I’m finally rid of my old hosting company, a big relief.
When I started with them, they were a small local reseller, two geeky preppies with a lot of ambition and technical savvy.
A lot changed through the years; they moved out of state and stopped taking phonecalls, asking that tech support questions be emailed. No one seemed to know where they were or even what business they were in.
Their spam filtering didn’t work very well; in fact, it didn’t seem to work at all. At one point, my catch-all account had over 10,000 pieces of junk mail, and it was driving me a little crazy. Not so much because of the volume of email, which was bad enough, but the stomach-turning content.
I maintain a mailing list for our local Microsoft user group, and recently, received bounce backs for their email addresses. Coincidentally, I’d already initiated a change in both the registrar and the hosting company for my domain.
The registrar change is instructive of the same lesson: exercise caution when you do business with people you call friends. I’d been using another local company for domain registration and renewal, and they locked my domain. It took almost a week for the registration to be transferred and the consecutive change in domain servers to kick in, all of which happened sometime yesterday morning when, of course, I was at work.
With the help of my new hosting company (they have 24×7 support by people who speak clear, unaccented English, a blessing for someone whose ears don’t process high-pitched voices very well), I got the email accounts straightened out last night and am hoping to square away my website tonight.