I’m almost relaxing now. Last year in the beginning of January, I realized that my old web host, CIHost was suffering terminal invasion. My own website olena.com had been hacked and was spewing out spam, etc. OK. Stuff happens. So, tired of being in my own dedicated server, and tired of being the last to be updated, and then only if I begged and paid, I moved away from CIHost to JustHost on a shared server. After a year of minimally frustrating activity after the flurry of work from the move, I got tired of their fuzzy administration and screwy tech support and asked them to consolidate all my billing. One record, one administration. I had no idea what kind of a firestorm that would light. They consolidated all my billing alright by (without my permission) putting all my clients inside olena.com as addon domains, all the data which was in the http directory of my own domain.

Then, to add insult to injury, they couldn’t move the databases over without a lot of cajoling tech support and endless waiting on hold. What a mess! Then there were email problems and poorly behaving web sites, etc. It was grinding me to a pulp with worry for my customers even though olena.com seemed not to be suffering too much.

I examined new web hosts and moved my most irate and oldest customer over to Fat Cow. I don’t blame him for being irate. He is happy now. For the rest I finally settled on a cloud server farm called Media Temple. The dedicated servers are virtual. In other words, a number of dedicated virtual (dv) server clients are on the same hardware, but it is as if they are all on separate servers.

I am not one to leave things alone, and I hit the repair button in the virtual server control panel when I couldn’t get the backup utility to do what I wanted. All hell broke loose, or maybe just my stupidity broke loose of its usual moorings. The entire server became invisible from the net, email, web hosting, etc. It was completely off line while it repaired itself. It took an hour before I had the courage to hit the restart button, after I had called tech support and they told me “good luck, you’re on your own, here’s a file that might help.” The server came up happily and it was working 100%. I can hardly believe I dodged that bullet. I am sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop. But 24 hours later, as hard as it is to believe, I think things may be OK. I am not going to hit that repair button again, unless everything is completely broken. I hope I am not stupid enough to break it like that.