Day 940: The Troubled Fortnight Of VatulBlog

Some of you may have noticed that between March 14th and this past weekend, there were no new posts up at this blog. This is all due to iPowerWeb, which deserves an award for Worst Web Host Ever.  Here is my official warning to the denizens of InternetLand: Steer clear of iPowerWeb! Also, be prepared to deal with the rearing of their ugly heads in the future. Follow.

Back when I lived in Illinois and Wisconsin, I had space on university departmental servers.  You know, the kind where you could walk up to or email the sysadmin and say, “Dude, can you reboot this machine?” or “Please install the latest version of _____ software for me” and the nice person would kindly oblige in a matter of minutes.  Now that I work for The Man and a personal home web server is out of the question thanks to the unreliability of Cox at my house, I am forced to pay some company $120 a year for hosting my site and its blog.  Oh, the ignominy.

The site and blog have had problems with iPowerWeb in the past and, each time I’ve called/emailed and complained, the problem has been fixed.  This time around, iPowerWeb began to flake out at the beginning of March.  Having just returned from Jamaica and not particularly interested in fighting evil computer djinns, I let the slow load time slide, thinking that a server/MySQL upgrade on iPowerWeb’s end couldn’t possibly take very long.  Besides, I was still able to reach the WordPress Dashboard and create posts, which was plenty at the time. A week went by and even that capability was lost.  Sensing that something deeper was wrong, I emailed iPower support on March 12th, 14th and 16th.  These are the responses I received:

– March 12th: “I checked the blog and it is loading fine without any delay from our end. The normal Web site loading time is 2-3 minutes (including gallery application). ” 
– March 14th: “We are currently experiencing issue with our MySQL database server. Hence, you are experiencing slowness while accessing blog. Our senior engineers are working on the issue.”
– March 16th: “We have lots of customers in the queue and the additional MySQL servers are added on a random basis. We do not know the exact time frame when your account will be upgraded to the additional MySQL severs.”

So on and so forth. Four days, three emails and two phonecalls later, I had been given three different reasons why my blog wasn’t up and what was being done to resolve it:

1. Everything is fine on our end.  It’s all your fault.  Optimize your database to speeden up page loading.
2. It’s all our fault, what with the additional MySQL servers, but we cannot give you a time when things will function smoothly again.
3. The problem is really with the vDeck Control Panel transition we’re making. We’ve tried twice to upgrade your account to the new Control Panel and have failed.

Why should any of these reasons be my responsibility? March 18th was the day I made the immutable decision to migrate my site to Dreamhost RIGHT F*ING NOW, thanks to this response, spelling and grammatical errors notwithstanding, from yet another customer service specialist when I asked for an approximate time frame during which the server upgrade would be finished: “As you mentioned in your E-mail, I have check your Account and notice that in the previous e-mail you have not mentioned the exact time frame when your account will be upgraded to the additional MySQL severs.”

Wha wha WHAAAT? How am I supposed to know? That’s their job. They are supposed to tell me when my account will be upgraded. Apparently, I’m not the only one with this problem. From the North Country Gazette – January 17, 2008 (emphasis mine):

Is IPowerWeb engaging in new tactics in order to force customers to comply with their mandated transition to their new platform, subjecting their customers to ongoing outages in an attempt to strong arm them to migrate? Are the outages going to intensify and become more frequent until and if the customer agrees to their transition, kind of like a technological We“re going to make you an offer you can’t refuse? Is that legal? Shouldn“t the FCC and FTC be opening an investigation into this Ipower/Endurance scam?

On Monday, The North Country Gazette website experienced another outage due to IPowerWeb“s server being down. Attempts to reach customer support were futile telephonically and after waiting for more than an hour for a Live Chat technician, when the live person finally responded, it was only to say he“d be back in three or four minutes and away he went.Over the past week, NCG has learned that there have been multiple outages in IPower service which once advertised 99.9% up time. That guarantee has since disappeared from their website.

It was increasingly clear that, at any given time, I was dealing with no more than Level 1 Customer Support staff whose sole responsibility was to stall me with any handy excuse, while engineers scrambled behind the scenes. The problem with that is they’ve got to keep giving the customer the same excuse and stick with it, and never let slip that they have no idea what they’re doing. Whoops. Word to the wise: Never tell these morons that you can’t access your WordPress blog’s administration panel to optimize/export anything because it will result in five emails that either change your iPower Control Panel’s password or ask you for your blog login and password.  Don’t bring up anything other than slow loads, no loads and what they are doing about it.

The moment I sent iPower a request to transfer my domain to Dreamhost, my blog loaded in less than a second and everything was back to normal. Surprise, surprise! Following this, I was inundated with emails that read, “Is there a specific reason why you are transferring your account away? Perhaps, if I knew why you were transferring, we could work something out so that IPOWER could better suit your needs.” TOO LATE NOW, iPower, I am moving my business elsewhere while you figure out how many customers you’re losing with your horrible service. Loyalty is offered only to those providers who have a clue what they’re doing.

It took until March 21st for iPower to acknowledge that I’d dumped them like a drunk boyfriend on prom night and for the domain transfer to go through. Between March 21st and 23rd, three different attempts to import my WordPress export file into the new install over at Dreamhost failed because:

1. Unless you create a PHP.ini file over at the Dreamhost server and specify a limit, the upload limit is a mere 7MB. Follow these instructions on how to create a PHP.ini file and update your .htaccess to increase the upload limit. Better yet, do a clean install of WordPress using the Detailed Instructions and then import the database at the command prompt. I don’t believe in One-Click or 5-Minute installs; do the extra work up front to ensure fewer future headaches.
2. The WXR (WordPress Extended RSS) blog export file does not necessarily attach the right posts with the right Post ID, etc. For instance, post 1690 in the database was showing up as post 1140 on the new blog and with the wrong Permalink structure. So, make sure that when you back up your blog, generate a SQL database backup and not just a RSS XML one.

This is when Alan Gutierrez stepped in to help. He ported the SQL database containing VatulBlog to its new location and inserted a RewriteRule into the .htaccess file to mimic the Permalink structure of the old blog. An hour of tinkering with the template and deleting old files yesterday, and the blog was back in business.

Why did I say at the beginning of this post that my saga with iPower may not be over? Some Googling reveals that iPower has a habit of rebilling folks for services not offered. I was assured by someone at iPower that my account which ends on May 20th will be cancelled on April 3rd. If I am rebilled on May 20th for another year, it’s Credit Card Dispute City. These folks are not getting another dime out of me.

Why did I do business with iPower in the first place? Five years ago, they had wonderful ratings and offered reliable hosting solutions with a good pricing structure. This only goes to show that a decline in service is possible with any host, which is why my goal is still to set up a personal home web server and manage it myself. All said and done, however, in my fifteen years of dealing with technology service providers, I have never come across such lousy support. If you’re currently an iPower customer, my only advice is to perform regular backups and to get away while you still have access to your Control Panel and files.  Now, to end on a positive note, many kudos to Dreamhost and Alan Gutierrez!  Thanks!