Kyle M. Perkins

Before I get started, I wanted to share this major issue that I just discovered. I was standing downstairs in our apartment today, and I thought I felt a slight breeze. After trying to narrow down the source of the mysterious wind, I found out that the door wasn't completely sealed! There was a constant gust of freezing air blowing in from between the door and the frame. Keat and I jury-rigged a light insulation system made from blankets (see below). Afterwards, I also found out that a breeze was also coming in from the window next to the door! Somehow, the sliding window frame wasn't flush with the wall, so that was poorly insulated as well! The make-shift insulator worked well, but not perfect. Hopefully, we won't be paying high electricity bills again if this works (and as soon as it gets fixed - Keat sent an email to the landlord yesterday).



On to Today:
Today wasn't much better with the subdomain issues. As you may (or may not know), I contacted the support guy yesterday with a concern about the subdomains. I received an email at about 1:30 on Thursday:

Hello,
 
Thank you for your email.
 
01. Most of your sub domains are manually configured pointing to 
 
a folder in shadowdev.com (sub net). You might need to reconfigure 
 
the httpd conf file which locates at /var/www/vhosts/shadowdev.com/conf/
 
Let us know which one is not working.
 
02. Please fill out this form:
 
http://####.com/company/cancel.php
 
Make sure you cancel the old account. Or email billing@####.com 
 
about it after you fill out the cancellation form.
 
Let us know if you have any question.

Again, notice the lack of grammar. Additionally, after I stopped the old server and requested a service termination (which I assumed was the correct course of action), I now have to fill out a stupid info form for canceling my account. I don't have an issue with forms, but this form was anything BUT professional:


Aside from being very unprofessional, the "Password" field was just a plan text field! Talk about lack of security. You would think they would at least make the Password field a password-type field!

After the old account was canceled (it took about 10 minutes after I sent the cancelation request), I received a response email at about 2:30 talking about the subdomains. My email had a dig request for the subdomains, and it showed all of the subdomains pointing to the old IP address. This is the response I received:

Hello,
 
Thank you for your email. They all point to the new IP now. What i did 
 
was that i logged on the old control panel, go to each sub domains, and
 
switch the 'subscription' to the new one. DNS record will automatically 
 
pick up the new ones on the new VPS account. Let us know if you have any
 
question.

Again, notice the lack of grammar.

I then sent another email saying that the subdomains are pointing to "Apache Test Pages." This basically meant that the subdomains were pointing to the correct server, but to the wrong location. For those of you who know the Plesk system, it seemed that the web server was ignoring the custom file locations in httpd.include and going back to the original file locations for when the subdomains were created. What a pain! As far as a response....none yet.

Later, I received an automated email saying that my server space was almost used up. At first, I thought, "How can that be possible? I transfered about ~20GB of info from a 30GB server. How can I use up 50GB already?" I didn't really install anything super-large and there wasn't anything added to the domains that was huge. I remembered that I told the control panel to perform a backup, about 2 days ago. I guess it finally got done (and duplicated the whole server, which can easily eat up any remaining space). So I went through and told it to delete it. I think it's still doing it...

Lastly, I don't mind the spotty support service or the server transistion issues, but if there is one thing that bugs me about 3rd party hosting, it's downtime. I subscribe to a free service called Pingdom which pings the web server every minute testing for downtime. Here's the latest result of uptime:

Yeah, one major issue there.

I finally got home, and Keat and I watched American Dad while we ate dinner (gotta love Netflix). After about 4 episodes, we went to bed. So....'Nite!

PS: Happy Hanukkah to my Jewish friends!