Hosts and Monsters
Posted: May 10th, 2009 | Filed under: Media, Pop Culture | 86 Comments »
OK, so, it’s interesting that my last post before this Web site blew up was about rage … and how I rarely feel it. Because I just had a fun little tango with rage. I’m going to tell you step by step what happened the last 48 hours or so — not so much because I think you will be interested in it but because, honestly, I have to write this for therapy.
So, Friday night, Margo and I went with our dear friends the Pop Warners to see Fleetwood Mac in concert. I probably did not need to put the “dear friends” prelude before the Pop Warners because, frankly, you must know me well enough to know that I would not go to a Fleetwood Mac concert except to be with close friends*. The concert was surprisingly enjoyable for reasons I simply do not have time to discuss now, though I will pause to say that Lindsey Buckingham did go all jazz odyssey on us about two-thirds of the way through, which did not seem necessary or helpful. He is some kind of guitarist, though.
*Especially if one of those friends happens to be in the music business and, as such, is connected enough to get free tickets.
Anyway, it was a wonderful evening with friends. We talked, we ate good food, we watched Stevie Nicks sort of, kind of twirl around. It was one of those rare parent nights out that matter a lot because we actually got a baby sitter who could stay to midnight. We went out afterward for drinks, and that’s when another friend texted me these words: “Dude what happened to your blog?”
Dude. I had no idea what he was talking about, of course. I popped online on my phone went to the blog and saw the words: “You Web site has been suspended. Please contact customer service immediately.”
Now, to be fair I am not going to talk about the specific company that hosted my site … well, actually, yes I am. Hostmonster. That is HOSTMONSTER. I want to repeat, in case anyone misses the point. It was Hostmonster that hosted my Web site.
Host. Like Monty Hall or Chuck Woolery.
Monster: Like an imaginary creature that is typically frightening or Chuck Woolery.*
*This is a joke. I am certain that Chuck Woolery is a very nice man. I’m frazzled, that’s all, and I’m taking it out on the guy who hosted Love Connection. It isn’t right.
OK, so, back to the story. My first reaction in all of these cases, every time, is that I must have done something wrong. My first thought was: “Did I forget to pay the site for hosting?” I was pretty sure that wasn’t it: A few months ago, when this blog really started to get pretty heavy traffic, I realized that I needed to get on a better plan, one that gave me more … whatever it is.
So I called my Web hosting provider* and they told me that it would be a good idea to upgrade my server or, to be more specific, they thought it would be a good idea for me to pay $40 per month for hosting rather than the 10 bucks or whatever I was paying originally. I’m pretty sure I had to pay like a year up front.
*HostMonster. Or maybe it’s two words “Host Monster.” It’s hard to tell.
That conversation, by the way, was boring and not worth reliving except to point out that, one, they started charging me significantly more money, and, two, the salesman’s precise words were, “Oh yeah, you will have no problems now.” Both of these concepts play prominently in our tale.
OK! No more problems! So, I have to admit being surprised by this small problem of them suddenly and without warning cutting off my site. I called up HostMonster, and connected to some guy whose basic job, evidently, was to know nothing. Every company has to have several people who know nothing — these are the ones you put out front so that customers feel guilty for yelling at them. After all, they KNOW NOTHING. What are you going to do, just scream madly at the people who know nothing? It’s not their fault. The Know Nothing people are the ones who tell you that your plane has been canceled on sunny days, your hotel room is not ready, your car reservation isn’t in the system. And this KN guy basically explained that they had permanently suspended my account … I could not get it back.
The reason for this? Apparently, it had something to do with too many MySQLs.
“Yes, the problem was definitely SQLs,” he explained again.
Now, look: I have absolutely no freaking idea what MySQLs are. None. But, I’m not kidding you: I am predisposed to thinking that when stuff goes wrong, it’s my fault. That’s just my personality. So at first, I was trying to get him to explain what these SQLs were doing, how they had gotten so out of hand, what I had done to set them loose. Was I some sort of SQL savage without even knowing it like the person in the movies with multiple personalities who is also the killer?
I asked these questions, give or take an adjective or two. But the guy’s job, as I have explained, was to know nothing, so he could not explain to my how a stinking free blog could set off the SQL alarm bells. He could not explain to me how a blog without audio, video, special graphics, e-commerce or any of the 10 billion other things I am utterly incapable of doing could have made these rowdy SQLs grab pitch forks and storm the HostMonster castle.
He could not explain to me why a company — a company called HOSTMONSTER, in case you have forgotten — would cut off a long-standing customer without a single email warning, a single phone call, a single hint that anything was out of line. And slowly, it started to dawn on me that … this wasn’t my fault. I was really, really, really getting hosed.
“I have to tell you,” I said to the guy who knew nothing. “I am absolutely baffled here. I am stunned that a company would literally cut off my service because of some SQL issue that you cannot even explain to me … does this have anything at all with the popularity of the site? Are too many people going on to this site? Can you guys not handle that? Is that what this is all about? Is your name not HostMONSTER — doesn’t that ‘Monster’ part of your name suggest that you guys are, you know, rather large and capable of dealing with my Internet problems?”
Know nothing guy put me on hold for a few minutes then. I was fully expecting that at that point I would talk to a manager of some kind … admittedly this was late Friday evening, and I do not know how many managers are on duty at HostMonster late Friday evening. Frankly, at this point I was not entirely convinced that HostMonster was not run by two brothers named Skip and Matt who had a small server in their basement.
Well, I was in for a second surprise. Know nothing guy returned. And he explained that the president of the company, Matt,* had just 20 minutes earlier written a note that my account should be closed because it was taking up too much bandwidth or memory or whatever the hell it is that servers use.
*I knew it!
I was standing outside a coffee shop at The Country Club Plaza in Kansas City across the street from a guy playing electric guitar for money … and I honestly do not believe that my jaw has ever dropped that low, not even when the Kansas City Royals traded Jermaine Dye for Neifi Perez. “So, I’m sorry, you’re saying the president of the company (Matt) just 20 minutes ago shut down my site? Late on a Friday night? Without calling or emailing? Because he thought it was taking up too much memory? Am I understanding this right?”
I was, in fact, understanding it right. In an emergency maneuver near midnight on a Friday night, Matt the President had shut down this blog to save the company. I guess that’s what Presidents do in times of crisis. Matt, however, could not come to the phone.
Yeah, that’s about when I started to get really angry. Is it possible, even slightly possible, to have worse customer service than that? I guess it’s true that Matt did not actually stomp on my foot or crash my car, so those are points for HostMonster. While I’m on the phone, I’m getting texts and emails from people saying, “Um, where’s your Web site?” and “Did you forget to pay your bills?” It was not a happy time.
Of course, what could I do? Yell madly at Know Nothing Guy while standing outside a coffee shop in The Plaza near midnight? I didn’t really see what that would get me other than strange “Isn’t that the guy who writes for the newspaper” looks. On the other hand, the Know Nothing guy on the other side of the phone call was still talking about My SQLs and inefficient scripts so I will admit I was thinking that if there was ever a time to have the Darth Vader talent of choking someone to death from afar, this seemed like a good one. But, no, I swallowed my anger. Someday soon, when I have my ulcer, I’ll named it “HostMonster.”
Of course, the story cannot end there. My blog was gone and, you people know me. I have NO IDEA how to do any technical things. And it’s not like this blog, you know, makes money so that I could hire a tech person or a personal assistant or something*.
*Actually, I’m thinking about hiring a personal assistant. Is this a good idea? Any advice?
I went home that night and called up the Web hosting site GoDaddy because, well, who doesn’t just love GoDaddy spokesperson Danica Patrick? My daughter thinks she’s the coolest.
I found out a couple of things. One, GoDaddy charges about a quarter of what HostMonster was charging me. That doesn’t seem right. Two, GoDaddy had right on their Web page that, whatever MySQLs are, they allow you to have an UNLIMITED number of them. That would be UNLIMITED MySQLS. Also unlimited.
Three, they are called GoDaddy, which, you know, speaks to me.
And so … I went with GoDaddy. Unfortunately, that was only the start of the longest weekend in years. For the last 45 hours or so — give or take a couple of hours for sleep, and various Mother’s Day functions and driving Pop Warner and clan to the airport and watching Zack Greinke lose 1-0 — I have been trying to transfer this blog to Go Daddy. This has involved a to-the-death wrestling match with SQL databases, permalinks, FTP clients, importing, exporting, user files, and about two dozen other issues that almost ended my blogging career and my life as a functioning human being. All because Matt, the president of a company called HostMonster, decided that this blog sets off to many SQL sparks. I feel that ulcer growing now.
But, maybe, maybe, we made it through. The site appears to be fully functioning again. And I have been given guarantees by the GoDaddy people that even if this site starts leaking SQLs the way anonymous sources leak A-Rod rumors, they won’t drop me. They PROMISE.
So, is there a lesson to be learned from this unpleasant experience? I can think of three: (1) When dealing with SQL coding you are better off cutting and pasting than importing — just trust me on that; (2) Never, ever, ever use anything that has either “Host” or “Monster” in the title*; (3) There still seems to be a lot of tension between Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Anyway, that’s how it looked to me.
*Ever. HostMonster is now the official dog of the JoeBlog … from here on in, everything that sucks will be compared to HostMonster.
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I’m not only glad the site is back up, but that some sort of pseudo “rage”* inspired another great blog post… Like great music, “rage”* and anger have inspired some great language to entertain us–the “non-raged”**…
Welcome back…
*I assume it’s only “pseudo” since you don’t often feel rage…
**Most of the rest of us deal with rage on a daily basis, only it has various names that only occasionally have the words “Host” or “Monster” in them…
This is actually all my fault, I feel really terrible after reading this!
I’m a pretty big Digg user, and so I submitted your steroids post on Friday. It went on the front page for a little bit Friday night, unfortunately the surge of traffic that comes from a Digg front page post seems to have taken your server down. And then the fact that your server was down caused people on Digg to “bury” your post, which removed it from the front page over there.
You can see the Digg submission here:
http://digg.com/baseball/Why_Outrage_Over_Steroids_In_Baseball_Is_Boring
I really am sorry, I was just hoping to expose a lot of people to your writing Joe, didn’t mean to cause you all this stress! HostMonster does suck, I hope GoDaddy will work out better for you.
That’s quite a saga… I assumed it was some glitchy problem along these lines, and that you would get it straightened out sooner or later. Sorry it was such an ordeal, but at least, since you’re a writer and all, you can use it for fodder. Imagine if you were an accountant or a pilot or a traveling salesman, and you couldn’t do anything at all with all these awful things that happened to you? Enough of these, and you’re practically guaranteed a Pulitzer.
Good to have you back!
As a person who finds hilarity in people who lack common sense, I just can’t stop laughing at Matt’s strategy on this one. In the words of my favorite ESPN analyst Ron Jaworski “Now, let’s take it back to the snap.”
1. Matt realizes that his “Monster” isn’t big enough to deal with a pretty basic blog.
2. His solution is to shut it off without warning, which may seem like a good idea, BUT
3. He is shutting it down for being TOO POPULAR?
4. Not to mention it is the TOO POPULAR blog of a person who writes for a living. Did he really not see this blog post coming? Seriously, he had to know he was going to get BLASTED for this gross error in judgement.
I was a techie in a former life. You have every right to be angry. You have every right to trash hostmonster. You’re in good hands now. Most my stuff is on godaddy as well and anytime we’ve had problems they resolved them quickly.
I blame steroids. And Bill Plashke.
GoDaddy is a very good company from what I hear.
Glad all has been resolved.
Joe!
I am so glad your blog is back, and I don’t want to be one of those sticklers that gets upset with a minor thing, but you won’t be getting an ulcer from stress. They are actually caused by bacteria. Still, try and stay relatively stress free (I know that’s impossible as a Cleveland sports fan).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peptic_ulcer
“Helicobacter pylori was rediscovered in 1982 by two Australian scientists, Robin Warren and Barry J. Marshall as a causative factor for ulcers.[12] In their original paper, Warren and Marshall contended that most stomach ulcers and gastritis were caused by colonization with this bacterium, not by stress or spicy food as had been assumed before.[13]
The H. pylori hypothesis was poorly received, so in an act of self-experimentation Marshall drank a Petri dish containing a culture of organisms extracted from a patient and soon developed gastritis. His symptoms disappeared after two weeks, but he took antibiotics to kill the remaining bacteria at the urging of his wife, since halitosis is one of the symptoms of infection.[14] This experiment was published in 1984 in the Australian Medical Journal and is among the most cited articles from the journal.”
I use HostMonster for some of my sites. They’re good for starting out, but if you get too big, you have to look elsewhere. They’re not too happy about giving out SSH access to their servers, and they’re really not down with infinite loops in your code. Still, for the value, they provide decent bang for your buck. They don’t suck as bad as Kyle Farnsworth does, for example.
WHOOOO this is good. Good therapy, man. Its good…good. Feel better? I actually don’t blame Matt at all. I mean, with all the hype around a pig flu, he was probably back inside his Millenium bunker with a mask over his face yelling into his cricket phone, “SHUUUU THHUUUU SEEYEEE DAAAUUUW! NAAAUUUUWWW!” This sounds a lot like when you get your f**king mortgage sold to another bank without you knowing about it and they send you a letter to tell you that your payment is late and that its going to affect your credit – only to find out the old company never shut off the auto-payment and was simply taking out your mortgage payment for two months and holding it while the new company wasn’t receiving anything, right Countrywide? RIGHT!??!!! rage…
Glad you are back up and running and that you got to see Steve Nicks before she drops over dead. Again.
But please tell us, were you secretly hoping the USC band was going to come out for a cameo? At least a little?
Thanks for going through all of that for us, Poz. It is appreciated. You are a highlight of my day.
Welcome back!
Looks like you made a good move. I have my site on GoDaddy, and even though I had to upgrade my hosting once, their customer service is pretty solid.
One thing that I do recommend as a fellow Wordpress user is to start using the WP-Super Cache plugin if you are not already. This should speed up page loading and keep your site from going down if you end up on Digg again.
Not that I have a lot of readers of my own blog, but the JoeBlog is now officially listed as one of the blogs I read. If my seven regualr blog readers overloaded your site, I apologize.
I must say that I was very upset when I couldn’t read the blog the other night. But now all is good in the world.
I’m pretty sure when you say “Matt” you mean Bud Selig, and when you say “HostMonster” you mean the World Baseball Classic, and when you’re talking about your site totally unfairly being taken down, you’re talking about Joakim Soria’s sore shoulder and his getting put on the 15-day-DL.
I’m pissed too.
So after reading this, I had to pull up Hostmonsters site and see how they sold themselves.
On the front page….”HostMonster specializes in customer
satisfaction. Call us with your
question Toll free”
On the About Us page…”Reliability is the key to success on the internet. With our high quality redundant systems you can be sure that your data is always available for both you and your customers.”
@Geoff, a lot of ulcers are caused by bacteria, but not all of them– I was tested for it and that wasn’t the problem, just an overload of stomach acid, which was absolutely caused or exacerbated by stress! Prilosec worked like magic, I highly recommend it. Took it every morning for a month or so, and the pain went away. Such a relief!
“HostMonster is now the official dog of the JoeBlog … from here on in, everything that sucks will be compared to HostMonster.”
I love this and will be using it the next time something makes me especially angry.
Just thought you should know (and not to brag) I like to think of myself as more than competent and really good at understanding things. So I went to the resident internet research facility (wikipedia) to read up on these SQL’s and now I can tell you that SQL stands for Structured Query Language and that the Wikipedia page for SQL is a long piece of confusing computer science lingo, So I guess long story short Im not as smart as I would like to think I am.
Nice to have you back.
Let’s not blame JD for trying to get a few more people hooked on Poz.
Sorry you got hosed by the hostmonster.
After a Mother’s Day like that I’m thinking your wife deserves something sparkly…or at least some of her favorite chocolates.
p.s. Margo – thanks for picking us as the winner of the Gardening book. It came last week. Awesome book.
Heh, as someone who knows exactly what “SQLs” are (;) ), and who pretty much knows exactly what happened here, I found this story very amusing and also somewhat educational. It’s great to see this sort of insight from a client’s perspective. I can understand fully why you would be so enraged and confused, and it’s not something I’d have thought about before, really. Good stuff.
Joe, I know you have millions of people at your disposal, but feel free to send me an email if you ever need help with this kind of stuff. I can help out, if not to fix things, then at least to explain them.
Love your blog and can’t wait for the Reds book!
Okay, let’s look at Matt’s total lack of business sense. He has the best sports writer in America hosting on his company servers. The blog is insanely popular. Wouldn’t most people be thinking of ways to use that as leverage for self-promotion? “We at HostMaster are the home of Joe Posnanski, God of all sports writers.” Logical right? Instead, he pulls the plug! What a nitwit!
Anyway, I am thrilled that Mr. Posnanski is back. With Neyer on weekend furlough and Posnanski off the air, the weekend was totally void of rational thought. Don’t even get me started on Preston Gomez’s post on the “Sweet Spot.” That was a HostMaster moment in and of itself.
Welcome back, Mr. Posnanski, enjoy your new digs.
Hooray! Good to see you back, Joe.
I’m sorry. we want your sqls back!!!
Yeah but GoDaddy jacks up the re-buy price once your two years are up…
another site taken down by the digg effect
glad you’re back up
Must be why when I sent your “Rage” piece out to everyone I knew and told them about how awesome it was no one sent me any emails back agreeing with me and singing our praises.
C Trent turned me on to your writing – but this was wild. As William above said – why wouldn’t they be tickled pink to host a trendy blog?? Maybe they disliked your content (being BYU neighbors)- they screwed up & took the cowardly way out.
No email link at their site but I am drafting a letter to Matt at…
HostMonster, Inc.
1958 South 950 East
Provo, UT 84606
This explains a lot –
http://www.cracked.com/article_17271_why-tech-support-sucks-look-behind-scenes.html
I’m glad everything (seems to be) back to normal with the blog. But, for what its worth, about a year ago I remember Uniwatch had site problems with GoDaddy and wrote about their similar feelings of frustration:
http://www.uniwatchblog.com/2007/09/07/uni-watch-site-crash-faq/
I know nothing about GoDaddy, but I thought I should warn you that they are not immune to alienating their clients either.
Clearly Matt from Hostmonster thought your blog was clogging their server’s basepaths.
hire the persoal assistant…it’s a life saver
How do I apply to be your personal assistant?
I recommend DreamHost if you have any more problems here. They have unlimited bandwidth and hosting for like $120 a year. Plus, as a current subscriber, I can give you a discount code for a % off hosting.
https://dreamhost.com/ Actually, they’re running a promotion through today for $50 off.
Disk Storage at signup UNLIMITED
Monthly Bandwidth at signup UNLIMITED
MySQL 5 Databases Unlimited
If your host couldn’t handle a single Digg link, then yes, I suspect that Matt and Skip are running this operation off of their old gaming PC in the basement.
For what you were paying, they should have had no trouble handling the load. As someone who has been in their position in the past, shutting off a paying customer who was doing nothing wrong is probably the worst way they could have handled the situation. The correct thing to do, IMO, would be to let you know what is going on, move your site over to different hardware, and then call back when everything is back up. If they even have a spare server, that is. They only reason I could understand them doing what they did is if your site was hacked and being used to send out tons of spam. Obviously, this wasn’t the case.
Anyway, glad you’re back up!
So Kyle Farnsworth = HostMonster?
@William – That Gomez post on SweetSpot ruined my weekend, almost worse than not being able to read Joe’s blog. (Is there a way to get just Neyer to post to SweetSpot? I read that blog to see what he has to say – not the Gomezes of the world.)
Joe – Very glad you’re back up. You and Calcaterra wrote the two most rational pieces in the wake of the Manny Ramirez thing, and that’s just one of the innumerable reasons I read whatever you have to say.
What about hiring Danica Patrick as your personal assistant? OTOH, that probably wouldn’t help things on the home front.
welcome back Joe. Thanks for going through all of this just for us.
It’s not Hostmonster’s fault that they couldn’t handle Joe’s blog. It is their fault that they couldn’t see that this blog had a lot of traffic and didn’t suggest that Joe have some kind of semi-dedicated hosting. It is okay for a web host to decide that someone is too popular and that they can’t afford to host them. It is not, okay, however, to just pull the plug without ever talking to you about it once.
Joe – I do this for a living. You do not want to host with Go Daddy. As a tech person, I cannot endorse them, and you, being the father of two daughters, probably wants to host with a company whose advertisements focus on hosting and not about breasts.
DO NOT GO TO DREAMHOST! The day my site was linked to by MetsBlog, Yahoo Sports, and about six other people, I experienced what is called “the Digg effect” (which is what happened to you). My site went down, HARD. I made some changes on the backend of the site to accommodate this in future, but Dreamhost insisted on moving me to a more expensive server, and gave me all sorts of nasty lectures about how terrible I was and that I was hurting everyone else on my server.
So I went on the expensive hosting… and even though I had other days with similar linking – I watched the monitor I now had because it was more expensive, and I never ever ever even came close to their minimum in bandwidth or sql connections.
Clearly, the day the site fell over was because of something they did wrong. not because of me. because every host should be able to handle one day of ‘digg effect’.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS UNLIMITED BANDWIDTH OR SQL CONNECTIONS. there just isn’t. they say there is… but if you got close, when you’re on a shared host, they cannot possibly support all of the sites that are on one box. It’s like a health club… if everyone who joined the health club actually showed up, they’d never have any room. They assume that if they put 20 sites on one box, that 19 of them will have no traffic so they can handle the one that is more popular.
I moved to another host. Who has again gone through the ‘oh crap everyone is linking to me today’ days but has never decided that I had to pay them more money nor has my site fallen over. In fact, my site is faster now.
If you hated your Hostmonster experience – at least you could call them! You can’t call Dreamhost! And their customer support has the worst tone and attitude of any company I’ve ever dealt with. I know, why did I wait so long? because moving hosts is a PITA.
You probably do need a personal assistant. You should look into a VA, or virtual assistant. But that’s a whole other post.
Glad you’re back Joe, sorry you went through so much pain for us.
My only recommendation regarding the personal assistant is to make sure you pay get their Social Security withholding right. We really don’t want any embarrassing scandals coming your way if you’re ever nominated for a cabinet position.
You definitely need to write a review for HostMonster!
http://www.cheap-web-hosting-info.com/write_review.php
I haven’t seen the movie in a long time, so somebody tell me, Did the guys in Front Page have to go through stuff like this? I’m pretty sure Woodward and Bernstein got more cooperation from Mark Felt. . . .
I also have Dreamhost. I also have unlimited everything (webspace, bandwidth, email, users, databases) for the same $10 a month.
I would be tepid in my recommendations to them. They are like the “cool kids” in their attitude. Customer service (via email) is fairly responsive, but if you want to talk on the phone, you have to upgrade your plan. All that is ok.
The bad part is how often their servers go down. It’s pretty bad. Back when I was considering switching, I was going to go with asmallorange.com . What I liked about them is that their user community seemed to really like them. I recommend checking the forums on any webhost, and see what the users have to say. (If it’s all-glowing, and it’s only a couple of users, you know they censor.)
Seems like a lot of us have been through this. After a lot of looking around, the best web hosting I’ve found is SBI.
This is a link to their easy-to-grok video. (Full disclosure, not wanting to offend anybody, this is an affiliate link. These folks are so good it’s a no-brainer to sign up.)
http://videotour.sitesell.com/Greg2.html43.html
If you don’t want to get there thru my link, just google Site Build It.
I have my smaller sites on A Small Orange. what I liked about them is that they do not promise the moon. They have very specific profiles, and if you fit into them, you’ll do great. When there is downtime, the owner comes on the boards and answers questions.
Every host has downtime. Every site has downtime. It’s how the company handles it that matters.
I would not recommend Dreamhost for a site that has any kind of audience. I don’t think they’re professional or responsive, and I’d been with them since 2003. Now I am moving every site I own elsewhere.
I just don’t know who I’d recommend to Joe. Media Temple used to be THE place to go – and I almost went there – but they’ve had a lot of problems with their new shared hosting infrastructure and people who formerly loved MT are now begging off.
Man, I can’t believe a single person asked this.
Does Go Daddy throw in those commercials and bikini pictures of Danica Patrick as part of their deal?
I mean, if you didn’t get that as part of the bargain, you got hosed AGAIN.
For anyone looking for hosting, I’d recommend a company called Colotraq– they don’t do hosting themselves, but they put your specifications out there to a bunch of hosting companies and let them all bid to give you the best price. Their pay comes from the hosting company, so you don’t have to pay anything extra but get a lot of help and support (if you need it) in making the decision. My former boss went through them and was raving about their customer service and how much they helped him (he was a computer naif) set up a good deal for hosting and a bunch of other services I don’t remember. Good stuff!
http://www.colotraq.com
I share in this misery. I had a web site. Past tense. It required changes. I called my host. I was left on hold, trsf to India (sounds real nice there) , transferred back. No one could place me into the proper department. That is how I spent part of my life. I’m not getting that time back. Finally, I had to tell them – shut it down. Shut it!!! Shut it you dumb bleep!!! Can you do that??!!
Now it says it is under construction. I am paying them for the benefit of not having to talk to them.
Even though a personal assistant would do wonders here, I am against the concept. Any businessperson is placing a ton of trust in someone they dont know.
As someone who works with MySQL, I love the way you described GoDaddy’s offer as “UNLIMITED MySQLS”. Seriously though, if that’s what the customer service told you, that is just awful.
Joe, you moved your hosting but your domain is still registered at HostMonster with THEIR contact info. You have to get the domain registration in YOUR name and move the registration to another registration company (ie Godaddy, name.com, namecheap.com…)
http://whois.domaintools.com/joeposnanski.com
I know absolutely nothing about the subject but if I were in the position to choose a company that I could trust and believe in for the long term I would feel odd telling my wife that I have chosen to partner with a compant entitled “Go Daddy!”
What do I know…I’m nearly 57 yrs old!
http://www.mattheaton.com/?page_id=2
here is Mr. President’s contact info, its available on his blog
[...] as his professional blog drew more traffic. “No problems,” except that last Friday they permanently closed his account without [...]
I was just about to post that Joe’s tale of woe is now on Consumerist but it looks like trackbacks beat me. Alas.
Please note that Joe will NOT be hiring a personal assistant.
Margo, however, may be hiring a personal assistant for Joe.
So all you 20 something Danica look alikes can stop working on your resumes.
On the other hand, somehow, I can’t imagine this is a popular blog for Danica-look-alike demographic.
That tendency to feel like everything is your fault? I have it. When I first saw your blog was down, my initial, nano-second-length reaction was, “What did I do?”
Sorry, dual commenting . . .
Great post from Matt Heaton which – to summarize – says that HostMonster now has this great software which allows his company, and his company alone, to restrict a site’s mySQLs when utilization becomes very high, rather than, you know, like every other company, simply terminate the account.
Huh.
http://www.mattheaton.com/?p=185
First time viewer, found your tale on the consumerist.
Wow, HostMonster sounds like a company run by ex-circus clowns.
I worked techSupport at GoDaddy in Phoenix for almost a year, so I can almost guarantee you won’t have any problems running this site with them.
It’s amazing how many fake positive-reviews HostMonster has out there.
[...] as his professional blog drew more traffic. “No problems,” except that last Friday they permanently closed his account without [...]
IfThenElvis is correct Joe.
Get your domain name of off HostMonster as soon as possible.
Matt could still make your life miserable once he gets around to reading your post.
One last piece of irony for you sir.
You just quit GoDaddy hosting, and moved to GoDaddy hosting.
HostMonster.com is registered through WildWestDomains.
WWD is GoDaddy’s reseller affiliate. Disquised to look like a seperate company, but believe me, WWD is GoDaddy.
I answered GoDaddy calls, and I answered WWD calls. Same company.
Chances are this Matt guy has a dedicated or virtual dedicated server housed inside GoDaddy’s building (probably their Mesa location). He gets discounted hosting/domain names.
I’m available for personal assistant duties, and look nothing like Danica. Unfortunately I live nowhere near KC.
Oh wow! I almost went with HostMonster a few months ago when I opened my new domain, at the last minute I chose Namecheap though because I had sold my old domain and they deposited the funds into my Namecheap account. To make a long boring story short–I didn’t have enough funds in my account to transfer the money to my Paypal and Namecheap had a really great deal so I took it instead of Hostmonster, now I am SO glad that I did!
Oh, and I landed here via The Consumerist by the way…
I think I might pay you to be your personal assistant. But seriously, I am unemployed and live in Kansas City. Perfect fit.
Being a (small) web host I can tell you that if one site can bring down an entire host then the person who set the host up doesn’t know how to do their job.
And for the record; I’m also a MySQL Database Administrator.
Love the blog. Keep it up.
–B
Just emailed “Matt”:
“Apparently, at age 36, you have never learned how to treat a good customer. Joe Posnanski brings pleasure to thousands of people with his blog, and perhaps hundreds of thousands more with his sportswriting for espn.com and his syndicated columns, which are nationwide in scope. Since you appear to be a pretty good ping pong player, one would have thought that your company would welcome the chance to host what I consider to be the best sports blog going. Hell, Joe might have done a piece on you, which would have been priceless exposure for you and your company.
“If your idea of customer service is to shut down a customer like Joe without warning, I predict a short [and unprofitable] future for your company. If Joe’s blog had depended on being up in order to profit, considering how your company represents itself to potential customers, you would have been on the hook for a big judgment.
“Here’s hoping you treat a for-profit customer the same way, and that you get justice!”
Thanks for ruining my weekend,
Tom Young
[...] as his professional blog drew more traffic. “No problems,” except that last Friday they permanently closed his account without [...]
Host Monster just lost its highest profile client with a whole host of bad publicity. Sounds like they’re the perfect company to host my personal website. Sign me up.
Matt sounds like a real business magician.
You’ve been posted on Comsumerist: http://consumerist.com/5249445/host-monster-turns-on-customer-shuts-down-blog-without-warning-or-sensical-explanation
I have a similar story with a similarly shitty company called Webhostingpad….& I totally agree with your conclusion, “Never, ever, ever use anything that has either “Host†or “Monster†in the title”
http://ninebullets.net/archives/ninebulletsnet-versus-web-hosting-pad-the-story
Hello All,
First things first, it was a pleasure reading that blog Melody – thank you for the kind words. On to the hosting piece; When you sign with someone like a GoDaddy or a HostMonster you are leasing a very small amount of processing power from a very large cluster of computers, with many other folks sharing those resources. This is why the price is anywhere from $5-$15 a month. It really wouldn’t be fair for anyone to be upset about downtime if the site was brought back up within 24-48 hours. However someone pulled the plug on you because you are growing and sucking up too much public resource.
It is called virtualization. The hosting company deploys racks full of super powerful computers and installs what is called VMWare on these machines, which slices them up into multiple instances. So one computer can act as many, saving $, space, and power. However it’s still one computer…you are just sharing. Moreover these computers link up to one big hard drive cluster called a SAN. The connection/cabling between the two should be fiber channel. THIS is the bottleneck. Your SQL queries go from the virtual computer (*hogging* resources) down the fiber channel (along with everyone else trying to access the hard drive), quieries the disk, then back down the fiber channel to the comp and out to your clients on the net. The problem/bottleneck is the fiber channel.
So imagine a ton of people on the highway and you are driving a huge 18 wheeler in the left lane. The highway is the fiber running the the harddrive and your data from your database is the 18 wheeler. You are slowing down everyone else. Is this a problem? How would you solve it? Simply add more lanes right? and send the truck to the right lane? This is possible in the IT world, but apparently not at your current host. It sounds like they simply do not have extra fiber channel back to the SAN. I have actually written articles on this because you are not the only one experiencing these sorts of problems.
Now with that said, I can tell you that if your application and database(s) are robust and growing, a simple hosting plan is not the right product for you. The SQl queries are taking a long time/taking up too many resources, and what this does is hog bandwidth to the SAN, or storage area network…aka the master hard drive causing everyone else to see their services depleating, and hence a phone call saying, “look you are too robust, we are going to need to put you in a dedicated environment”. Yes this is a better plan…for them. And yes you will have better service, and by better I mean faster and more room to grow. However, heres the pitch for COLOTRAQ
If you are cost sensative what do you do? Well you simply go to a host with a more robust virtualization offering. Diverse fiber routes to their SAN is key. Joe, if you are growing, and the database is filling up day by day, honestly my friend, that $40 a month is right around the corner for you. I can help you look for more agressive offers, but it’s your fault your site is successful!
Feel free to contact me or anyone at COLOTRAQ
Cheers!
-Brandon Peccoralo
bpeccoralo@colotraq.com
973-575-7997 x1
http://www.COLOTRAQ.com
Hey Joe,
My name is Andy and I’m from KC, used to read the star once in awhile, but i’m glad you’re on the ‘blogosphere’ now. Much easier for me to catch up on than sifting through the paper. The star has really come a long way in the last couple of years though, pretty cool.
Anyway, I’m also a nerd like many of these other commenters, and would also like to offer my help. I currently use DreamHost, they’re pretty good about stuff and if something is causing a problem (like too many database queries or “SQLs” or something) they usually contact you before shutting you down entirely. Anyway, if you’d like some help with a ‘personal’ touch, shoot me an email or something. I’d be willing to put you on our server or something whatever.
If nothing else, good luck!
Matt Heaton, a pox on your eternal soul.
That is all.
That would be Matt Heaton, President of HOSTMONSTER. Matt Heaton of HOSTMONSTER, I am talking to you. Matt Heaton is also with Bluehost. Bluehost and Matt Heaton, a pox on you.
Bluehost. Host Monster. Hostmonster. Matt Heaton.
Honestly, it was bound to happen anywhere Joe was hosted. His app grew to the point where he needed more services, simple as that. HostMonster’s offer of $40 a month for probably a dedicated server, is a great price. So really there is no need to beat up HostMonster this bad (no I am not partners with these guys so that is not my reasoning for backing them. I truly mean Joe’s instance would have occurred anywhere else).
) and they were threatening to leave. So what Matt did probably was figured either I keep up Joe Posnanski’s site and lose X amount of clients and revenue, or I shut down Joe temporarily, everyone sees an immediate performance throttle, and then I give Joe a deal. Matt’s single mistake was not contacting Joe before hand. No one should ever be shut down without notice, and for that I agree.
HOWEVER. I do agree whole-heartedly with the business oriented folks out there that HostMonster should have NEVER flipped the switch on you out of the blue. HostMonster was probably getting numerous called from upset clients that their services are slow (because this site is so popular
But let’s not beat up HostMonster too much, this site gets a lot of eyeballs
Brandon w/ COLOTRAQ
You know, all it would have taken was HostMonster sending Joe an email saying, “Dear Joe, your blog is exceeding your contract’s maximums. Because you are a good customer, we are adding resources to keep your blog going, but if this new high rate continues for (insert quantity of days here: less than three days on a Friday night would be unacceptable) days, then you will need to upgrade your account or find other web hosting.” And I bet that within three days the problem would have been resolved without any need to upgrade or for cancellation.
Now for a suggestion. Joe, you host this blog. This blog drives some readership. You are kind and generous to all us loyal readers by not dunning us with advertising, except for the random book that, quite frankly, everybody in the western world needs to buy else the terrorists win. Or the martians win. Or maybe the steroid users. Anyway, a popular blog is a commodity. I suspect that a for profit site with which you are affiliated, si.com, might be willing to provide hosting services in exchange for the SI links. Just something to think about.
Finally, I know you get little recompense for your efforts in this blog. That is why I try to post all the errors I see in what you write. I figure there’s probably a 1% chance that some blog post will become an SI.COM post or maybe a newspaper article, and if I report a probably typo first, then your editors will be a little more kindly disposed towards paying you for your blogs, so in a tiny (but non-zero) way I am contributing to your financial well being. So I do try to help, by contributing my time in spotting and reporting things that I don’t think would slip by professional proof reading. I also make you an offer I’ve only made to one other offer: if you want/need a book proofed, I will do so for free. Not because I devalue my skills as a copy editor, but because I value your writing enough to know that my time will be well spent.
Again, sorry to hear of your problems with those dirty dirty dogs, and count me amongst the many voices raised in grateful support of Joe Posnanski’s Blog, even if somehow it has managed to lose the “exactly one louder”. Copyright issues?
To Brandon about his defense of HostMonster: I believe if I read the story correctly, the author had already upgraded to the $40 plan *before* the site crashed/was turned off. Tat does not sound like defendable behavior. And Joe needs a refund!
Travis,
Eek. Maybe you’re right. Well then, proper biz etiquette would be 7 days notice of termination…and with a $40 plan this should have never even occurred. I wonder what services the $30 surcharge included.
Thank you for the correction
-B
Transcript of my recent chat with HostMonster:
a guy [10:20:12 PM]: How could you idiots possibly disconnect Posnanski’s blog??? I will make sure that I and EVERYONE I might ever possibly discuss blogging with will NEVER use your service
Ann A. [10:21:57 PM]: Hi I’m not familiar with the blog. You can contact our Abuse department at abuse@hostmonster.com or call 1-866-573-4678. I’m not certain how much information they can provide regarding this.
I don’t even know which way to go with the fact that they have an “Abuse” department.
[...] excruciating detail, he recounted his awful customer service encounter. By the conclusion of his amusing rant the very name of the company in question was transformed into the equivalent of an expletive. [...]
To Jay:
I’m actually suprised from that thread. I just spoke with someone closely involved with HostMonster and undoubtedly they know who Joe is. A lot of their customers are mom and pops, little apps, etc. Also, it was a factor of Joe sucking up public resources so my diagnosis pretty much was on target.
I love this guessing game, it’s very fun as HostMonster has made no effort to update anyone as to what happened or how they are remedying (sp?) the situation. No blogs, no help to your inquery, no nothing.
Guess #2: The “know nothing” guy Joe was dealing with and Ann A whom you were dealing with are probably interns. FWDing you to the abuse department doesn’t make any sense.
“FWDing you to the abuse department doesn’t make any sense.”
No, but it does mean that (a) the service rep (Ann A, in this case) can put “Closed” on the ticket for that call, and (b) she can hang up the phone with a clear conscience. As for providing actual “customer service”, well, that’s just somebody else’s problem.
This is not idle speculation; I have worked for over 40 years in various forms of customer/enduser support, and this is what usually happens.
What no is telling you is that 500 other customers sites were completely non responsive because of Joe’s site. He was using almost 3X the processing time (Cpus) and disk i/o of more than 500 other customer COMBINED. It wasn’t just that Joe needed a VPS or dedicated server. He was using more than 5 dedicated servers worth of processing and I/O for $7 a month – approximately $500 a month worth of services. Even still, we wouldn’t have shut his site down for that. We shut it down because 499 customers sites being up is more important than one site being up. You can disagree all you want, but leaving the site up while he “fixed” the issue wasn’t an option. Everyone was already down at that point.
This isn’t a new business for us. We host more than 1,500,000 domains in our organization. Joe’s spike was in the top 50 I have ever seen.
Have you noticed that since the site was switch from Hostmonster.com that it is incredibly slow? There is a reason for that. You don’t get 4-5 cores/cpus of processing power for $7 a month. Godaddy isn’t even close to hostmonster in features or reliability or speed.
Matt Heaton / President Hostmonster.com
what a douche. You stay classy, Matt Heaton.
Hey Matt – this page is currently the 4th result of a google search for matt heaton hostmonster.
Keep up the good work.
Matt –
Even if I were to agree to every statement you have made (and, actually, I probably would), the issue is not your server performance or your domain hosting capabilities or anything like that.
The problem is that you took down a paying customer with no warning before and no notice afterward. That is, regardless of how you slice it, the definition of lousy service.
Just started following your stuff over the last year and really enjoy the way you frame your stories.
“Longtime reader; first-time commenter”…all that
Get the personal assistant. If you have to pass Go first, or whatever, so be it. But get the assistant.
You will thank yourself everyday. Especially those days you realize you will never be on the phone arguing about acronyms (non-baseball, I suppose) ever again.
Yes. Say yes.
Besides, that’s the person who would be doing the due diligence on all these fine business-folk who are pitching their IT sevices on this very thread…
Too bad they can’t do the diligence on personal assistant hiring, though.
It amazes me how Matt Heaton can talk about “Hyper Speed MySQL Databases” and “Hosting Nirvana – The Future of Shared Hosting!” on his blog claiming to having found the solution to all problems with shared web hosting. But behind the scenes he is booting a client off a server he feels is using too many resources. It sure appears to be a conflict in what he says and what he does!?