I had this great, thoughtful & in-depth post typed out last night, all about my insecurities and struggles in this business… but literally just as I hit submit, my hosting decided to shit out on me. I checked every single website of mine, and all the ones hosted with Webair had vanished. After waiting on someone to actually sign into their supposed “24/7 Live Support” for about 15 minutes, and putting in a support ticket with no response, I posted in their thread on a high-traffic webmaster forum noting that my sites were all inexplicably down and that I couldn’t get ahold of anyone to help me. Within three minutes of that post, my sites were magically back up.
I got an accompanying e-mail that simply stated:
“Hello.
We apologize for the difficulties.
We have corrected the problem and your websites are working now.
Thank you.”
Okay, but why the fuck did it happen in the first place? When I pay for hosting I expect my websites to stay up and accessible, especially when they’re my main source of income. I checked all my usage statistics, and I haven’t gone over with bandwidth or anything of the like - I’ve used about half my alloted BW for the month and the month is almost over. I kept up my end of the deal, I’d at least like some heads up if you’re doing maintenance and my sites are going to be down for awhile so I don’t waste my time trying to update them and then suddenly having all my work disappear into the void! I mean, I know hosting will have problems, but is it so hard to shoot a mass e-mail to the clients affected? It doesn’t help my mood that Posh Freebies disappeared for about an hour earlier in the week due to an unexplained problem with the sql server it’s on. I’m started to get really annoyed and somewhat concerned that I made a really bad choice in switching to Webair - I’ve only been with them for a month and I’m already having so many damn issues. They can’t even bill me properly - my invoice with them has been sitting on “pending” and has stated that they’d initiate billing in the next 24 hours… for the past two weeks. I have the money just sitting there waiting for them to actually do something about it, I’ve tried re-entering my payment info, tried contacting the Billing department… their only response was this:
“I have looked over your account and see that you have one invoice pending as of 12/10/07.”
Well, no shit. That’s exactly what I fucking contacted you about. The fact that the invoice has been pending for SEVENTEEN DAYS, and has yet to actually initiate any funds transfers as per the payment method I have set up.
I’m just so damn frusterated right now. Get this shit together, people. If you can’t even take my money properly, and my websites have disappeared TWICE in my first month hosting with you, how do you think this looks?
December 28th, 2007 at 11:55 am
Come to my server. i drop $20 a month a computer nerd at the bar. It’s what I use to run my site, Chads site, and soon, Aarons site. I have 5 e-mail accounts, ftp, as much space as my little heart desires, and a bunch of other technical shit that I doubt I will ever understand. It’s cheap, reliable, and if I don’t pay on time it’s no big deal (I think I’m 2 mos behind actually).
If I ever have a problem, he’s the only person I have to deal with…and the only problem I’ve ever had was adjusting to the new file manager that was installed.
if you’re interested, drop me a line.
January 2nd, 2008 at 6:12 pm
yikes, i always knew webair was either on or off.. doesn’t help that most of the “bros” at this major board stand behind webair only because of bought drinks at conventions. If you need help finding a host I can probably point out a few.
March 25th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Looking to learn all we can about making it in this business, learning on our own and testing it out ourselves. It’s getting better but we’re not there yet. Thanks for sharing your experiences with the world. We’ll be sure to pay it forward.