I don’t have the wordsto publicly describe the past 24 hours. To say it’s been a bit stressfulwould be an understatement.
In short, a couple of days ago, our server, hosted at serverbeach.comstarted to act flaky. Over three or four days, site performance slowedto a crawl, then finally gave up the ghost yesterday. We made a coupleof requests to repair or replace the failing hard drive. These werenever directly answered, instead we were told that the server had beenrestarted and appeared to be working. That was acceptable after itstopped once. Even after it stopped twice. But after the 4th restart thehosting company should have pulled the obviously faulty drive.
The drive was finally yanked yesterday. It took almost 24 hours for anew drive to be installed and properly configured. Every request forhelp would result in a 2 to 4 hour wait for a response. In 80% of thecases, the information in the responses was either incorrect orincomplete. We’d do as instructed, discover it didn’t work, then have towait for another 2 to 4 hours for the original request to be fixed. Theerrors involved things like not plugging in the drive correctly, notinstalling the control panel software, and overwriting a bunch of files.These are very basic problems that would have been easily avoided ifthe tech people had taken a moment to test their work.
This didn’t just affect, but a number of ourfriends and client’s sites as well. To those folks I deeply apologize.
We’ve changed server companies, and so far are very impressed. Not only are they literally half the cost of serverbeach,they have actual human beings in tech support you can reach 24/7.