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08/16/2006: "Back With a Vengence ..."
As you probably noticed, this is my first posting of the week. Look closely, and you'll also see there's a gap in the sequence, with all postings after August 4 having disappeared into the ether. That's what happens when your web server 1) has the machine hosting your site take a dump, 2) has a piss-poor backup policy and 3) has an even worse training policy for their customer support folks.
Before I go any further, let me give credit where credit is due: this rant is brought to you courtesy of the incompetant folks at Web.com ...
... be sure to see them for all your web hosting needs.
This is a fishing site and to maintain a certain level of street cred, it's important that I actually get out on the water once in a while. My chance finally came last week, and I spent Friday and Saturday whacking dorado. When I got home late Saturday, I did my civic duty and posted a Trip Report and passed out.
Come Sunday, I make my usual first-thing-in-the-morning visit to the site. Crap - it's down. Now, this isn't a huge thing, as there are lots of reasons why it could happen, and it's usually back up pretty quickly. Not this time. After a couple of hours, I check the Web.com support site, where I'm informed that a "hardware anomaly" has impacted a number of sites - marlinnut.com amongst them. OK, nothing I can do but wait it out. Eventually, around 9PM, the site is back up. Again, I make a visit ... hey, where's that trip report I filed last night? At first, I thought it might have been lost during the crash but quickly I realized that everything on the site was stale - the last entry for any interactive part of the site was a week old!
Apparently, when they restored the site, they used a week-old backup. Now that might be acceptable for some hack with their home page, but that is totally unacceptable for a professional webhost. So I call the help desk.
Big mistake.
Now, I'm OK with the fact that the help desk is located somewhere in the third world, and I'm OK with the fact that the person who answered the phone clearly learned English as a second - or third - language. These are just the facts of doing business in the downward spiral that is free enterprise today. What I'm not OK with is that the training this person received was so poor that they were basically nothing more than a note taker, someone who would have to pass the message along to someone else who did have the knowledge required to try and solve the problem.
I explained that the site was stale, and that I was sure that they must have a newer backup copy, and could they please upload that copy ASAP? Naturally, she couldn't answer, but a few hours later I got an email saying that they were busy restoring sites and that it could be as long as 48 hours until they got to mine. Again, this sucks, but I understand that they could have had thousands of sites on the broken server. So I shut down the forums and stop making blog posts, confident that there will be a refresh soon.
And I wait.
After two days and a shitload of emails back and forth, the truth finally comes out: the latest copy of the site that they have - and the one they uploaded - is actually post-meltdown. So they first posted the week-old version, diligently made a backup of it, and reposted it. Any data from the week in between is lost forever.
Needless to say, I'm irritated. In a way, it's a lot like those assholes who keep screwing with our airlines. The real damage isn't the potential terrorist attack - it's the impact of the new rules and regulations and the interruption to lives and business. In my case, now that I have no faith in Web.com to manage my site, I have to perform a manual server backup myself, wasting time and effort that could be spent elsewhere.
At least until I find a new host ...
UPDATE: The cached copy of the MB at Google had the missing entries from Monday through Thursday ... I'm not quite sure how to reintegrate them, but at least I have the text ... 
welcome to the modern era of frustration ! Even if Web.com were ISO9001 certified it wouldn't be an absolute guarantee that they'd not make that silly mistake. 
