God: I hate the Internet. Especially the arrogant f*ck*rs who claim to provide a service…
Until very recently, this blog (as well as several others) was hosted by an organisation called ‘lifetime hosting’. mainly because it was cheap: a one-off payment for (as the name implies) a lifetime of hosting. Ha bloody ha.
We received an email informing us of an “interruption of service” for (up to) 12 hours while they made changes to their servers. A pain, admittedly, but something we could live with…
So the sites duly disappeared and we waited for their reappearance. And waited. And waited. After two days, I contacted ‘support’ to find out where my sites had gone. Their reply was that we’d “made changes to our .htaccess file” which caused the problem. Wrong: I’ve never changed the .htaccess file (knowingly, anyway).
I replied. They then told me that they’d “fixed the issue” and that my sites would now work. Wrong: although I no longer got 403 or 404 errors, the sites still didn’t work.
Eventually, after a little more argy-bargy, a couple of the sites reappeared: but not this one. All I got was an html listing of a ‘hello world’ file. Interesting. So I logged in to the admin area and did a file search, to find that there was an index.html file (dated from the dark Ages) which contained the listed html code. Deleted it and this blog reappeared.
OK: problem solved (for this site) except why did a file which had been there since the dawn of time suddenly cause problems – I’d guess it was because their ‘old’ system (and everybody else’s) prioritised .php files rather than .html files whereas their new one didn’t. Why not? Administrative incompetence, I’d guess.
It never ceases to amaze me how incompetent many of these so-called ‘organisations’ are when it comes to implementing changes: didn’t they even do a trial migration to test their new system? I’d guess not. Once I get my sites back, I think I’ll move them somewhere else: this one already has been…