Projected Outage
I wandered to my hosting service’s main site this morning (domain registration is coming up, and I’m trying to determine if I want to switch to another service or not), and I noticed this announcement:
PLEASE NOTE: We will be having a scheduled service outage from approximately 10pm PST on 2/24 to 4am PST on 2/25. During this time, the owners of our data center building will be performing electrical maintenance that requires a temporary building shutdown. This temporary outage will affect customer web sites and site-related services for all hosting products.
I’m quite certain that means the site will be down tonight. If it is, check back Sunday morning.
I love how they post the announcement on their website but can’t be bothered to send out a mass-email to their customers notifying them of the same.
I was thinking the same thing. When I logged into my admin page, they had a note there, too. Unfortunately, I don’t log into my admin page every day.
The email notifying me I have 60 days until domain name expiration asked me to contact the billing department, but didn’t provide a way to do so. I don’t believe it was spam, but I went to the site and emailed the billing department from the site asking what I was supposed to do, assuming I wanted to renew with them.
The service is reliable, the package is dirt cheap (any comparable package costs about twice as much), and when I’ve contacted tech support, everything works out. I’ve had maybe two very minor glitches in the five years I’ve been with them. I’ve asked two or three questions, all answered in a more than acceptable time and manner. Their site and contact methods are “clunky” (that’s how I described them in the email this morning), but fortunately, that hasn’t really mattered — yet. I figure it’s the trade-off for a dirt cheap reliable package with lots of storage space and bandwidth. On the other hand, I’m only using about 10% of my available space and even less bandwidth, so I could get half the package for the same price and never know the difference and a company *might* have a spiffier interface. So far, I’m inclined to stay where I am.
I decided to change hosts. I’d had enough of iPower. Bluehost is already treating me very well. I’ve kept my Bluehost dashboard open in a browser tab because there are actually things to do in there. Craziness! 🙂
I’ll check them out. Thanks.