Jeff Blogs

I truly thought that after I posted that my hosting services had finally been restored that this would be an end to this never ending saga. I expected that the servers had to be bullet proof and I would not be seeing any more outages. I was of course temporarily delusional as I expected that IX Web Hosting would be about to maintain their hardware. On Monday of this week my sites again incurred an outage of nearly an hour. I went back to the problem ticket center and entered a ticket and followed up with a visit to the online chat. I was told that the server was having communications issues and that the administrators were aware of it. I asked for an estimated time this would be resolved but the chat host never returned to answer my question. I can only assume that he fell over dead and was laying there waiting for medical personnel to appear to remove the body. After the outage and services were restored I noticed strange behavior with regards to my blogs. Prior to the outage I was able to post entries and have those entries broadcast to several of the micro-blogging services including Twitter and Plurk. Now though that functionality was not working. After a quick troubleshooting session I realized that IX Web Hosting had somehow removed or uninstalled two PERL modules. I went back out to the web and opened yet another problem ticket requesting that these modules be added back to the server. That request occurred on Tuesday. Here it is Friday and the modules are still not installed and there is no timeline of when these might be completed. This is pretty much the end of my patience and I decided that I need to finally change hosting providers.

(continue reading…)

For the last eight days I have been fighting with my web hosting company trying to get them to restore my site connectivity after they had a hardware failure. For the first few days I had absolutely no connectivity whatsoever and was completely dead in the water. I spent nearly every waking hour working with them to try and get someone to take ownership of this problem and resolve it. Finally after several days of being down I requested that they move me to a new server so I could begin restoring things myself. They relented and moved my. Unfortunately they did not properly install the software nor load the PERL modules necessary for me to be up. It has been one of the most frustrating experiences of my life and I had come to the conclusion that I needed to find a new hosting provider.

(continue reading…)

I really don’t like Friday the 13th. It is not that I am superstitious, ok maybe I am just a little but you’ve never had to live through a 15 game streak where you couldn’t hit a ball if your life depended upon it. It’s funny, I am college educated and my IQ has been measured in the 140 range yet I still cannot get over the fact that luck plays such a part in life. Personally I don’t think luck happens as much as it is a manipulation of circumstances by the observant. In a lot of cases you can make your own luck just be watching everything around you and making the right choices at the right time. That of course means you need to maintain a higher level of concentration and consciousness than most people are willing to devote each day. Still, it is possible. But before you think that you can manipulate everything in your favor let me assure you that it isn’t quite that easy. Take today for example. The events that transpired with regards to my web hosting could never have been anticipated nor could they have been controlled.

(continue reading…)