iamPariah.com Will Return in January

After the first of the year I Am Pariah​.com, The Memes List, and the Saturday Slant will all be back up and run­ning at break­neck pace. They will be run­ning off a brand new WordPress instal­la­tion, on a fast, reli­able serv­er. They will run on the same servers that cur­rent­ly pow­er QuarkVSInDesign​.com.

I hope you’ll come back to read, and for­give my igno­rance for not real­iz­ing ear­li­er what a sleazy com­pa­ny my web hoster real­ly is.

As you may have read here
Blog – Blog… Crumbling… MT… Dying…, the tech­nol­o­gy under­ly­ing this blog is falling apart. I did­n’t dis­cov­er until recent­ly, until after months of touble-shooting the site and soft­ware, how far under was the prob­lem. But, very recent­ly I did find out exact­ly what was falling apart, why, and how.

It turns out the host­ing com­pa­ny I use as of this writ­ing, the oft com­plained about Interland (here, here, and espe­cial­ly here) is screw­ing me.

I did­n’t choose Interland, mind you.

Several years ago I signed up with Communitech, a cus­tomer service-oriented host with a sol­id rep­u­ta­tion. I brought all of my sites to Communitech, and I was served well and charged fair­ly for years. Then, in 2002, Communitech was bought out by Interland in a deal that would lat­er prove Interland’s amaz­ing pro­fi­cien­cy at screw­ing not only its cus­tomers but every­one (details here).

After the buy­out, ser­vice degrad­ed quick­ly, includ­ing six instances on which ser­vice was down in excess of 12 hours–three such instances where this and oth­er domains were out for more 24 hours. Customer ser­vice and sup­port was also hor­ri­ble. When Interland did respond to requests for help, it was non-responsive and inept.

I’ve been work­ing pro­fes­sion­al­ly the Internet since 1994; work­ing with com­put­ers for near­ly ten years longer than that. I build high­ly pro­grammed sites–this site is PHP, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, SQL, and Perl (in no par­tic­u­lar order). I’m a novice who asks stu­pid ques­tions (often). But the ques­tions I asked–things like “what is the path to [some serv­er program”–were met with the e‑mail equiv­olants of blank stares. Interland’s sup­port depart­ment is full of under­trained personnel.

But, I stuck with Interland because my Communitech rates and ser­vices were guar­an­teed for life–unlimited band­width was the key thing–genuine, hon­est to good­ness, unlim­it­ed band­width. Communitech’s client con­tracts guar­an­teed fixed rates and ser­vices for life, and Interland’s pur­chase agree­ment spec­i­fied that it was required to hon­or those con­tracts. Thus, I and tens of thou­sands of oth­er clients, were grand­fa­thered into Interland.

Over the past year, my servers have encoun­tered a vari­ety of prob­lems. Most notably has the been degen­er­a­tion of this blog’s abil­i­ty to function.

For the last eight months read­ers of IamPariah​.com have report­ed increas­ing dif­fi­cul­ty post­ing com­ments. In October the com­ment­ing issues cul­mi­nat­ed a total inabil­i­ty to post com­ments on this blog. Not even I, the blog’s admin­is­tra­tor, can post a comment.

The com­ment­ing prob­lems pre­ced­ed the post­ing prob­lems; for you to read this, I will spend approx­i­mate­ly 20 min­utes fight­ing with the sys­tem to get it posted–that’s 20 min­utes after I fin­ish writ­ing the post.

I thought it was the blog soft­ware, Movable Type (“MT”), with the prob­lem. Silly me for lis­ten­ing to tech sup­port. I dis­cov­ered through exploit­ing the igno­rance of Interland’s sup­port per­son­nel that the serv­er issues are intentional.

Blog or any soft­ware requires cer­tain serv­er based process­es and soft­ware be run­ning. Whats more, just like any desk­top appli­ca­tion, blog soft­ware requires cer­tain ver­sions of serv­er process­es and soft­ware. MT, for exam­ple, requires that the serv­er (high­er up than my web­site) run PHP ver­sion 3.23 or high­er (PHP is a pro­gram­ming lan­guage). If a serv­er does­n’t have that ver­sion or high­er, MT will not func­tion as expect­ed or at all.

This is the prob­lem with this blog: The PHP instal­la­tion is no longer the cor­rect version.

Until ear­li­er this year, it was the cor­rect ver­sion (high­er, as a mat­ter of fact). And it was the cor­rect ver­sion since before I signed on with Communitech.

Interland down­grad­ed the ver­sion of PHP, as, I sus­pect, they down­grad­ed sev­er­al oth­er sys­tems key to the func­tion of their clients’ sites.

Why would they do that? Because of the con­tracts grand­fa­thered in from Communitech clients. Interland was­n’t mak­ing as much mon­ey from us as it could. So, Interland silent­ly down­grad­ed crit­i­cal serv­er sys­tems, ren­der­ing clients’ sites par­tial­ly or whol­ly unusuable.

When clients asked for help with some­thing not work­ing on their web­sites, Interland pushed them to pur­chase new, higher-priced con­tracts with­out the Communitech fea­ture or price guarantees.

This ploy worked on many of Interland’s less savvy cus­tomers. I’ve been around the block a few times, though. More to the point, I sus­pect, had the where­with­all to fol­lowup on what Interland told me the prob­lem was. When it did­n’t pan out, I did some digging.

I talked to a few Interland employ­ees, ran a few inde­pen­dent sys­tem ver­i­fi­ca­tion tests on my servers, and did some exper­i­ment­ing with the help of net­work­ing and Internet gurus.

What I dis­cov­ered is what I said above: Interland is inten­tion­al­ly caus­ing its clients’ sites to break, then push­ing new con­tracts on the clients as a means of get­ting around the Communitech contracts.

Next quar­ter, I was told by one Interland rep, prices will go up.

Interland is get­ting away with its sys­tem­at­ic screw­ing of clients because most of them do not know any bet­ter. This is one who does.

Au revoir, Interland.

After the first of the year I Am Pariah​.com, The Memes List, and the Saturday Slant will all be back up and run­ning at break­neck pace. They will be run­ning off a brand new WordPress instal­la­tion, on a fast, reli­able serv­er. They will run on the same servers that cur­rent­ly pow­er QuarkVSInDesign​.com.

I hope you’ll come back to read, and for­give my igno­rance for not real­iz­ing ear­li­er what a sleazy com­pa­ny my web hoster real­ly is.