Hosting Mutters

Okay, that’s an unfair headline, but it occured to me, and I’m a sucker for a pun.

The HM folks, trying to resolve the problem with the guy super-saturating the MySQL database on the Kronos server, moved me, with my permission, over to the Calliope server.

Hilarity ensued, since I didn’t think about DNS propagation. Each of those servers has a different IP address (actually quite different), and so there was a finite period of time when folks would call up my blog (or domain) by name and still see the old server. And, if they commented, comment on the old server. And then, as the domain name mapping propagated across the Internet, they could go back and see the comment vanish. (Adam, that happened on one of yours.)

Well, that’s how it goes. No problem.

I go home, connect in … and, hey, I’m seeing the new server correctly by domain, not IP. And, ho, I can FTP to it to update my Spamassassin settings file. And ha, I get … a disk quota exceeded error?

Okay. Diddle around with the domain control panels. On Kronos, I show as burning 90.4Mb, with 34.6Mb free. On Calliope, my same account seems to burn 162.6Mb, leaving … well, -37.6Mb free.

I quickly update my help ticket, and bump the priority to Urgent … and within 30 minutes, the ever-friendly Scott had resolved the problem (a known but momentarily forgotten bug on Calliope) by the expediency of doubling my disk quota, accompanied by an apology, a thank-you for the previous kind mentions of HM, and a sincere this-should-fix-it-but-holler-if-it-doesn’t.

And it did, and I will once again mention that these folks are good. They are technically proficient (which is rare enough in the hosting community, believe it or not), but, even more importantly, they are service-oriented.

They could have simply terminated the original guy’s account. Having been on the receiving end of a termination for reasons that weren’t really my fault, I appreciate their ability to scramble in order to avoid that disruption.

They could have simply shrugged and told me that they were working on it, and they’d hopefully have it resolved in a few days.

Once they’d decided to cut me over, they could have just done it, rather than checking with me first.

Once it was all planned for the cut-over, they could have scheduled it for a day or two, or overnight.

Once they’d cut me over, they could have simply said it was done and not mention anything about DNS propagation, or answered any questions about it.

Once they’d discovered the problem with Calliope, they could have just begged off, not admitted to any error on their part, or Scott could have waited for the techie who’d been handling my problem to come back in the morning, or they could have simply noted the problem and said it would remain until they could finish debugging the problem on that server, or …

I can think of any number of hosts who would have taken the above short-cuts. So can you. They didn’t. They went out of their way to respond promptly, courteously, and helpfully.

Why can’t everyone do that?