Tag ix webhosting sucks

So yesterday morning I received yet another TOS (terms of service) violation email from my good buddies at IX Web Hosting.  Evidently the participants from the Turkey Trot hitting the GCR web site was too much traffic for my “unlimited” shared hosting plan to handle.  As is always the case when this happens, IX simply turns your site off until you contact them.

So I decide to go through their Romanian online chat tech support instead of dealing with their India based phone help desk.  After waiting close to 30 minutes I finally get someone on the other side and after another 20 minutes my site is finally turned back on after I promised to follow the guidelines the support person sent me via email.

Well I have had years and years of problems with IX including their insecure servers which allowed my sites to be hacked repeatedly, poor reliability and performance, highlighted by the SIX DAY outage when they had a SAN crash, and their brilliant decision to outsource their US based call center to India.  The only way you get to speak to an American now is if you want to buy something from them.  If you have a problem you get to deal with an Indian on the other side of the globe who you will be lucky to understand every third word out of their mouth.

So anyway I finally took some action and although it isn’t a total IX divorce it gets me out from under the threat of TOS bullshit.  I migrated the WordPress sites I use for Dufisthenics and the running club to GoDaddy yesterday.  The plan I bought includes up to 5 WordPress installations so I figured I may as well take advantage of it. I am planning to move the blog you are currently reading there as well once I work out a couple bugs.

The GoDaddy hosting I bought is tailored and optimized for WordPress so I shouldn’t have to deal with the normal shared hosting bullshit I have consumed from IX for so long.  Another barrier to me moving hosts was the hassle in doing so.  GoDaddy can make this process stupidly easy.  You provide them access to your current site and they can duplicate it on their hosting in less than an hour.  It’s awesome.

I am actually using a hybrid approach to this since I already have stuff like domain names, DNS and email bought and paid for on IX which works fine.  I would have to pay extra if I wanted to duplicate that service on GoDaddy.  So I am just leaving that stuff as is and just moving the WordPress installations which will basically eliminate the vast majority of my problems with IX.  It feels good to move away from the source of so many of my cyber-headaches.

After work I bought a small palm sander, another kitchen corner inspired purchase.  Cindy used it last night to do all sorts of smoothing and rounding of edges on the table top.  When she was done the counter top had a distressed look that was sort of cool but the plan is for Cindy to hit it with one more layer of stain before finishing it off with a glaze coat.

I had my hole bit attached to my drill last night to drill two holes, one in the inside of the corner cabinet to access the electrical outlet and a second one on the counter top to route the cords through.

This morning I started my Thursday morning unconventionally with prolonged, laugh out loud inciting videos.  The first was LA Beast swallowing 15 hot dogs without chewing them.

The second video was a hilarious scientific explanation of how to find a wife using careful formulas that utilize a crazy versus hot graph.  It is amazingly funny.

So this quick rant is about my good buddies at IX Web Hosting.  No, I have not taken the initiative to tackle the monster task of migrating all of my content/sites to some other host so in the end, shame on me. But let’s not let that get in the way of a good rant.

So I get one of those delightful TOS violation emails this morning from IX.  Every time I have received one of these, and there have been quite a few, it has to do with something on one of my sites consuming too many CPU cycles.  I was surprised but no less annoyed to see that my violation was of a different nature this time.  They said that I was consuming too much disk space.  Between all of my domains a total of 31 gigs of space was being utilized.

The email said, among other things, ” if you do not reduce the disk space used in your account to the requested levels within 7 days of this notice, your account will be suspended and content will be deleted soon after. If you receive another ticket for a disk space usage, we will have to take further action and may permanently suspend service to your account to prevent further disruption to other customers on the server.”

Well I felt two things after reading this email, surprise and anger.  I was surprised I would have 31 gig of data up there,  but even if I did, the plan I signed up for boasted that I had UNLIMITED disk space available to me.  I responded back very simply with “My hosting plan was sold with “unlimited storage space” why is this not being honored?”

In the meantime I did some digging around and found the source of bloat, a back up plug in I used for the Bar-barians web site which was dumping the back up files inside the server.  Deleting them immediately relinquished 24 gig of space but still, I was pissed off on principal alone.

IX has had so many blunders, missteps, and epic fails over the last 5-6 years I just have no patience for even the tiniest amount of bullshit when it comes from them.  So, when I received back my reply to my reply I was even more annoyed. “Please keep your account disc space usage below 30 GB in order to avoid same issue in future.
I understand your disappointed at this case but please note that by “unlimited” word we mean that we do not set a hard limit to how much space you can use. However, your account is still a shared hosting account, and you have to share resources with other customers on the server. While we normally allow customers to use as much as they need, we do have to take action when a customer’s usage becomes disruptive to others on the server.”

What the fck is that supposed to mean?  So “unlimited” means no hard limit is set, and you can have as much space as you need, as long as it isn’t too much. Have a nice day.

So I sent pack one more reply to “Prakash” who must be a member of that stellar India based help desk IX migrated to several months back.  ” I understand you are not based in the USA but UNLIMITED means unlimited, as in no limits, as in no hard limits. It seems that IX is not providing the services that it advertises.”

Of course this is just one of the many, many reasons I should drop IX webhosting.  I WILL do it, I just need to have a large block of time to make it all happen.

So yesterday I developed an issue with one of my WordPress sites I host with IX webhosting.  When I would try to authenticate to the WordPress dashboard I would be presented with a 403 Forbidden error.  Sometimes a WordPress plug in can cause odd behavior like this so the first thing I did was rename the plug ins directory to eliminate that possibility.  It still threw a 403 error.  Oh well I guess I’ll have to call support.

Any long time blog reader of mine is aware of the many, many issues I have had with IX Webhosting over the years, there are too many to enumerate.  However one thing I actually did like was that their call center was located in Ohio and I could at least speak with somebody that has English as a primary language.  They also have an online chat but that is staffed by Romanians whose communication skills are less than stellar, so I prefer to call in when I have a problem.

So I call the number and am on hold for a very long time, at least 15 minutes.  The reward for my patience was the other line finally being picked up by somebody with a very strong Indian accent on a poor quality line.   Immediately I could feel my blood pressure elevate.  Don’t tell me that IX has outsourced their call center to India…

So as is almost always the case when dealing with an Indian phone representative, the conversation was peppered with lots of “What?”, “Say that again..”, and “Huh?”.  It was frustrating as hell.  The communication barrier and the guys obviously lower level of technical expertise resulted in my problem not being resolved.  I hung up in near disbelief.  After having a four day plus outage several months ago that cost their customers collectively hundreds of thousands of dollars in downtime, they decide to ship phone support to India, something that is is universally seen as a hated practice for customers.  Indian help desks suck, plain and simple.

The move just piled onto the multitude of reasons I should have abandoned IX webhosting years ago.  The ONLY reason I have not bolted is because of the massive amount of work and time that will be required for me to re-home the NINE web sites I house there.  It will be horrible.  It needs to get done however, I can’t continue to reward horrible customer service with my dollars.  I guess I need to start doing some homework.

Cindy has been having some issues with her phone connecting to my in home wifi network.  I found something online about some compatibility issues with my D-link router which is at least 5-6 years old at this point.  I used it as a good reason to refresh my in home wifi network.  I purchased an ASUS RT-AC66U dual band router after reading a number of surprisingly good reviews.  I never bought an ASUS router nor knew they even produced them.  This is the first time I have ever used anything beside a Linksys or D-Link router in my house.

After screen shotting all of the configuration on my old router I shut it down and put the ASUS in place.  Getting the ASUS online had some hurdles to clear and bugs to squash but I had most of it done before we ate dinner.  I like the UI for router, it is easy to navigate and as powerful as you need it to be.  The wireless performance boost was noticeable.  The 54 megabit top speed of my old router is now tripled, Cindy’s laptop was showing a 150 mb wifi connection, sweet.

Tomorrow Cindy and I fly out for PA for my sisters wedding.  It is going to be a very quick hitting visit with our flight back leaving early Monday morning.  I believe it is the first time I am stepping foot in the greater Reading area in at least three years, wow.  The major to do besides the wedding is to see my brother’s new house.  Other than that I will be giving Cindy a whirlwind tour of the area that I used to call home.

Tonight I have to run the dogs back to Ali’s place so they can be picked up by dogsitter number two.  Ali does not return until Saturday sometime.  I then will head home to do a whirlwind packing job followed by hopefully reasonable bedtime since the flight rolls out at a ridiculously early 6AM.

So finally, finally, finally, my DB driven websites came back online early yesterday afternoon after being down since early Sunday morning.  Since I have had a presence on the internet in the 90’s, I have never had my content be down this amount of time.

To have this type of outage in 2014 is even more incredulous since high availability technology has improved so much in the last 5 years.  IX really has managed to set the bar to a new low.  I am pretty sure no major webhost in the last 5 years has had an outage of this duration.

The official description of the incident was IX’s RAID 14+2 SAN had a drive fail, and then as a hot spare was being swapped in, another drive failed which put the entire SAN into a failed state.

I have questions about why this would happen as the SAN was described as actually being 5 storage arrays, each one with 14 drives  in it.  I don’t follow why a failure of two drives in one of the 5 arrays would bring down the whole shebang.   If a massive array of 90 hard drives was toppled that easily then there was some poor engineering/planning/configuration utilized.

Last night I received an email from Faithi Said, the CEO of IX, declaring the recovery process was now officially complete with a promise of a full investigation of the circumstances that lead up to this mess.  Noticeably absent from this email was any mention of compensation for this clusterfck.  Many, many people literally lost thousands of dollars as a result of this outage.  A simple “sorry, our bad…” just isn’t going to cut it.

Last night on the way home I picked up a Craftsman tractor shade at the small Sears location in Bonita Springs.  I bought it online.  I had the option of having it shipped to a store and picking it up for free or paying almost $70 to have it shipped to my door.  It was a pretty easy decision to go pick it up.

The store appeared to have exactly one employee in it, at least while I was there.  It seemed pretty representative of the dire situation I read that the Sears family is in.  As I was waiting for the guy to be free I walked around the store, mostly looking at kitchen appliances since I have plans to update my set sometime in the future.  I was surprised at just how expensive most of what I looked at was.  There was a fridge sitting there tagged at $3600, wtf??  Sure it was big, something like 33 cubic feet but still it gave me sticker shot.  The floor was littered with high priced appliances, tons of them $2k or more.  Obviously Sears is not looking to be a low price leader, sheesh.

So the guy retrieves the box and asks me if I have the confirmation email on my phone.  I realized I did not.  I ordered the canopy the same day my IX servers went down.  The email confirmation was one of the casualties as initially IX f’d up and had things configured so people sending email to me would have gotten an undeliverable bounce message, meaning a number of emails sent to me in the first 24 hours vaporized in the the internet bit bucket, including the Sears email, great. Luckily he was able to confirm my order using some other method.

I actually have thought about getting a canopy for my yard tractors for years, ever since I saw my old neighbor Rick tooling around his yard on his sun shaded John Deere.  With my skin cancer history, avoiding unnecessary sun exposure is a smart move.

The addition of the canopy will make certain tractor maneuvers no longer possible under low hanging objects but I’ll trade that inconvenience for a less UV intensive and 10 degree cooler mowing experience.

This weekend we have a BIG movie to see, the sequel to 300 comes out.  As silly as it sounds, the original 300 really had a big impact on my life.  It was that movie and the published 300 workout that the actors on the film used that transformed my fitness routine.  Up until that point in my life my gym routines were pretty static, routine and yielded no real results beyond maintaining my current level of fitness.

The 300 workout is a brutal circuit that really pushed my mental and physical endurance boundaries.  I was REALLY into it.  I even have two pages dedicated to it the description of the workout and my log of 300 workouts which I maintained for 2-3 years.  When I did 300’s I had no real concept of the difference using full ROM and good form made.  Looking back now, with many of the movements I used poor form.

My 300 workouts eventually morphed into my current day calisthenics/bar focused exercise regimen that I have been doing for most of my 40’s.  So the point is, to me a new 300 movie is a big f’n deal. Cindy is a big 300 fan as well so we both are very excited to go see the film in 3D on Saturday night. I HOPE it lives up to epic-ness of the original.

I am planning a double endurance training weekend with hopefully a 5 mile run tomorrow backed up by a bike swim/brick on Sunday.  We also might be doing more work with getting the house ready for a full time second occupant.

Another dissatisfied IX Webhosting customer found my blog.  To say she is dissatisfied is an understatement.  She is on the all out war path.  Any idea that the problems I had with IX were an isolated thing have been blown out of the water.  Check this out!

Other than pressure washing the pool cage and lanai, I didn’t have a huge weekend agenda.  In fact I had enough time on Saturday to accompany Ali to the pet groomer.  We were baby sitting the neighbors dog so we all piled into the party van and headed out.  Nicki has her nails trimmed regularly.  We used to do it ourselves but had some bad incidents where we cut too far and hurt Nicki.  They only charge 10 bucks or so to do it so it’s worth it.  Zoe’s nails were very long as well so while we were there we had them do hers as well. 

We have been recording a bunch of classic xmas specials off ABC family.  We have been watching them as we go.  I especially like the old style stop animation style specials like Rudolph and The Little Drummer Boy.  It goes hand in hand with our increase in Christmas spirit this year.  I forgot to mention that Ali scored a scented candle that smells just like a real Christmas tree, addressing the biggest problem with an artificial tree, the lack of a fresh tree smell.  I am liking the combination.

So Sunday I set aside to clean the pool cage and lanai.  Doing so is a two part process, first I go around with the shop vac and try to suck up dirt, spider webs and any other loose matter.  I did this part of the job on Saturday actually.  Oh I forgot, I decided to put BOTH Dirt Dogs into duty to help sweep up the pool deck, the old one that has taken two swims in the pool and a brand new one that has never been used yet.  They were both diligently out there sweeping away for quite awhile.  I went out to check on their progress when I witnessed a very unwelcome sight, the brand new Dirt Dog sitting motionless on the bottom of the pool…  SON OF A BITCH. 

Now since I have had this happen twice before I knew this wasn’t necessarily a death sentence for the robot, however it still annoyed me quite a bit.  As I set the robot out to dry I tried to analyze why the brand new Dirt Dog joined the aquatic robot club.  My theory is the brand new tires were a bit slick.  As a result when the robot did the immediate direction reversal when it sensed the pool edge the tires slipped on the concrete and the momentum sent it over the edge.  So assuming Dirt Dog 2 survives it’s bath, I will keep it regulated to safer jobs like cleaning the garage and shed until it’s tires get worn in a bit.

Ok, back to Sunday.  One of the biggest hassles with cleaning the pool cage is reaching the areas of the frame up high directly over the pool.  Even with me standing on a ladder and using every inch of my considerable reach, I have never been able to proper clean certain sections of the frame.  Well I had a new plan to address the problem.  I again utilized the pole saw.  I tied the pressure washer gun to the end of the pole saw and then used some velcro ties to keep the handle locked in the on position.  I then carefully extended the pole and clumsily attempted to clean the frame.  As you can imagine it was sort of difficult to accurately aim the contraption but it was more or less working except for another problem, the wand end.

  The wand on the washer has been problematic for awhile.  Instead of using a steady angle spray, it utilizes a small fitting inside the head that shoots out water in a concentrated stream as it rotates around.  I never liked it much since it didn’t have any way to adjust the pressure of the stream.  If you got it too close to something it could rip right through it .  Well the head that spins around has been getting stuck and going around slower than it should.  This was making it ineffective in cleaning.  As I strained to hold the pole and gun in place I had no patience for a shitty performing cleaning head so I decided to go get something else.

I shot out to Home Depot and looked to see what they had available in the replacement pressure wash wand department. I was excited by what I found.  I grabbed a new wand that had quick release couplings and a set of quick release heads that allowed you to shoot a stream anywhere from a leisurely 45 degree spray to a “drill a hole through your leg” ZERO degree laser stream.  I also found a three foot extension from the same manufacturer that would give me much more range with my pressure washer!  I grabbed it all and hurried home, hopeful that my pressure washing duties were about to get much easier.

I assembled the new wand and extension and attached it to my pressure washer.  I now had what looked like a pressure washing lance at my command as it extended nearly 7 feet outward.  I squeezed the trigger and was instantly greeted with feelings of pleasure.  It worked perfectly.  I was able to reach every inch of the pool cage without even stepping foot on a ladder.  It wasn’t exactly easy at times.  In certain situations I was standing on the edge of the pool with my arms fully extended, supporting the 7 foot pressure gun precariously as I blasted sections of the cage that were far away.  It was not an ideal situation to help my tendonitis get any better.  I didn’t care and plowed ahead. 

I was so into cleaning the area that I did something I never did before, I pressure washed the outside of the cage as well.  After spending a couple hours just on the cage section I still had to do the tedious duty of blasting the concrete pool deck.  All in all I spent nearly 5 hours on the project.  It looks great, as great as a 6 year old pool and 3 year old pool cage can look. 

Ali was out with my mom at some Christmas music performance.  I was quite beat after power washing all day and just vegged.  I flipped on the TV and found the Merrill Lynch Shootout on NBC.  I thought it was quite cool to have a tournament hosted  in Naples nationally televised.  I found myself looking in the crowd for familiar faces.  The tournament director is a friend of ours which made it more special.  He’s in my fantasy football league as a matter of fact.

After watching a bit of the Steelers/Ravens game I decided to catch Hellboy 2.  Just like the first one, I found this movie very enjoyable.  I never once had the urge to look at the clock, yawn or say to myself silently “this just got stupid”.  It was a good time from beginning to end with bad guys that are really bad and an unconventional super hero that you can’t help but like.  Good flick, A-.

So I found out over the weekend that not only does my mom read my blog, my mother-in-law does as well.  No more writing about my wild orgies and rampant illegal drug use.