Friday 22 December 2006

Pic of the day: Before you join... It may seem like a dream come true, but lately a small nightmare has been growing inside that dream.

Meta: Upload problems

For years I had lots of trouble with my archives. There just wasn't room for them all on my original online.no site, so I had to look for somewhere else to put them. I ended up with Crosswinds.net first, which at the time was almost too good to be true: No ads, unlimited free web space. It was true, but it was too good to last. Shortly after the death of a relative of one of the founders, the policy changed. Pop-up ads were hastily introduced. The servers would crash frequently - several times each month - and only "premium" (paid) sites got backed up. The rest had to upload the files, one by one, after each crash. I already had a thousand of them or more, and new arrived every day. Not fun.

I moved to Dreamwater, which was nice and free and only required a minimum level of activity, something that was hardly a problem for a daily journal. Admittedly they changed the hosting domain after a year or so, so I had to upload everything again to a new domain name, but it was still better than it had been ad Crosswinds.net.

Then the site was hacked. It came online again, but I was never able to upload again and there was no longer any way to contact the management.

My primary web site at online.no was in the meantime upgraded to allow more files, so I just managed to squeeze my archives back in there. This lasted until I could no longer bear their outrageously bad service (we are talking recurring periods of two weeks without Internet access, but what really tipped the scales was that the customer contacts were obviously lying as if they were paid to, which they just might have been... if I called three of them in a row, I would get three different stories of what the problem was, each of them sounding quite reasonable and convincing. In each case it turned out that the problem was small and could be fixed in minutes once I met a competent person. They have probably fired the competent person now, because that's the way large corporations work. Pay everyone except the bosses as little as possible and don't reward good work, then wait until all the competent people have found serious jobs elsewhere and cash in your stock options.)

In time before I left the sinking (but very large) ship, I looked for a decent web host. I no longer required or expected it to be free. I would rather pay a small amount and have reliable service and no dubious ads. (Non-dubious ads are good. If Google ever offers web hosting for user-designed sites, not just the current Blogger thing, I may go there. They may or may not he sticking to the "no evil" principle, but they are still the most reliable service on the Net in my experience.)

As you may have guessed by now, my current host (dreamhost.com) has started to act up as well. It worked fine for a year or two, probably setting a new record for me and webhosting. But for the last few months, there have been increasing problems with uploads. I can log in to the FTP site, I can change directories and browse them and even look at existing files. I just can't upload. At first the problems seems to have been in peak time, but lately there seems to be only a few hours a day that I can upload, less and less for each week, and not always at the same time either. I can easily spend more hours trying to upload an entry than I did writing it and reading the years-ago entries together. Not good.

I am not sure that you would get the same problems if you started an account on dreamhost.com today. It may be local to the server I am hosted on, and as a new user you would probably get the least loaded server; this is only common sense. In fact, I wonder if it would be easier for me to do that than to keep going on like this.

Unsurprisingly, their pretty detailed error reporting form has no category for this kind of problem. If I were unable to log in to FTP at all, I could report it, and they would probably fix it. Let's hope that happens soon, or I may have to look elsewhere. AGAIN.