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Outage earlier this week

Okay, that sucked — you may have noticed that this blog has been down since late Sunday night, or showed my corporate website instead of the blog. I’m constantly amazed at the ways that domain registrars and hosting providers can screw things up; there’s always some new frustration. I’m documenting the whole story here for posterity — and maybe to help other people in the same position in the future — but if you’re not interested in technical details of domain transfers, move on.

It started around 2am Monday morning, when I couldn’t sleep and decided to start a project that I’ve been thinking of for a while: transferring my corporate domain, which includes my website and my primary email address, from Yahoo to GoDaddy. I love Yahoo’s webmail, but I’ve become frustrated with their implementation of MySQL and WordPress, which is anything but standard. I’ve been using GoDaddy for both this blog and my wine club site/blog for quite a while, and am happy with their registrar services, their hosting and their prices.

Easy peasy, right? Not so much. First, I go to Yahoo and unlock my domain — first step in starting any domain transfer. Then, over to GoDaddy and initiate the transfer. I get the email from GoDaddy with the Transaction ID and Security Code, pick up the Authorization Code from Yahoo’s domain management page for my site, and enter it all in on GoDaddy, which is supposed to be everything that I need to do, except wait. So I wait. Now, I’m a bit impatient about technology sometimes, but every domain transfer that I’ve ever done before has happened automatically, and therefore within an hour or two has switched over. Which means that I was a bit surprised to find that 12 hours after initiating the transfer, my domain was still sitting as a pending transfer in GoDaddy with a status of “Pending Current Registrar Approval”. Basically, that means that although I’ve initiated the transfer and provided all required approvals and security information to complete the transfer, the current registrar is sitting on the transfer.

Meanwhile, I replicated my corporate website on GoDaddy (which explains, in a roundabout way, why this blog was down — I’m hosting both under the same hosting account, and I wanted to make my corporate site the primary site, so had to relocate this domain as a secondary domain on the account, which takes some time) so that when the transfer finally came through it would be available, and I changed my MX records over on Yahoo to redirect my mail to a new mail account that I set up on GoDaddy for my corporate mail. Mail started arriving on GoDaddy instead of Yahoo, but still the domain transfer waited.

This morning, more than 24 hours after initiating the domain transfer, I called Yahoo technical support. “Walter” informed me that Yahoo is not the reseller of my domain (huh? then how come I paid Yahoo for my hosting/domain services?) but that I have to contact the registrar, Melbourne IT, directly — in Australia! Okay, this is starting to bite.

I went on Melbourne IT’s site and tried to their password recovery for my domain (which presumably would email a password to me as the domain’s contact), but was presented with:

Retrieval Failed

The Registry Key for Domain Name kemsleydesign.com was not able to be retrieved. This could be due to the Domain Name being managed by a Melbourne IT Reseller. Please contact your Reseller for assistance.

Hmmm. I went off to their help pages, then their contact pages and eventually found a customer service request form, where I tried to be as succinct as possible:

I am attempting to transfer my domain, kemsleydesign.com, from Melbourne IT to  GoDaddy, but it appears to be stuck in the status “Pending Current Registrar Approval”. I have entered the appropriate authorization code that should release the domain, but it has been in this status for more than 24 hours. Can you please confirm that this transfer is pending and will occur soon?

By this time, it’s midnight in Australia and (given the current state of things), I’m not expecting a real speedy answer, so I was impressed to receive a reply within the hour:

Subject: How to contact your domain manager for kemsleydesign.com

THIS IS A SYSTEM GENERATED MESSAGE

A Melbourne IT Reseller manages the domains specified in your message.

Please contact this reseller using the details below for any assistance you require. If the person you contact refers you back to us, ask them if they would please contact us on your behalf.

Reseller details:

Yahoo Inc.
Web address: domains.yahoo.com
Email address: domains-support@cc.yahoo-inc.com

If after 48 hours you have yet to obtain a satisfactory response:

FOR FURTHER ASSISTANCE FROM MELBOURNE IT YOU MUST REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE. TO ENABLE TRACKING OF YOUR REQUEST, DO NOT ALTER THE SUBJECT LINE OF THIS EMAIL.

Please provide us as much detail of any correspondence with the reseller which relates to this request.

Please note: In an effort to resolve this matter quickly we will notify the Reseller of this request including any details you have given us.

Kind Regards,
Melbourne IT Customer Support

——————————

The status of your case is now closed.

If you need to reopen this case with additional information, please reply to this email. If you need to contact Melbourne IT by phone please quote this case ID

Okay, someone is obviously confused: either Yahoo is the reseller and their technical support people don’t know it, or they’re not and Melbourne has their records screwed up. In either case, they both appear to be refusing to give me technical support for this, which lends credence to my argument that they’re just trying to delay in hopes that I’ll forget about it.They don’t know how stubborn I am (they should ask Netfirms).

I check the WHOIS information (again) and notice that Melbourne IT is indeed listed as the registrar, although I’m not sure if the reseller’s name normally appears on WHOIS along with the registrar. I replied to Melbourne IT, hoping to eventually get a human to look at this:

Yahoo customer service informed me that they are NOT A RESELLER, and that I must contact Melbourne IT directly for assistance with my domain. Melbourne IT is listed as the registrar on the WHOIS record for this domain. Please confirm that the domain transfer to GoDaddy.com is in progress.

Then, I fired off two emails to Yahoo, one telling them not to renew my domain (which they were planning to do later this week as part of my hosting package since it comes up for renewal next month), and the following which included Melbourne IT’s message to me:

Earlier this morning, Yahoo technical support told me (on a phone call) that Yahoo is NOT a reseller of domains, and that I have to contact the registrar, Melbourne IT, directly with my current problem with my domain kemsleydesign.com. However, Melbourne IT states quite clearly in the attached email that Yahoo is in fact the reseller for this domain and that you should be dealing with my technical support problems.

I am attempting a domain transfer away from Yahoo to GoDaddy, which was initiated more than 24 hours ago. My domain appears to be stuck in “Pending Current Registrar Approval” status, although I have entered the transfer Transaction ID, Security Code and Authorization Code from the GoDaddy site as required. Can you please confirm that this transfer is underway?

Meanwhile, over on GoDaddy, the hosting account finally accepted the switch from this blog domain to my corporate domain as the primary domain for the account, and I could initiate adding the blog domain as a secondary domain. This, however, takes a few hours so this blog address went from displaying my corporate website (bad) to displaying a GoDaddy parked domain page (worse). My own fault — I could have left this blog as the primary domain and added my corporate one as a secondary — but I thought that the switch would happen within minutes, not more than 24 hours. By now, I was unhappy with Yahoo, Melbourne IT and GoDaddy, and ready to go back to chiseling blog entries on stone tablets.

I searched around for other people with this problem, and found a few. In fact, I even found a document from GoDaddy specifically talking about transfers from Melbourne IT, so they must have seen this problem before. They state that it could take 5 days, since once GoDaddy requests the transfer at the registry, if Melbourne IT doesn’t respond to the registry’s request to approve/deny the transfer, new ICANN rules automatically approve it after five days. In other words, Melbourne IT probably just ignores requests for transfers and waits for them to time out; they’ve had their wrists slapped by ICANN for sloppy practices in the past when they abdicated responsibility during domain transfers to their resellers (although there is definitely dissent between Yahoo and Melbourne IT about whether Yahoo is actually a reseller). I realize that at this point, I’m about to become an ex-customer of Melbourne IT and they may not be fully motivated to serve my needs, but this is an incredibly poor bit of customer service.

This blog address finally sorted itself out around midday today. Stay tuned for more on the domain transfer.

2007 02 20 blogging
customer service
technology Comments (1)

The Boys of DemoCamp strike again

Although not (I think) as bad as the incident at DemoCamp 9, I found a not-insignificant level of sexism in one of the presentations at last night’s DemoCamp 12: Alec Saunders of Iotum was demonstrating their Talk-Now service, and his demo scenario involved himself and three (presumably fictional) others: Frank, John and Jill.

Frank, he wanted to talk to about the budget.

John, he wanted to meet for drinks after work.

Jill, however, he wanted to ask out on a date.

Is it just me, or is it too much to ask that some man, somewhere, depict a woman in a technology demo scenario as something other than a sex object? Who knows, maybe Alec’s bi, and his “drinks” with John was just a thinly-veiled euphemism for wild man-sex, but that wasn’t the impression that I had.

2007 02 06 Comments (7)

Shut up on mute, already

Excerpted from TheFreeDictionary:

moot  (mt)

adj.

2. b. Of no practical importance; irrelevant.

From the Kemsley Guide to Bad Writing:

mute  (myt)

adj.

1. Unable to understand when to use the word “moot”, as in “moot point”.

In the past two days, I’ve seen two technical articles online (that I won’t embarrass by linking) that have used “mute” when they clearly intended “moot”. One was a blog post, which is a bit forgivable, but the other was a 3-page edited (?) article on a well-known technical website. I may have been trained as an engineer, but my schooling did include some English courses along the way (plus some time with an English major as a university roommate), and I expect anyone who is going to take on writing lengthy articles on any subject to at least make sure that their use of the language is correct. Otherwise, there will be some people — like me — who judge a writer’s overall capabilities based on their inability to use the correct word in a sentence.

2006 11 30 Comments (2)

The last "Netfirms sucks" post

Oh, did I mention that Netfirms still sucks? The entire site for my wine club was down for at least an hour today, on the day that we announced the ticket sales for our next event (which are sold through the website). I also couldn’t get onto email or even the hosting control panel. That’s it for me and Netfirms; next, I get my stuff off there, and start writing letters to try and get some of our money back, since we’ve so clearly been ripped off through their lack of ability to deliver a stable hosting environment.

I’ve already started the domain registrar transfer back to DomainsAtCost, where I previously had it registered (although not hosted); this way, I can choose either a Canadian host like 8i or a U.S. one like GoDaddy in the next step once the domain transfer is done. I know that if I pick a Canadian host, it would be cheaper to let them be my domain registrar as well, but I fell into that trap with Netfirms and now it’s taking me longer to get moved off them, so I’ll keep them separate for now.

I did get a response to my email to 8i, and it was not that encouraging:

At the present time, we do not have any websites running wordpress on our servers that I can refer you to.  I would like to mention the fact that Apache is compiled with AllowOverride on all our servers. As far as testing the response time of our MySQL servers, you can take a look at couple of the following sites that are running phpBB. phpBB uses PHP and MySQL for its database.

[ list of websites omitted]

If you decide to signup with 8i Networks, your hosting account will be placed on one of our newer servers with fewer than 10 accounts. Obviously with time, the number of accounts will grow, but rest assured we will not fill our servers to the brim. Quality is our number one priority, not quantity.

I’d really like to buy Canadian, and I’ve read some good reviews here, but the fact that they don’t have anyone (that they know of) running WordPress on their servers is a bit disconcerting. However, I suppose I can try them out for a month on a month-by-month plan, and ditch them for GoDaddy if they’re not up to snuff.

2006 11 09 netfirms Comments (2)

Later the same day, Netfirms still sucks

Netfirms sucksNetfirms sucks, did I mention that? Several hours since my last post, I now can’t get access to my email via my Outlook client, either inbound or outbound. Problems with the SMTP server are rampant, and often I give up and just use my DSL provider’s SMTP server, but this is a first for the POP server crapping out, too.

Although I was able to access my webmail at a few times during the day, there has been no email arriving all day, which is more than a little suspicious; I’ve just sent email to that account and the webmail reports no new email, so I imagine that they’ve somehow buggered up inbound email altogether. Hopefully any email that is delayed will eventually show up, rather than being sent to that big bit bucket in the sky.

I’ve sent a message off to 8i Networks based on the great reviews that I read about them, and I’m waiting to hear back. In particular, I want to see a WordPress site that’s hosted on their servers so that I can check the response time, and I want to be sure that they support AllowOverride on .htaccess, which will allow me to use pretty URLs in WordPress, a final step to getting the entire site (not just the blog) switched over to WordPress. If I don’t hear from them, then it will be south of the border to GoDaddy for me, where this blog is hosted with many fewer problems.

2006 11 06 netfirms
technology Comments (0)

And now for something completely different… oh, wait, Netfirms still sucks

Netfirms SucksIt’s been a few days since I last posted about how Netfirms sucks, not because they stopped sucking, but because there wasn’t anything new to report. Today, they rise to new heights of suckage: I haven’t been able to get into my webmail for some time now this morning.

I’m quite sure that calling their technical support will have the same result as last time: they walk me through the process to recreate the error, put me on hold for 10 minutes, then come back and ask me to try again. Since their servers act fairly erratically, chances are that sometime in that 10 minutes (when you can be sure that I’ll still be trying to do whatever it is that isn’t working), I’ll be able to connect at least briefly, and then they can close the issue. They refuse to deal with the bigger issue of the servers being either grossly undersized or incompetently managed, and experiencing frequent outages.

I’m still not getting on the first page of Google results when I search for “netfirms sucks”, I’m way down on page 3, but I’ll keep trying.

2006 11 06 netfirms
technology Comments (0)

Netfirms suckage quantified

I know, I’ve got this stuck in my craw and I’m not letting go, but just wanted to share some hard data on how much Netfirms sucks. When you load the admin dashboard screen in WordPress, it helpfully provides the load time for the page at the very bottom, right beside the WP version number. Here’s how my three hosts stack up:

  • GoDaddy, 3.95 seconds
  • Yahoo, 5.71 seconds
  • Netfirms, 19.15 seconds

Yup, it’s almost 5 times slower on Netfirms than on GoDaddy.

If you move from the dashboard page to the “Manage posts” page, we’re looking at 1.39 versus 3.01 seconds for GoDaddy and Netfirms, respectively — still over twice as slow on Netfirms. The “Presentation” page, which displays thumbnails of the themes available, is 0.88 versus 3.75 seconds, more than 4 times slower even though the GoDaddy-based site has three times as many themes to display.

Out of interest, I googled “Netfirms sucks” to see if I was getting any hits from this yet, and found many other people with the same problems (apparently even in other languages). I saw the reviews on HostSearch and decided to add my own to the mix.

In looking for Canadian-based hosts with good reviews on HostSearch, I came across 8i Networks, which has some solid reviews across the board; I’ll be investigating further.

2006 11 01 netfirms
technology Comments (4)

More on how Netfirms sucks

Did I mention that Netfirms sucks? Oh yeah, I wrote about it a two days ago. This morning, I couldn’t get on to my webmail, and pages from WordPress were taking 15-30 seconds each to load. When I tried to go to the WordPress admin pages, I would get part of the main dashboard page, and then a big blank.

Although I had an idea that it would be a useless endeavour, I called Netfirms support (at least it’s a local number) and explained the problem. The tech support person had me retry things several times, during which time I don’t think that she actually did anything, just tied me up on the phone, which I think is their general ploy to wait until the system gets past its current hiccup. I started to rant a bit about the service, saying that I didn’t expect to have constant site outages and performance problems, and she recommended that I upgrade to one of their enterprise plans. Riiiight. First of all, the site in question is for a non-profit wine club that I help to manage, and we don’t have either the budget or the requirement for the bigger hosting plans. Secondly, what possible confidence could I have in their ability to run an enterprise hosting plan when they fuck up the “Advantage Business” plan so badly?

She said that she would open an “interaction” for this, and I asked to have it escalated, but I’m not hopeful with the outcome.

The best part was when I asked her for the name of the head of customer support — presumably her boss, or her boss’ boss’s boss — and she said (after a long pause) “I don’t know”. I burst out laughing and hung up.

In addition to my rants here, I’ve put a review up on Epinions with all the details, so hopefully will keep some poor sucker from going down the same road in the future.

A note to the kids over at CommandN: having sponsors whose products suck are not good for your image.

2006 10 31 customer service
netfirms
technology Comments (0)

Garth Turner’s transparent politics

I’m about as far as you can get from being conservative (or Conservative), but I have a huge amount of admiration for Garth Turner, the former Conservative MP from Halton, for the level of transparency that he brings to the political process. First of all, he blogs. Second, he blogs his opinions even when they don’t toe the party line. Third, when he gets booted out of the Conservative party, he posts a video about it on Google Video.

I’ve had a soft spot for Turner ever since he helped out my sister and her husband almost 30 years ago when they were stuck in an 18% mortgage snafu: he publicly named the bank in his influential morning business column in the Toronto Sun, and the problem was magically resolved within days. Lately, he’s more likely to be publishing his thoughts on a number of issues where his opinion differs from that of the party, such as child care, same-sex marriage, and the publication ban when the bodies of soldiers are brought home from Afghanistan. (Not surprisingly, he’s in favour of children, tolerance and freedom of the press.)

Meanwhile, the Conservative party backs up their actions by saying that there were “confidentiality concerns” about his blog, which sounds a bit too much like the US cracking down on music pirates as part of “national security”: I can almost hear the jackboots marching in the streets.

2006 10 18 politics Comments (0)

Moving hell

Seems like it’s the time of year for people to be moving, and almost every one of them has a horror story to tell. I was reminded of a post about moving that I had read some time ago on Joey deVilla’s blog, the comments on which resulted in him getting some nasty phone calls from the thugs at Quick Boys Moving, when my sister Betty had a slight moving catastrophe last week.

Betty moved 6 doors down the same street in her Toronto neighbourhood, from a 2-storey house to a flat on the 2nd and 3rd floor of another house. She called around for movers who would do a moving job without a truck, which was apparently something that they’re just not programmed to accept, since it really just needed 2 or 3 guys and a couple of dollys to cart the stuff down the sidewalk. Finally, she found Desi Movers, and had two (two!) discussions on the phone with the owner telling him that a) no truck was needed, and b) there’s one flight of stairs at the start, and two at the finish. No problem, he said, quoted her a price, said that there was no minimum number of hours, and said that they’d be there at 8:30 sharp last Monday.

The only thing that arrived at her place at 8:30 sharp on Monday was me with her coffee, and we waited until almost 9:30 for the movers to show up: 2 of them, with one dolly. The movers whipped out a contract for her to sign that a) had a four-hour minimum, although she estimated that three would do it, and b) it was an extra $15 per man per set of stairs. She called the owner, who first had to be convinced that they were not going to use the truck since it was parked practically in front of the new place anyway, and then told her that the guys didn’t want to do the move because she was apparently depriving them of their stairs bonus. Now, she should have had a written contract before starting, and he really should have come out to see the place before giving an estimate, but this is the type of moving-day extortion that is so common that I wasn’t completely surprised when it happened.

She prepaid them for 3 hours, with the agreement that she’d pay more if they went over that time, then we proceeded to have the 3 slowest hours of moving that I have ever seen. Two pre-schoolers with a rickety wagon could have gone faster at some points during the morning. When the couch wouldn’t fit up the stairs at the new place and the landlord (who lives downstairs) was taking the door and part of the door frame off to accommodate it, they mostly just stood around instead of moving the remaining boxes out of the old place and down the sidewalk to the new place. One particularly heavy box was just left at the old place, and a heavy one at the new place was left on the porch until they were prompted several times to carry it up the stairs. At one point, they just stopped going upstairs in the old place, leaving 12-15 boxes up there, then at 12:30 they got in the truck, told Betty that they had another job to be at, and drove off. To say that she was furious would be a serious understatement.

This is not an isolated incident, by any means. When I moved back to Toronto from southern California in 2002, my furniture arrived in a big truck (as you would expect) from Alex Moving and Storage, a North American Van Lines agent in Orange County. The movers, who I think were just tired and cranky from driving all night, decided that they couldn’t park the truck in front of the apartment building (it was common for moving trucks to park there, although technically not legal), and they couldn’t get the truck into the back laneway in spite of all the other trucks of that size that I’d seen get into exactly that same spot. So they drove away with all my furniture, and their local affiliate, Blue Bird Moving, called me to extort an additional $US827.63 from me to offload my furniture to a smaller truck and bring it back the next day — which is more than it cost to have movers move the same load of stuff from that apartment to another one about a year later. That’s after I already paid Alex Moving $US4,500 to get the stuff here in the first place. To top it off, they damaged some leather furniture — furniture that had been shrink-wrapped to guard against just such damage before leaving California and somehow was mysteriously unwrapped somewhere along the way. The insurance adjuster who visited from NAVL said that I would certainly be eligible for compensation since the damage would take a few hundred dollars to repair, but his final report (ever faithful to the company, I suppose) deemed that it was all less than the $100 deductible. One such episode would be bad enough, but to be screwed by the NAVL agent in Orange County, the agent in Toronto, and their insurance company, all on one move, was a bit much.

Then this morning, I saw this post on Feministe about her particular moving hell, and realize that incompetent/unscrupulous moving companies are just part of life everywhere.

2006 09 05 customer service
toronto Comments (21)