And We’re Back…Sorta

If you follow my blog via RSS or email and had wondered what had happened to my site, then you must have missed the story I documented via Twitter and FriendFeed last week. The shortest explanation is that my dear ol’ dad accidentally killed my website, but the longer story involves a tale of webhosting nightmares, complaints, desperation, and finally -  at last -  a working website again. I documented the saga over on my posterous blog, which will now be known as my “emergency blog” from this point forward. I’m not going to rehash it here, but I urge anyone who still seems to think DreamHost is a safe place to host your site to go and read it.

In the long run, they came to their senses and re-enabled my account. Dallas from DreamHost left a comment on the Posterous blog that read:

You are right that this situation could have been handled better by us. We have to deal with a lot of credit card disputes and we have a cookie cutter process to handle them. Honest mistakes like this do happen, though, and we need to be better at recognizing that.

I’ve just re-enabled the account for you. Sorry for the trouble!

Dallas (of DreamHost)

I also received an email from him which read:

Hello,

Your credit card story
(http://sarahintampa.posterous.com/webhosting-issues) was sent to me and I’m sorry for the problems you’ve had with how we handle credit card
disputes.  I definitely understand your frustration and it’s unfortunate that we have to be so intolerant of charge disputes.  Our credit card processors have basically no understanding for our side of the situation. Credit card fraud is a very big problem for us and we have to take charge disputes seriously and act quickly.

I’ve re-enabled your account just now and I’m going to start an internal discussion about how we handle situations like this one.  Honest mistakes do happen and we need keep that in mind.

Sorry again!

Dallas Kashuba

I would like to publicly thank whomever alerted Dallas of DreamHost on my behalf. I could not reach them in the way that you did, so thank you. DreamHost essentially ignored my plight for the first day of my outage – support tickets went unanswered, and they have no phone number to call. The next day, they then treated me as an unwanted customer whose account they would only re-enable long enough for me to back up my data and get the heck outta there. I personally had done nothing to deserve that treatment, which increased my outrage 100 times over.

At the moment, though, this site is still on DreamHost…but now it’s backed up in case they have a change of heart and decide to kill it again. I have, however, hired some help in my transition to a new webhost. I actually have numerous websites to transition and since dad’s paying (since he’s to blame for all this!), I know it will go a lot faster if I leave it to the experts.

I received a lot of suggestions for new hosts, but I decided to pick BlueHost. Their uptime is probably no better than DreamHost, but the price was right, the cPanel is easy to use, and most importantly, they have a telephone! And if you call it, a human will answer! That was a big consideration this time around.

I don’t have any sites that receive tons of traffic, so I didn’t really need a fancy (and pricey) solution, which is why I decided on BlueHost. Before I make the huge commitment, warn me now if you have any BlueHost horror stories to share. I had been with TypePad forever before transitioning to WordPress and had been with DreamHost since that move, so, frankly, I’m a little out of my element when it comes to picking hosts. Let me know if you think BlueHost will be OK.

P.S. I’d love to know how many RSS subscribers I lost thanks to the outage, but the Feedburner numbers are crap these days. Yesterday, I had 600, today it’s 1100+. Who knows how many people really subscribe. Grrr.