I threw down the gauntlet yesterday and, in a predictable twist of fate, the gauntlet bounced right back and nailed me squarely in the jaw. Downtime is a problem we’ve never addressed, gentle reader, and I suppose we’re fortunate in that regard. But this evening, I’m told, we were down for more than an hour. A full hour.
Certainly our technological innards aren’t serviced by the Ritz, there’s no reason to expect as much, yet I count on a minimum level of reliability. Is it so unreasonable to demand the same level of uptime savored by the owner of www.geocities.com/countrycottage/users/ny/75621/free? We’re paying for something, right? During that fateful hour, the user experience was akin to coming home after a long day, key in hand, only to find your front door has transcended the very notion of locks.
You were left on the curb. This pains me. Here, at this coordinate in our rich history, we’re like refugees. Site5.com offers a 30-day guarantee with allegedly no strings attached, so if things worsen we’ll have to move. We’ll find a new home eventually. This isn’t so monumental a task–I imagine there are things far more important–but there’s value in a sense of normalcy. I’m searching for it, believe me.
It didn’t seem possible to switch hosts so effortlessly, dear reader, but there you have it–we’ve moved. Saying those two words will probably sentence us to total downtime and a prodigious gnashing of teeth, that’s the way things go, and I’m going to tempt fate anyway.
It’s my hope the migration improved your experience in some capacity, because from where I’m sitting the view is expansive. There are charts and graphs of every conceivable shape and texture, some of them so cryptic they require an advanced degree to operate. The honeyed secrets of chatrooms and discussion boards require but a few clicks to unlock and install. Rumor has it they tucked away the cure for cancer in one of these golden tabs.
Convenient as the Internet may appear, it also prescribes an odd list of practices. Changing hosts? It’s a notion that would’ve invited angry lynchings, were it uttered a few decades ago. I mean, your chair doesn’t suddenly transmogrify into a couch during roundtable discussion. The walls of your lecture hall don’t melt and transform into solid mahogany, it’d just be absurd. But that’s the Internet, I suppose, so go ahead. Stretch. Oh, and I’m not equating our enterprise to a class of some sort. A fully accredited university would be much closer to reality.
Please lend me your patience, dear reader, as we change hosting companies. Escaping our festering shithole of a home for more reputable digs means we’re moving up in the world, last I heard, and the trick is to switch quickly.
Now, understand the infrastructure wrought by Aplus.net was seldom at fault–the bundle of silicon and masking tape they stored in a drainage ditch somewhere proved reliable, but then again I don’t clap my hands and frolic when my computer refrains from exploding into radioactive shrapnel. Let’s save the confetti for real achievement, you know?
My discontent, instead, stems from the company’s adorable tendency to charge credit cards on a whim. I read the horror stories online, which were scant preparation for when the horror appeared on my doorstep. It was like, “Thanks for double-charging my AMEX. Thanks doubly for applying the overcharge toward another year in your cesspit.” And yet it wasn’t like that, mostly because each customer service call sounded like an ESL class blossoming before my very eardrums.
No more surprises. When you were little and wanted to astonish your pop with a sandwich, for instance, you didn’t seize the rye bread, wipe your ass with it, and stuff it under the fridge for him to find. That would qualify as a bad surprise worthy of flogging.