I was getting a slow but steady trickle of spam account signups to this blog and one day I looked around and discovered SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam.

It has lots of options but I primarily only use the CAPTCHA on the registration page… and I have not had any spam accounts sign up since!

I am currently in the process of migrating my websites off of Bluehost. I’ve gotten all of the content off and serving elsewhere… the only thing remaining is to get my email serving and then I will be canceling their service. [Edit: this was finished later the same night.]

Why have I decided to switch?

I signed up with Bluehost in April 2008 because I was looking for something inexpensive and reliable, and at the time, Bluehost certainly fit the bill. I saw several positive reviews and thought that it would be a good way to spend my money. I had been hosting my sites off of my home ISP connection and that was proving to be problematic, especially when more then 3 or 4 people were attempting to access it simultaneously.

For most of the first two years, I was actually quite happy with the service. There was little downtime, and I ended up using them for a handful of relatively low-traffic websites as well as an email provider.

I don’t have objective analyses or numbers but over the past 4-6 months, the quality of hosting with Bluehost began to decline. I began to get messages about DNS lookup failures, and more recently, authentication failures for my mail services. I would see errors in the logs about the MySQL server “going away,” and memory errors or execution time limits that seemed to be increasing in frequency.

I chalked it up to “cheap hosting” and kept on keeping on, because, hey, cheap is cheap, and I wasn’t having any major problems nor data corruption, and these were annoyances–though the authentication errors indicated to me that they were having more serious problems.

And then they had a disaster. According to reports from people who were able to get through to customer service at the time, Bluehost’s datacenter in Provo, Utah experienced an emergency shutdown situation due to an imminent transformer failure, affecting 50% of their customers.

However, when services went down at around 8:30pm MDT on September 16, 2010, there was no notice. There was no notice on their main site, on the server status page (which said that all services were up and running with no problems), on their helpdesk page, nor anywhere else obvious. They did not comment on the forum thread that was opened regarding the downtime, and they disabled their live chat with not a word about what was going on.

Actual explanations about what was going on started to appear around 11pm, which was about the time that their help center main page was updated with a notice indicating that services would be restored around 1am Friday (September 17th).

It was also at about this time that somebody at Bluehost started submitting updates via their Twitter account.

While I definitely have sympathy for the techies and customer service reps who got thrown into the shitter, having to deal with this disaster and a large number of very unhappy customers, I have a serious problem with the way Bluehost handled the situation during and after the incident.

You see, I’m a techie myself. I know that, sometimes, everything just plain goes to fucking shit and there is no happy ending despite how hard you work to get things up and running. However, I also know that even if everything is going to shit, you still need to try to please your customers.

My problem with Bluehost isn’t the downtime. Shit happens! My problem with Bluehost is their handling of their customers. As above, there was no mention of the disaster or the downtime anywhere on their site for two and a half hours.

Mull that one over.

In an age where you have smart phones, remote access, VPN, SSH, VOIP, and all kinds of other technologies, Bluehost, a web hosting company, did not update their main page regarding a disaster that affected 50% of their “millions of domains” being hosted by their customers.

That just makes me angry. It tells me that, whatever else is going on, I as a customer am not being considered in their list of priorities. That my confidence in their ability to communicate with me is not important to them.

It probably never has been just good enough to provide a service if you have poor customer service, but it is certainly nowhere near good enough now.

And this is not a subtle or esoteric aspect of customer service… this is Customer Service 101! If I were managing customer service at Bluehost that night, I would have thought, “Total service outage for 50% of our customers and the first two places they will go are the main site and the server status page. We better stick a message up there.”

And it’s not like it would have been particularly embarrassing for them to talk about what was going on, so that makes their silence even more inexplicable.

I posted something on twitter about my displeasure with the situation, and Bluehost responded:

I retweeted: Sigh… #bluehost is STILL down. No formal explanation or apology. Case study in how NOT to do business in the social media age. (https://twitter.com/YuriArtibise/status/24754337216)

They replied: @jamesapyrich We’ve been back up for hours and have made several explanations, such as http://bit.ly/9Lw2cr. Is your site not working? (https://twitter.com/bluehost/status/24821147691)

I replied: @bluehost my complaint is not the downtime. my complaint is the lack of communication for 2.5 hrs from the start of downtime… (https://twitter.com/jamesapyrich/status/24828517137)
@bluehost i have yet to see this point addressed; perhaps i’ve missed it (https://twitter.com/jamesapyrich/status/24828536688)

Their response: @jamesapyrich We definitely should have communicated faster. Primary cause was the timing, those with twitter access had already gone home. (https://twitter.com/bluehost/status/24828732356)

Talk about missing the point.

Their followup has been just as disappointing, frankly… it is almost as if they’re not even aware of the fact that the problem is their lack of customer service.

If I did this in my job–was unavailable at a point where our systems were down, finally appeared 2.5 hours later, and gave no explanation to my absence nor offered some sort of apology–I would either be fired or be treading on very thin ice.

That kind of approach (for lack of a better term) to customer service and communication is a serious liability.

Don’t support this kind of customer service.

[Edit] – if you’re looking to upgrade to a VPS (not for everyone), try linode. They’ve got some nice bundles and if you use that link to become a customer, I get a bonus.

… please stay tuned, we have some behind-the-scenes processing going on. We will return you to your regularly unscheduled blogging as soon as we can.

I locked-down the blog when I was feeling quite low and self-attacking.

Now that the critic is quieter, I was able to ask myself: how do I feel about opening the blog back up?

I thought about how I’d feel if a family member came to my blog and read the post, Hiding Feelings. I did feel a little anxious. I’m not sure exactly why this was, but I think it has something to do with the fact that I have made it very clear, through my actions, that I do not wish to engage with them, but they’re cyber-stalking me. To open myself up to that, even in a small way, does cause some anxiety.

But then I thought about how I’d feel if somebody came to my blog through a link to one of my very heartfelt and personal posts. I felt sad, and I think the sadness came from them not being able to access the treasure that I have to offer. I mean, when most people come to a site and they have to log in to do anything, even if it’s a completely free account, they skip it unless they’re very motivated to sign up. Heck, that’s what I do all the time.

So if I have something valuable to offer people, and I hold it back because of a handful of people will feel bad… well, isn’t that being unfair to the people who will appreciate what I have to offer? Isn’t that being unfair to myself and living in reaction to my history?

So… I’ve unlocked my blog. Enjoy!

Please give the songs I uploaded another listen if you like. I got some new equipment and the recording is more than 100% improved:

What Is Man?
Saturday “Serenade”

If any of y’all were wondering, we’ve arrived, are unloaded.

Our headboard did not survive the journey. It would appear that the loaders did not load it wisely nor did they buttress it properly according to the way they loaded it.

Beth’s not been very well the past few days. We’re hoping it’s just stress! The eating schedule’s been way off (eating late, eating badly), and there’s been, of course, the physical and emotional stress of moving. We have less than a carload of stuff at the old apartment still, so I’m going to take care of that tomorrow morning and will hopefully be able to get back before lunchtime.

I imagine we’ll be unpacking for a while… but that’s OK!

We are tired, but safe.

Excellent, Smithers! With my blog now at bluehost.com, not even Homer Simpson can stand in my way!

Who, sir?

I plan on obtaining hosting (through bluehost.com) next week, so please bear with me through the upcoming changes. It’s likely that you won’t notice a thing except for having to log in again, but there will be a point in time where this host will be deactivated so that there aren’t any more updates to this database when the new one goes live.

I am hoping that the upstream bandwidth will improve! Right now, I have a 30kbps pipe that not only is my home Internet connection, but is also shared among all potential users of the website. So, if you have 3 people downloading a file simultaneously, you’re all very lucky if you get 10kbps each! I’m particularly looking forward to that improvement.

The blog, she has been moved to www.personalarchaeology.com. The feed should redirect, but please update your feed-readers as necessary with the following url:

http://www.personalarchaeology.com/feed/

Edit – Livejournal users, I’ve put in a support request to change the feed URL. You shouldn’t need to do anything special.

Hello all! I’ve replaced my old router, and networking around here has gotten much faster. I am hoping that this will resolve the issues that people have been experiencing with the website, especially the very strange hanging errors that I’ve been experiencing for far too long now.

Hey, I finally had $50 to throw at the problem instead of blood, sweat and tears. (Those latter things don’t mix well with computers anyway.)

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