Feb14, 2009

Exhausted Post-Move

12 hours of moving furniture yesterday, I'm absolutely knackered. Argh :|

Anyway, not a proper blog, just wanted to let you all know that the Internet hasn't been connected at the flat yet, the cats are settling in nicely, and the guinea pigs didn't even notice we moved them really.

A couple of people have had intermittent problems with the site being 'down'. It's not down, I think it's an issue with the dns. However, there's no point wasting the host's time saying "some people can't get to my site" because they're not going to find that any use. So, if you do discover you can't get to my site, it'd be really handy if you could send me an email noting the time the site went down (approx) and, if you know how, do a traceroute and nslookup.

Back soon :)

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Jan26, 2009

Server Move and Some Coding

As you may (or may not, it was fairly seamless) have noticed, I have moved to a new server. Site5 cocked something up during a supposedly routine server upgrade last week, and after contacting the CEO and having a level 2 tech supposedly fix the problem 3 times, most of my site remained unavailable. I got fed up; I was losing valuable hits from StumbleUpon to tutorialtastic and had an inbox full of messages to let me know Mr Ken Marx was hogging my space (this is not a complaint.. it made me feel that tutorialtastic is worthwhile :) )

So, long story short, I've moved to Clook. I know they're reliable because we use them at work. Everything was set up and I was able to start copying data across within less than an hour.

Although I took a copy of the guestblock database from the Site5 server, I was hesitant to reinstall the script yesterday as I've been having problems with spam. The script is old and the website retired. I decided to sod with it all and have spent the past two evenings indulging in some random coding... of BellaBlocks.

BellaBlocks will be my flat file 'replacement' for the old Guestblock script. It will be easy to manage, easy to update, and will have some decent bloody spam protection. You can see my live beta but bear in mind it may be broken at any point. Thoughts?

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Jan15, 2009

Sorry for the Downtime

My apologies if you came to the site earlier and found it unavailable. The server I am on was down for over 7 hours this morning. It's annoying, and sad.

It's sad, because I had over 2 years of fantastic uptime from Site5, they moved me to a new server last year and now I have problem after problem after problem. Even now, months on from the original move, I know for a fact that something is incorrectly configured with my account/server because if you go to a subdomain that doesn't exist, instead of giving you a 404 you get my old "my own." clique. I don't want to report it, because I don't want another week of downtime while they fuck things up even further.

It's annoying, because I'm a good customer and I don't deserve this kind of arsing about. I've given Site5 a total of 23 referrals, which is probably around $2000+ in revenue. Most of you guys, my readers, are using them based on my personal recommendation. I've created a small handful of support tickets, so I'm not even pestering the techies regularly. I don't normally bother to claim back credit if uptime doesn't reach 99.99% and I occasionally pop in at the support forum to help. I've left about 5 excellent reviews of Site5 on various hosting review websites. I even recommended them for 2 separate work accounts, based on previous experience.

My account expires in July. Site5 have less than 6 months to impress me, or I'm moving to Clook. I'm not just talking about providing the promised uptime either... I want decent support. I want my website to work every time I visit, I want them to quit with the bullshit unlimited packages that are capped in the FUP providing you nowhere near what you expect. Of course, it's not going to happen, is it?

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