Powweb Web Hosting Sucks
Hello again. As you can see, Say Anything is back online. Kind of.
The template will be changing, this is just temporary. And there will likely be some bugs until we get everything ironed out, but for now this works.
For those of you who don’t know the recent outage was caused by a feud which erupted between myself and my webhost, Powweb. As far as price and bandwidth resources go they’re a great company, but when it comes time to get some support from them they’re terrible.
What started it all was when they shut my site down for what they told me later was an “abusive script.” At the time, however, all I got from them was a one-line email reading “MySQL abuse too many connections.” Aside from the subject line, which read “Account Suspension” that was the sum total of information contained in the email.
So I called Powweb and was told by a tech there that there was nothing they could do for me. They couldn’t tell me which script had caused the problem nor any of the particulars on the problem itself. They said that all I could do is reply to the abuse email and wait for a response. So I did that and waited.
And waited. And waited.
Thirty hours later I’d had enough. My site was down and I was losing traffic. I called them again and was told, again, that I had to wait for a response. I told them that waiting this long without even knowing what the problem was is unacceptable. I was told, essentially, “Too bad.”
So instead of layind down and taking it I put up a static page on my site to get around the MySQL problem and explain to you, my readers, what was going on. I included links to Powweb’s support chat room as well as their customer service email and telephone number. Many of you got in touch with Powweb asking for anwers to my problem. Rather than respond by addressing the issue, they deleted my site.
All of my images, all of Say Anything’s 5,000+ posts. Everything. Gone.
Luckily I had grabbed a backup of the posts and images before they did it. I still lost my templates, but those can be re-created, which we’re in the process of doing now.
After Powweb deleted everything I called them to ask for an explanation. I could understand them not wanting to do business with me in the future. That’s a childish response, but certainly their decision. But deleting everything on a whim? That’s a bullshit move.
The tech I talked to was pretty smug about the whole thing. He was obviously pretty familar with Say Anything and told me, in response to my question about giving me access to get what I needed off my account, that my “right wing tactics” weren’t going to work on them.
I’d hate to say that Powweb’s cancelation of my account was politically motivated, but its clear that at least one technician their who worked on my site’s hosting holds some biases. Regardless, their handling of my situation was totally unprofessional.
So, in the future, those of you looking for web hosting would do well to steer clear of this company. There are simply too many other hosting companies out there for you to take a chance on going through something I like I’ve been through in the last few days.
Anyway, I’ll be continuing to work on getting Say Anything back to what it was before all of this over the next few days. In the mean time, you could really help me out by donating a few bucks (if you haven’t already) to helping me pay for the new hosting package and template design. My blogging budget wasn’t prepared for this Powweb debacle and the whole thing has hit me rather hard in the wallet.
