Moving My Site

csoft.net decided to disable oldblog.phoneboy.com today because the main page rendering program was misbehaving. I can understand their need to protect their “shared” servers for the other users. Their method for addressing the problem leaves a bit to be desired, however. Here’s how they handle it, and how they’ve handled most of the other “problems” that have occured:

1. They disable my web site.
2. They kill any active ssh sessions I might have to the server. Considering I maintain an active ssh session for email purposes and site tweaking, I tend to notice the ssh session going down.
3. When I log into the server again, they throw up a message saying something along the lines of “we were unable to contact you, please go to the following URL for details of why your account was disabled.”
4. After sending them a WTF email (at least they don’t disable my ability to get in via imap), they get around to re-enabling my service.

Now the first item, I can understand. The second, well, it depends on the nature of the problem whether or not that seems appropriate, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. Number 3 is unacceptable because it’s a blatant lie. They make ZERO attempt to contact me before shutting me down. I’m logged into the friggin server via ssh. I’m actively using my session. Ever hear of “talk” or “write” (these are Unix servers) first, or even calling me on the phone?

Anyway, I think it’s time to find a different place to do business. Thanks to Data393 and egenity I have a dedicated server for oldblog.phoneboy.com now. It was good I stayed up late hacking on the server a few nights ago to get it “ready.” I still had a few things to do (recopy the data, troubleshoot a problem with TWiki and rcs, twiddle DNS, etc), but it went as smoothly as I can expect. Of course, I still need to find a different place to put my wife’s stuff (web-based email with her own domain) and my own email. I could use my oldblog.phoneboy.com server for all this, but I have no desire to manage a mail server. I really don’t even want to manage a web server, but it’s the only way I can make my site not suck.