People are even asking *me* where Dogmomster is. That is, The Commander asked me. I can’t lie and say that mobs of people are beating down my door wanting to know. Where is Dogmomster? Are you holding her hostage? Yiiiii! But still. Wanna know what’s up with Dogmomster’s blahg?

She is still stuck at my crappy old host server, Purehost. It’s really her story to tell but I’ve been in her shoes, so I’ll tellya my story, which is similar to hers. Maybe it’s finally okay for me to tell that story in a somewhat coherent way. Since I finally escaped it a couple months ago.

I didn’t proactively choose Purehost in the first place. Getting there was a whole long story of meandering around the net through various free hosts back in the wild, wild west days when things were flashing and blinking all over the place. I finally settled on a real, paid host in the laziest possible manner by choosing one that a friend was using. It wasn’t Purehost. That came later, when my first host decided to get outta Dodge and dumped me and all of its other customers over onto Purehost.

But Purehost was okay. It was up most of the time and when all you have on your site is a bunch of static html pages, that’s about all that counts. Even after I got tired of rolling my own blahg and installed WordPress, it was okay for a long time. Late last summer, the whole thing gradually started to grind to a halt. I mean literally. At first I hardly noticed that it was taking ababsurdo a longer time to load. I figured Comcast was just being glitchy or whatever.

It got worse and worse. It got so every time I navigated to any of my blahg’s administrative pages, it was about a five minute load time. Or it would just plain timeout and I’d lose my post. Emailed pleas for help generated replies that were all over the map.

I won’t go into detail here but I figured out all on my own that they were having some kind of problem related to php or mysql or both. Now, the fact that I am a baggy old blonde kayak woman may not inspire a lot of people to have much confidence in my intelligence. And I won’t argue with them although I may turn around and roll my eyes at Elizilla, the quintessential eye-roller. But I do just happen to have *some* experience with web-based relational databases. So I started asking questions of a more targeted nature. The responses I got fell into one of two camps: “I don’t even know what eez that” and “I ain’t gonna tell you so I’ll just bullshit you with whatever”. Perhaps that last response shouldda been phrased “my boss won’t let me tell you so I’ll just give you a crap response”.

Some honest support guy finally stuck his neck out and owned up to the fact that Purehost was having issues with mysql and it would take *two weeks* to fix it. And they did fix it. It was better for a while. But then things started to slow down again. That time, I had had just about enough, and I jumped ship. But it is still going on and Dogmomster is still caught up in it.

I just do not understand why. Technorati reported that it is tracking 112.8 million blahgs as of this morning. I’m not sure if all of those blahgs run on top of a mysql database but since that’s what WordPress runs on, there are certainly a *lot* that do. You would think that any host service worth its salt would make a firm commitment to providing *service* to its customers with blahgs. We could talk about price here but we won’t because this isn’t really about money.

I’m ranting about Purehost right now and their mysql issues are their own and I’m glad I don’t have to deal with all of that any more. But the crappy customer service issues are not limited to Purehost. Crappy service exists all over hell and gone. You guys, get a grip. I don’t even pretend to want to know what it’s like to work in your bubble. I *know* you have issues that a customer like me can’t even imagine. But when I write to you to ask why my blahg loads like molasses, you insult me when you tell me stuff like it’s my fault because my page is “too long” or I don’t have 24 tables in my WordPress installation. “Clear your cache” is the biggest cop-out in the blahgiverse. And if you can’t duplicate the issue inside your development environment, maybe you oughtta deploy a contingent of “support” folks to the nearest Starbucks to find out how long the sites you host take to load from “the outside” or whatever you call it.

I am out of steam. Enough said. But that’s where Dogmomster is these days. We’re gonna try to *move* her outta there. Kee-reist!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 7:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.