BlogRodent: Pentecostal Rumination & Review

Okay. I’ve finally completed the transition of TatumWeb, ChurchRodent, TypeRat, and BlogRodent, and everything else off of HostedToday and now onto the exalted servers at midPhase.

I was frustrated with HostedToday early on because the support staff were hired anonymous technicians one or two continents and three or four language groups away from here. There was nobody I could call—I had to submit a support ticket instead—and I constantly had to repeat my query to get my simple points across. The servers were slow, ailing, and un-hardy. If I blew hard, my website—thousands of miles away—would flicker and flame-out. I won’t bother describing what happened when I sneezed.

Transferring to midPhase was straightforward—or at least it should have been straightforward. In preparation for my move, I contacted midPhase over a month ago to find out what I needed to do to prepare. The answer was: “Just have your current host provide a full cpanel restore, tell us when it’s ready, give us the FTP login and password, and we’ll take care of the rest. Then you just have to update your DNS servers.”

Great! That sounds real easy.

In an ideal word—run by machines; where webcams are 3d, and high definition; where toasters would talk, if there were any need for toasters, that is; in a world where humans have been relegated to a huddling and shivering threesome in a cramped coat-closet on the isolated moon Io—it is that easy.

It’s people that make things complicated.

What nobody mentioned to me is that when you ask your cpanel host to do a “full cpanel backup,” you have to knock heads around and break a few kneecaps to make sure everybody understands you want a new backup, current as three nanoseconds ago. But, naturally, since technicians 8,000 miles removed aren’t interested in why you’d request a full cpanel backup, they also don’t care that you get a current one. What they do care about is reporting a lack of disk space “quota” for the backup. That’s my cue to start yelling IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS about the idiocy of telling me that I don’t have the proper disk quota to accommodate a backup that is the final step toward: Leaving. Their. Server. After all that nice-nice chit-chat and small talk, I finally get a backup. midPhase promptly restores it, and I have an operating website. Problem: It’s a one-month-old website.

:: sigh ::

After getting on the horn to the beleaguered midPhase techs, they send me back to HostedToday. A few broken kneecaps later, I finally get my up-to-date backup. So, I unleash the hounds over at midPhase only to take a 4.5–hour trek home through the snow to find that now midPhase needed confirmation from me to perform the restore.

Well, at least the fellas over at midPhase have the decency to clarify with questions. Over at HostedToday, I was lucky to get intelligible answers, much less useful questions.

So, long story short: my old site has been restored, I manually uploaded the 85 or so comments that were missing, and we’re good to go. I hope you enjoy this site in its new home, I think there’s a noticeable improvement in site-responsiveness.

Anyhow, enjoy.

Rich

Update: So, having been on midPhase for nearly a week now, I’m happy to report that not only are things going swimmingly, my bandwidth is solid, my server is snappy, I’m no longer plagued by time-outs and failed email downloads. Plus, and this is huge for me, I can finally offer my own email subscription service. Whew. It’s good to be on a good host.

Suspiciously Similar Posts

The machine does this. Your mileage may vary