The website host I was using was costing me over $100 every single month to run a Drupal installation because the PHP Memory limit could not be sustained on a community server. I chose a place that was less-expensive than some, yet it was still very pricey for a guy like me. The host ran the site well enough, after I struggled with a language barrier with the technical crew for nearly three weeks in order to get it transferred from the community server where it crashed because of that PHP memory limit.

The tech crew at my now former website host was filled with people who were truly very nice; their accents were just so thick that despite the fact that they spoke English, communication was nearly impossible. Email exchanges left me wondering how well they understood the written form of English, something I don’t hold against them in any way; but again - communications were very hampered. It finally took an engineer to get what amounted to a kind of, ’super-blog,’ up and running.

Then came the attacks from some unknown malicious people in the world who decided that this particular website host was suitable for an attempt at proving something. My site crashed repeatedly because these, ‘hackers,’ found it amusing to take down not only my site, but anyone’s on the entire cloud across the planet. My former host’s little robots did their very best - but the downtime was still there.

In the meantime, there were no refunds for time lost. There were no widespread general apologies. When I examined how much I was actually spending on this poor service, I realized that it really *was* time to look for service elsewhere.

I found another website host and politely paid a final month’s worth of service to my former host. I backed up my site, and informed my former host that they needed to point the nameservers (something that tells the Internet where to look for your website) to my new location. What did my former host do? They essentially held my site, ‘hostage’ while playing dumb.

First it was a case of, ‘musical departments.’ “I’m sorry, you will have to get ahold of department X in order to address that issue.” Contacting department X found them saying, “I don’t understand,” in so many words. “Could you please give us further information?” and blah, blah, blah. All of the information they needed was contained in three sentences of plain language.

Due to the actions of my former website host - I have lost everything associated with my former site. It is all sitting here on my desktop computer at home in a nice backup of the Drupal site; I cannot access it unless I reinstall the entire Drupal installation at my new host, something that is extremely time consuming. It took me three months to create.

So…I will, ‘rescue,’ the files I can - and move on from here with a new website name. Gee Thanks, former website host…I appreciate your less than kind services and lack of consideration for your customers.

Tom.