So, what the hell happened?

Ok so if you’ve been following along for the last little while, you’re well aware that the site went through some turmoil towards the end of last week. Instead of tweeting it again and again (hey, it doesn’t fit in 140 characters anyway), I’ll lay it all out here.

Basically my former web host, Hostmonster, completely screwed me and this website. Yeah yeah yeah, I know this might sound like whining, but I’m still going to get this off my chest.

On February 13, 2009 I received an email from support saying that I was hogging system resources and they disabled my site because of it. The email also said that if I didn’t deal with this within 15 days my account would be deleted. I called them up right away to find out what the problem was, and immediately went and deleted the rogue process that was effing everything up. I replied back to the same email and said that I fixed it. Bam, the website was live again. Great right?

June of this year my hosting was up for renewal but my credit card on file had expired. Hostmonster contacted me asking if I wanted to update my card, so I did so. Website still running just fine, so no problems right? Well that’s what any normal person would assume…

For some reason on September 23, 2009, Hostmonster decided that it was time to delete me. Did I get any heads up? Nope. Was I given a backup? Nope! Was I even given an opportunity to talk to anyone before this happened? Of course not.

So on the 23rd I came home and checked traffic stats and noticed things were down. I just figured that since it was nice out that nobody gave a shit about a hockey website. The next day I (went golfing again) checked the stats again and found a total of SIX visits all day. ALARM BELLS!!!

Hit up the site and I have a “this website parked by hostmonster” message. I emailed them asking what the problem was and got the following responses (yeah, I sent one email and got 3 separate responses).

Tech Support: “You’ll have to contact billing to speak with them about this.”

Billing: “You were deleted for non payment.”

Abuse: “You were warned that if you didn’t fix your problems from Feb 13th that your account would be deleted in 15 days. We just noticed it and found out that it’s 222 days late and therefore we deleted it.”

W T F

I called in to the abuse center and spoke with them about this, and they basically told me to beat it. They didn’t have any backups available and chastised me for not keeping my own backups. I argued the fact that I fixed the problem way back in February, and that they reactivated my website then, but the guy started getting testy with me saying it’s too late and to basically go eff myself.

I emailed back and forth for a while later with the fine folks at hostmonster but it didn’t change anything. They claim that there are no backups anywhere, but I find this near impossible to believe. How can a company that relies 100% on it’s data not keep backups?

I even went as far as emailing hostmonster/bluehost’s owner, Matt Heaton with my beef, but he didn’t reply… How nice.

So yeah the website has been in shambles for the last few days, but thankfully google cache didn’t let me down and I was able to scrape back what I think is all the content. Unfortunately google didn’t index the pictures so they are all gone… that is a total piss off because I have so many posts that say “hey look at this picture! bla bla bla” so now a lot of them aren’t going to make sense. Am I going to go back and recreate them? No, there are just far too many, and a lot of them were my own screen captures of things going on, so it’s plain old impossible.

So yeah, I, we, you, got screwed by my old host. Good news is that we’re back though and hopefully stronger (with frequent backups) than ever!