access to (old blogs, old ver­sions of past sites long since dead, noth­ing I will cry over). Then, I am going to can­cel my account. It is due for renewal in April, but they can go and swing if they think I’m sub­scrib­ing to more of this shit.

As of now, I am look­ing for a new host. I have no desire to pay newly obscene sums for a newly sub­stand­ard ser­vice only to be told I’ve actu­ally been “upgraded”. Bol­locks to that.

Do any of you have any recommendations?

I want some­thing with fairly decent amonut of room, plenty of band­width, (prefer­ably unlim­ited) MySQL data­bases, PHPAdmin, the abil­ity to cope with the latest incarn­a­tion of Word­Press and a good, clean, simple and com­pre­hens­ive con­trol panel (cPanel pre­ferred, but I can live without it if the altern­at­ive kicks ass). Also, I paid about $100 USD per year for my last plan and am look­ing to keep within the same sort of budget. Oh, and it needs bloody good sup­port too.

I tried read­ing reviews online, but people only seem to write those if they’ve had dire exper­i­ences and are vent­ing grudges and frus­tra­tions. I’d rather go on testi­mo­ni­als of blog friends whose opin­ions I trust and value.

I thank you for any views or recom­mend­a­tions you are will­ing to offer.