Website Issues

Today we had a big run-in with our data-center. First of all; over the past 3 weeks that this site has been up (and not counting the 3 years my other sites have been), our data center’s quailty of hosting has been rather bad. However last night, we had an issue where they claimed that their Air Conditioning unit had failed, which would make the 9th time this year it has. What they do not know is I am a network technician; I know whether the server is still there or not. By running multiple pings I could tell they were having severe network problems — not a problem that would be caused by such an event as an air conditioner failing. A/C Units are vital in a server farm such as this place had, but these units do not fail 9 times per year.

After all was said and done with, I told them I would be canceling my service which was paid through July 18, 2010. Upon confirming that I was wanting to cancel the service, they in turn and very “smart-assed” said, “Well there is an early termination fee of ten-thousand dollars ($10,000.00) plus any damages incurred to the early termination of your service.” I asked for the data, then, on the server and was replied to with, “You currently owe us ten-thousand dollars for termination of your yearly contract with us (which is already paid for) and until that is paid, we will not unlock your server. If you should not pay this fine, we will destroy your data by the first of the year.”

Clearly, our data is now being held hostage with a ransom of $10,000.00 and a deadline of January 1, 2010. I have switched data-centers now and have the new site up and running, however I think that our data is lost is going to hurt pretty badly. I have done what I can to retrieve what files were indexed by Google and other web-services out there, but I don’t think it will help much.