Those who frequent Barely a Blog know by now that we’ve been down for close on two weeks.
Our host, the FrontPages Web Hosting Network, crashed the server, bungled the backup (or didn’t backup), and corrupted the “backup” data. All this, during a sloppy upgrade/transfer. Forensic recovery service was apparently initiated, but we saw no evidence of a positive outcome.
Follow-up service, moreover, was non-existent. I cannot speak for the hundreds of clients affected, but I was not informed of the bungle, or of the steps being taken to put things right. Hell, as far as I’m concerned nothing was done to correct matters. We were left hanging.
FrontPages Web Hosting is a Third World operation by any other name.
IlanaMercer.com is on the Microsoft FrontPage System, a clunker of a system, but extremely reliable—the site is automatically backed up on one’s PC. (Now that I’m in the process of having a new website designed, I also realize the FrontPage System offers the best editing tools.) We could easily have uploaded IlanaMercer.com right away on one of their functioning servers, but we decided that this would give the incompetents a way to wiggle out of forensically resurrecting the blog. So we waited until it became untenable. After contacting what goes for technical support at FrontPages Web Hosting repeatedly, it transpired that they were unable to locate the blog data base. Lost it; couldn’t find it, whatever.
Naturally, I had been backing my blog up diligently. As you know, BAB is a companion to my main site. On it I offer original daily commentary; not mere links to other reports and commentary. FrontPages Web Hosting appears to have made changes to the backup procedure, so that my backup had been incomplete for close on a year. The consequence of this is that a large portion of the blog has now to be restored manually. Your comments for the last year were lost.
If you are Fujifilm, Honda, and Intel—big customers with dedicated servers—you’re, no doubt, treated well by FrontPages Web Hosting. My business they handled with contempt. I would go so far as to say that this company operates in bad faith (not toward Boeing and the Library of Congress, I’m sure). What else would you call an Internet host that fails to back up its (smaller) clients’ data properly, or does so carelessly? Reliability, after all, has to be the most important feature in a hosting company. Suffice it to say that this isn’t the case with FrontPages Web Hosting. In fact, their advertising here is nothing but a farce. “Expertise, security, highest ranking in reliability”—are you kidding me?