I’m taking a wee pause from the travel and expat posts to seethe publicly about technology, namely outages on my web host’s servers that have been taking down my five websites on a too-frequent basis lately. It’s been happening sporadically but the frequency is steadily rising. You may have noticed it already or been lucky that you haven’t yet. It’s a consumer problem for which moving hosts seems to be the simplest of solutions… or, is it?
Just like moving in real life, making a digital move of domains and content is all kinds of hassle. Plus, no web host is immune from server issues and thus it’s somewhat of a time/expense gamble to move, only to find out the green is not greener on the other side. And, while I’m tossing metaphors around, I’m on the fence about moving since I’ve been with this host for more than 10 (!) years. A web eternity! Not from loyalty, however, it’s based on the usual formula of price / customer service / reliability, but the reliability measure is heading into the red zone: on Wednesday they deactivated my entire account after it was flagged for spam posting (what??) and it took some convincing that I did no such thing!
Anyway, the outages have become a real issue and I decided to write this post to acknowledge that I’m aware of them and notified the Powers That Be. But unless I can prove the outages in real-time (which is often while I’m asleep and they don’t accept the emailed notifications I’m given by my website monitor as proof), I can’t build a case for frequency. If the situation doesn’t improve I’ll end up transferring this site (and the four others) which means another outage during the transition. Really not looking forward to that, either.
If you’re a reader with no intention of ever registering a website, by now this post has either put you to sleep or assured you that website ownership is a dumb idea. Leave that sort of crazy to the masochists.
Photo: February 4, 2012
Subtle Technologies: ArtScienceCamp2, Toronto
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