Marking time in February 2011
Sunday 13 February 2011
A message to Page-Zone
Since 2002 this website has been hosted by page-zone.com, a small outfit based in the USA. Over the years I have appreciated their low prices, and I have been content with their service—despite (very rare) outages and sometimes slow response to support tickets.
But recently something has gone seriously wrong at Page-Zone. Here is part of a message I sent them today:
Thank you for answering the question I asked on 19 December 2010, and for your apology for the delay. I do understand some of the difficulties of running a business with a small and busy staff, but six weeks to answer a straightforward support ticket is too long.
Fortunately, my web site and email server continued to work in the meantime. I was annoyed, but not devastated.
A good friend of mine, who relied on another of your servers, was not so lucky. It appears that something went wrong with the server, his website disappeared from the web and his email messages stopped. He could not get any response from Page-Zone to fix the problem or even to explain it. It was a scramble for him to find and transfer to another host—a scramble that took him away from productive work for several days and had an impact on his business.
Yesterday I moved my marquis-kyle.com.au domain to another host.
Please cancel my account at Page-Zone.
Let this be a warning to anybody responsible for a website: Make sure you always have fresh local backups of all the files that make up your site—including all those templates, scripts and databases. And set up monitors that let you know as soon as your website goes bung.
