Technical Difficulties

As we're all now painfully aware of, the Salvage Chic website was down for a few days this week. I first noticed it on Saturday night when I went online and got this giant "FORBIDDEN" message on my screen. My initial thought was "Ha Ha Kenny, very funny" as I figured he was playing a prank on me and blocking my laptop from going on the Internet. He had No Idea what I was talking about though so my next call was to the Hosting Company, Superpages. Where I found my account had been 'locked' due to an outstanding balance and they cheerfully informed me I could speak to the Billing Department on Monday at 8AM.

I spent the better part of Sunday fretting about what people were going to think when they logged on and saw THIS:

YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO VIEW THIS PAGE

Like, poor Jerry in Natick! His partner Wally is always playfully threatening to restrict him from my website... this could be a Relationship Breaker! And all my customers in the Corporate World, who will think that their employers wised up to the fact that they are wasting precious hours browsing my website on company time, when they should really be processing insurance claims or writing medical software code. One woman even emailed me to say she was going through withdrawal, she needed her daily Fix or the D.T.s were about to set in!!

So Monday rolled around and I hooked up with Nancy in Billing and we determined that the debit card that automatically paid the bill every month had expired hence the lock on the account. Only it wasn't a 'lock', they had actually DELETED the whole website. Seriously, it was like my whole existence over there had just evaporated. And this was only one month's payment missed, without even a phone call to see if maybe I wanted to provide them with a new form of payment before they annihilated my website. Nancy cheerfully forced me to sign a brand new contract and said there was a chance they could recover the data, as long as 72 hours hadn't transpired since they deleted it. We were now past the 48 hour mark.

I spent about 6 hours on the phone with Nancy on Monday, who had engaged the support of Technical Guy Jody, and they were very good about keeping me busy with Up-To-The-Minute Reports, such as "we are just waiting for Amber to get back from lunch to figure out why the Billing system is not synching with the Technical system so Jody can have the green light to try to restore your data." TICK-TOCK...

Finally around 4PM the website was (sort of) back online so I went off to an Auction with Claudia to try to forget about the whole sordid mess. Only to come home and find out it WASN'T entirely back online... SIGH. If you're still having problems accessing it a quick re-boot of your Router should do the trick, as it's probably cached the address of the old server that no longer has the data on it.

Now the kicker of it all is I had told Nancy "I have the $14.95 a month package" which she kindly set me back up with... but in the interim a rate hike took place so now I have less data storage & transfer bandwidth than I had, and I now have to upgrade to the $24.95 package to get back what I had. Hmmm, I wonder how many people they kicked off for being 1 day past due, in order to force them to sign a new contract at the higher rate. I smell a call to the Better Business Bureau in my future!

Word to the Wise: If you need a Website Host, don't go to Superpages; or as I know affectionately refer to them: SUCKYpages.