from the gut

I recently wrote that I switched all my domains over from SRLNet to Dreamhost.com. I closed the account on 10/11 by jumping through all the hoops to file a ticket on their support system. When I received a bill 11/1, I replied to the automated email, and BANG! Instant response.

The reply was that dreamhost offers terrible support, oversells their servers, and their sites frequently go down. I already knew all this. You know why, because dreamhost told me. He told me that I might be saving money but that I would be losing support and performance.

At the time, I didn’t realize I was talking to the owner of the company. I thought it was just some support jockey. But I still wanted to be helpful and give him some feedback about his company — hoping that the information might make its way up the chain. So, I replied:

…For the record, your assumption that cost is my primary motivation is
wrong. I prefer their control panel. I like the subversion support. I
have received great support via their wiki and I am entertained by
their blog. SRLNet is missing all of these.

Who knows what was controversial about this, but the response indicates that I pushed some buttons. (Maybe he just hates dreamhost.)

cPanel is an extremely user friendly control panel, we’re here 24/7/365
to offer you our personal support.  So you’re basically moving to a
terrible hosting provider because you like their blog.

The condesending demeanor … totally free of charge.

I finished moving everything to the new host last night. I am done with the old host and their skimpy disk space allowance and am now on Dreamhost.com. They’ve given me 200GB disk space that will grow by 1GB per week. (My old host gave me 1GB total.) How did I learn about Dreamhost? Through their blog, of course!

I don’t need this disk space right now, but with all that space I can put up a lot of baby pictures and videos. All Dora, all the time.

For those of you reading this on the web, I apologize for the new theme. It looks like I forgot to install the theme I was using. I might change the theme a time or three before I settle on something I like. I read blogs through RSS so layout is the least of my concerns.

I have a new home on the web. For the past few months, I’ve been hosting the site with GoDaddy.com. I had been hosting my DNS with them for some time and was happy, so after they added .NET functionality to their < $10/mth hosting plan, I jumped in head-first.

My problems started early. First, they had trouble getting my parked domains added to my account. I would set them up, and from what I could see, everything was OK, but any request to the domain names would time-out. Support was OK. They were a little slow to respond — anywhere from 8-24 hours — and the first-tier support would simply quote the FAQ in response to all my inquiries. (Which, from the perspective of a former support person, is something I always wanted to do.) The second tier support could usually fix the problem, but after a few days, it would go back to not working. Anyway, after months of on-and-off-again service, I finally got that resolved.

Then I tried installing some blogging software. At first, I tried .Text, the software that powers the MSDN blogs. Well, it required some permissions that my user didn’t have. After futzing with that for a couple days, I gave up for a while. When my friend Aaron asked about the blog, I decided to give it another try. Another software package — probably scavenged off of SourceForge — but the same result. The permissions weren’t set-up correctly.

Well, your website doesn’t do much good unless you can do something with it. So, I decided to go back to the PHP world. There are many excellent open source blog and CMS systems, and I figure I could pick up enough PHP/Perl to patch up the rest. So far, so good.

As a final reminder of GoDaddy’s incompetence, I was emailed a link to a survey after I cancelled my account. My first reaction was, “What have they done to warrant my time?” but that quickly gave way to, “Why not two minutes to vent; even if it winds up in somebody’s trash bin?” So, I clicked on the link, answered the questions, vented in the comments, and submitted my survey. This response says it all: