echodrift

Adrift

Where do I even start. Those who follow me on twitter have seen most of everything that has happened since last Friday as it unfolded. There is so much… I don’t even know what that has go on that I wanted to sit down and write the whole thing up, start to, well, present. Cause honey, this ain’t over.

Today is June 6. I had told my landlord we would be out of our house on June 5. The plan was for us (note the emphasis) to be together in Wisconsin last night. But the best laid plans of mice and men and all that. Hang on because this is the story of the weekend that just would not end. Continue reading…

Bizarro World

(Turns out the major problem was actually my fault. It supposedly wasn’t the previous times this same issue seems to have happened. See updated post here.)

Well folks, once again it looks like I can’t access my sites from my home computer. The only reason I’m updating right now is that for some unknown reason, if I use a proxy server I can get to them no problem. This has happened in the past with my host and I have NEVER got an answer. Somehow after days, weeks, whatever, it fixes itself. This is hardly acceptable. I haven’t found any other sites that I’m not able to access except for ones that are also using this particular web host.

Really, I don’t know what’s going on and I’m really frustrated. I am trying to decide if I’m going to find new services or what. I’m sorely tempted to but I don’t want to end up in the same sort of situation. (Read: bad.)

The most frustrating thing? I was working to try to get some things updated. A tiny, small update, but update nonetheless. Then WHAMMO: can’t access the server. It just irks me that nearly every time I want to work on any of my sites they’re down. I’m serious: this is NOT the first time this exact same thing has happened. More like the fourth or fifth. And, like most sites, they claim a 99.9% uptime guarantee. Know what that translates to? Less than 9 hours of downtime in an entire year, if I’ve done my math right. Less than eight hours and forty-five minutes, to be more exact. Of course, they will tell me that right now my sites ARE up and it’s no fault of theirs.

So until I get things figured out this is just going to have to sit. Not like it hasn’t been but what can I say. Life’s been a little rough.

What gives?

Last night I sat down and was all ready to write up an entry on how I’ve spent so much time reading lately that I just haven’t bothered to blog. So I tried to bring up my WordPress Admin page when I get a “Server not found” message. Oh no, not again. So I tried another site (it is in dire need of attention and shall not be named) and got the same story. I tried to ping both sites and got a “ping request could not find the host” message. Support caught one of my tweets and looked into the issue but everything is shiny on their side. No one has problems accessing anything.

My host did make an announcement about some nameserver updates but since it really only applied to customers using nameservers I wasn’t supposed to have to do anything. Support had me to manually flush my DNS cache but when that yielded no favorable results they asked if I could change my nameservers anyway, just in case. I was able to for the neglected site but then I remembered: this domain was registered through Netrillium. A few days ago I got a message saying that Netrillium would be merging with AxisHOST. (Aside: I am so tired of businesses and products that are like LowercaseALLCAPS. Do they have any idea how annoying that is to type, especially when you have to refer to them often in typed communications?) As of Wednesday, all domain updates would be handled through the AxisHOST control center and if you didn’t already have an account you needed to request one. Of course I would need to try to update my nameservers on the day they made the switch and I didn’t already have an account.

Honestly, I don’t want to bother with changing nameservers. But, since the company says everything is fine, I don’t have many other options. I’m able to access everything now but I suspect that this is due to my using a different ISP at the moment. If it is something to do with my ISP there isn’t much I can do about that; they’re my only option for cable.

So. Entry on books to come later. You should take a look at my books page to see how large the list has grown in the meantime.