etc.

A few longtime readers might remember the Feature Price debacle from approximately one year ago. For those not inclined to follow the links and fill in the backstory, I’ll summarize: about two years ago, I registered this domain and signed up for a hosting package with Feature Price. It was one of the most poorly-researched purchases of my life, I was completely inexperienced with the world of hosting, the extent of my research was price-comparison, and I made the decision to go with FP based on what I thought was a rock-bottom deal ($5 a month for a little plan, which I can now assure you is not rock-bottom at all). I cower in shame when I think of it but I’ve come a long way since then so I’ve stopped beating myself up about it.

So, since it’s often when things go wrong that you realize the folly of your decisions, I only realized what a bad decision FP was when they went into receivership or some such thing, and were eventually taken over by another big company. Their customer support went from being satisfactory 10% of the time, to being satisfactory 0% of the time. And since I was on the bottom of the customer-base totem pole (they were getting a slim $5 per month out of me), there was zero telephone support and when all accounts were transferred over to the new company I had no access to the control panel and all mail was shut down.

After a few weeks of wrangling and very stern e-mail messages, I managed to get my DNS switched to DreamHost (who I love dearly because they are dependable, reachable, and their admin messages make me laugh) and all my web services have been operating at 100% since.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, for starters, Andrea brought up the fact that she had trouble finding good, solid, firsthand accounts of hosting woes/victories, so I’m doing my bit to fill the void. Of more immediate importance is the fact that I am finally working on getting this domain registration transferred to DreamHost so that I can control absolutely everything from one panel and not ever have to worry about dealing with the FP/Atlantic/dotRegistrar people again. There should be no visible sign of this change on the site, it’s just some admin stuff that should be working behind the scenes, but you never know. If, in the next couple of days, you come by and find a “page cannot be displayed” message, hang tight and think of it as preventive maintenance now so that etches-johnson.com will always be here for you in the future. Sort of like highway repairs in the summer.