Server Migration

When I woke up on Saturday at 4am to use the toilet, I made the mistake of picking up my phone. Instead of sleeping, I opened a conversation from the day before. I clicked a link to Parakeet only to find the website wasn’t loading. I went to this blog’s URL and found it similarly did not load. And then all the rest of my websites, none of which would load.

I threw off my covers and headed downstairs to my desk.

I love websites. I love making them, and I want everyone to do it. But whenever I encourage people to do so, I’m asked how I host my website. The answer is complicated.

Many years ago, when I was looking for a new host, I recalled just how many people had told me they loved MediaTemple. So, I started hosting my websites with MediaTemple. What I didn’t know at the time was that GoDaddy had acquired the company a year prior. The two hosts were entirely separate and MediaTemple was unchanged for years, which was fine. This all changed a few years ago, when every MediaTemple customer was migrated to GoDaddy’s primary platform, but grandfathered in to a specific plan that is otherwise not available. For years, I put up with GoDaddy, just because the effort to move felt too great.

But this morning, it became abundantly clear that I cannot afford to rely on them. When every one of my websites went down, I made an international phone call for support, because the “24/7 chat” button was missing on their support page, and the international phone numbers page had a 404 error. I wish I was kidding.

I spoke with outsourced support, who said the problem was obviously that nameservers for my domains were pointing to mediatemple.net and not GoDaddy’s servers. I asked them to go to mediatemple.net to see what comes up, knowing it would redirect to GoDaddy’s own website. They placed me on hold, and when they returned, I could hear them asking for me, unable to hear me. Despite having a callback number for me, they did not say anything like, “If you can hear me, I’ll call you right back!” For 5 minutes, he just kept saying my name, hoping I would reply. And I let it happen, because I didn’t want to wait in a queue again.

I hung up and called again, honestly hoping to get someone else. And I did. This person began by saying my public_html structure was incorrect. I reassured them that nothing changed while I was sleeping, and pushed back to try to find out what was going on with all my domains , not just the one that they didn’t realize was redirecting to another domain.

I’m sure we’ve all experienced support like this, where the person on the other end does not understand the issue and are not qualified to diagnose the issue. It’s maddening. But it’s downright infuriating when it’s time sensitive and it feels like your business depends on it.

In consult with “the engineers,” my support agent was told the server my websites were hosted on was in “mitigation,” which means absolutely nothing to me. The support agent started making wild guesses like how I could have been “hacked” or that I was doing some kind of “illegal” activity (he actually, honest-to-god, said “porn” which is not illegal anyway) or “malicious” behavior on the server. I was asked to provide my “location,” my ISP, and my IP address so they could try to deduce if my traffic was causing the “malfeasance” they’re seeing. (??) I refused, and asked if I could speak to the engineers, which he in turn refused because, “They make hundreds of thousands of dollars. They don’t get paid to take support calls. I get paid dollars an hour to do that.” Then I was told it could take 24–48 hours to resolve.

I called a third time, an hour later, to see if there was new information. A third agent told me that there’s nothing I can do but wait 24–48 hours for this to be resolved. I have no faith in this kind of response. I know there are reasons I shouldn’t be, but I’m shocked at the absolute disinterest in this company’s commitment to ensure the absolute highest level of uptime possible. When all is said and done, it is the only factor that really matters. When I mentioned the 99.9% uptime commitment on the front page of their website, they said “99%” allows for almost 4 days of downtime a year. I clarified that the website clearly reads 99.9% uptime, which allows for less than half a day. They argued with me, saying it did not say 99%, but I could speak to a supervisor about this, who could not solve the greater issue, but could address this concern. I waited on hold for a little bit before they told me it would be easier if they called me shortly.

The supervisor never called me. I checked in the fine print, and GoDaddy will refund you about $5 if they don’t meet this commitment. What a waste of everyone’s time.

I relay this on my own blog just to illustrate the level of bullshit I was dealing with. I searched Reddit and noticed someone suggested just a couple hours prior that GoDaddy may have shut down the MediaTemple nameservers. I don’t...