Well, that was quite a rough ride.

For several years I’ve been with HostingZoom and was fairly happy. At this point however, I heartily recommend that you stay away from them. They have obviously changed management, or something. Let me walk you through it briefly.

I’ve been noticing degraded performance on the server for several weeks. At some point I realized that the problem was not going to be cleared up on it’s own. In cPanel I can see server load and so I started going to cPanel and looking at server load any time I felt that server performance was worse than it should be. Server load was very high during these times. And it was becoming more often the case than not that my sites were very sluggish.

I finally opened a support ticket on the January 7 asking why server load was so high, pointing out how slowly my sites were running, and asking politely if they could do something about it. I got a reply from Support Level 1 saying they were escalating to Level 2 as they could not resolve my situation. Same with Level 2, they escalated me to Level 3. Finally, after many hours Level 3 support replied back that the server was under some load but there was not a lot they could do about it as there were no abuses to suspend from any of the accounts, and that they were closely monitoring the situation (for all the good that does).

By January 11 the server load was constantly high, and by high I mean really high. Website performance was really bad, often taking 80 to 90 seconds before a site would even start loading. I posted to the support ticket again asking about the situation. Response? They wanted a URL to the site that was slow so they could assist me better. They do not see any such high resource usage on the server.

Well, now I’m annoyed, how is it possible that I know more about what’s happening to the server than the server admins? I responded with URLs to 4 of the sites hosted on the account. They replied that they are closely monitoring the situation. And if I felt the server was having repeated load issues they could migrate me to one of their other servers.

Thorough the next day, I documented the high server load with screenshots of the high load situation in cPanel and posted it to my support ticket. Finally, FINALLY, tech support acknowledges a problem. They report to me that they have checked into the issue and have found 2 bad drives in the RAID which was causing the server performance issues. Not particularly reassuring, but I am at least glad they have found an issue to fix.

And that was the last I saw of my sites for 48 hours ¹. This is where a good chunk of my support ticket turns into a back and forth. My requesting information, demanding to know “why my sites are down for this long?“ “why can’t I access cPanel” “why can’t I access my databases?” “why does SSH keep closing the connection on me” etc. The reply was always, “kindly hold on while the RAID rebuilds” etc.

After 48 hours, I realized that HostingZoom was no longer the host for me. I got a couple of recommendations from people I trust, but ultimately decided to go with BlueHost. The recommendation came from someone I trusted and the prices seemed sane. I was able to do some FTP downloading from the HostingZoom server as long as I babysat the download, sometimes the server would close the connection, or simply fail to respond or whatever. I got to a place where all I was waiting on were my databases because I couldn’t access cPanel, phpMyAdmin, or SSH.

Finally after several rounds with tech support, they gave me a SQL dump of all my databases last night at about 11:45. I stayed up for a couple hours uploading databases, making the final tweaks, and testing the sites on the new server. Then I set the name servers to the new host and went to bed.

So here we are on the new host. My decision was validated when, this morning, HostingZoom informed me that the server was completely back up to speed, and the couple of sites I still haven’t been able to transfer were not loading. A quick look at the server overview on the HZ client dashboard revealed the the “http service” was down. Unbelievable.

Here’s to hoping this new host will work out better.

In a seriously stupid move, Illinois on Thursday decided to start taxing Amazon.com, based on affiliates that refer traffic to Amazon.

The Illinois law, signed by Gov. Pat Quinn Thursday, requires online retailers that work with affiliates in the state to collect sales taxes on purchases made by Illinois residents and businesses.

And so Amazon responded:

Amazon responded to the measure by cutting ties to its Illinois-based affiliates, which are blogs and other websites that refer traffic to Amazon’s website and get paid commissions if customers make purchases there.

So let’s review. Illinois government feels it doesn’t suck enough blood sweat and tears out of people, so it wonders how to get more money.

“Oh, oh, I know,” someone says, “let’s tax Amazon!”

But someone (surely someone, anyone…) wonders aloud, “How can we tax an entity that has no physical presence in the state of Illinois and is therefore not subject to Illinois laws or tax?”

And so someone says, “Hey, I think there are people in Illinois that run blogs and websites which link to Amazon. That means we can tax them based on that!”

And so, the law is written and signed…

And Amazon cuts ties to the affiliates. Effectively reducing incoming cash to the state of Illinois.

Brilliant, just brilliant. Great one for the books fellas!

More on Illinois goverment’s mental retardation HERE.

Man is Windows frustrating. I’ve been working on websites this evening and since 80% of the world uses IE on Windows I must resign myself to testing sites on IE for Windows.

Well anyway, Windows started nagging me about an update while I was in the middle of working. It was annoying too because I had all my browsers and different various windows just where I wanted them and this nag window would pop up right over them while I was doing something. It had a little progress bar and said that Windows would automatically restart in 10 minutes if I did nothing. And it had buttons to restart now or ignore till later. To make a long story longer, I clicked restart later. I didn’t want to bother with restarting since Windows take approximately 3.5 years to restart.

Well 5 minutes later up popped the dialog again. “Now that’s frustrating,” I thought to myself. “Didn’t I just tell this infernal thing I would restart later?” So I clicked later… AGAIN! Well apparently Windows thought it misunderstood me the first 2 times because it did it again. And again. And again.

After a total of 5 times it finally won. You see that last time I was busy doing something else and so ignored it for the 10 minutes it needed. But you know what’s frustrating? I was just clicking over into Windows to test some code I just wrote and it was shutting down.

I gotta tell you I was unimpressed! I told that silly thing 5 TIMES I did not want to restart right now. When an update pops up on Mac OS X, and you tell it later that’s the end of it. It realizes that, “hey, he meant what he said when he said later. To ask again would be interrupting his work.” Not to mention, automatically restarting after I clicked later?!? That’s out of the question!

So yeah, I was just reminded in a small way why I do not put up with the troubles that 80% or so of the rest of the world puts up with.

Windows always makes me appreciate my Mac!

Where do the bailouts end??? How come the government gets to decide which companies receive bailouts? A bigger question, such as in the case of the automakers, is why do we bail out companies who are obviously so big, bloated, and mediocre that they can’t make it anymore?

I guess capitalism works too well, when you let companies fail, so that other, more efficient companies, with higher demand and better products can step up and fill the void, therefore we must interject the government into it! Problem is, this just makes the mess bigger, the clean up longer, and prolongs inevitable failure!

/soapbox

Edit: A post on the “Give us Liberty” blog started this rant of mine… (there, is that better John? )