the fourth place

Welcome back world, all over again.

It doesn't seem that long ago that my last web host accused me of being a thief upon hearing that my credit card was stolen (it was, it was stolen from me) and - having already had his attention drawn to my account by a hacker exploiting it for DOS attacks - shut the service down. That incident left this blog offline for a week and lost me content that I was very much attached to.

This time around I'm spared the slur on my character, but am cursed by my own efforts to deal with spam. Having compiled a list of 200 domains that needed blocking I used a macro to make a large HTML form with a button for each domain and set about pressing each of the buttons. Server load shot to 12% (of what I have not been told, despite asking) and the abuse team shot into action by locking the world from the blog's home folder. The effect was to instantly halt my onslaught on the spammers and take my site offline for almost 5 days.

The common factor between each of these incidents is that in neither case did prohosted.net or hostgator.com think it wise to ring me or even email me before taking action and in both cases the time taken for the support team to get back to me was the largest part of the outage. In this case 3 days. Sure, if my well intended button pounding is really about to take out the whole server then block me immediately, but did it really need most of Friday, all of Saturday, and Sunday, and much of Monday for anyone to do anything.

Hostgator come off far the better for at least emailing me on an account they had reason to suspect I'd look at, but I think frankly if they are taking down a site they should at least phone me immediately and after that should be proactive in arrranging for it to come back online.

Not impressed guys.