WebHost4Life: why I got so angry

"They're only a hosting company that you pay less than $10 per month. Why get so upset when your site goes down? Why yell and shout on the phone for 30 minutes at the CEO? Have you lost your marbles?"
This thought went through my head many times yesterday, but my answer remains the same: you mess with *MY* web site and I get really pissed off; ignore my support requests for several days, and I go ballistic. *MY* web site represents hours and hours of work, often done after hours or over weekends. For me it is a work of art, a labour of love, and an extension of who I am.
If you mess with that, you're messing with me. You're also betraying my trust. I signed up and paid for service a year in advance. I struggled and tweaked, uploaded and tested, and spent hours and hours getting the damn thing to work. Of course I'll get fed up if something goes wrong, epecially when you deny that anything is wrong and that you broke it.
If I find over a period of time that your service is unreliable or your help system sucks, I weigh the pain of moving with the pain of staying. If there are technical glitches that get sorted out over time, as long as you own up to them, I'll cut you some slack.
But don't send me a hype-laden impersonal email with no signature or name on the bottom and tell me that you are "migrating" my precious baby to a "new platform" without giving me the chance to test this platform. Don't promise to do it in February and then do it 34 days later.
Don't train your "support staff" to lie about their names (there is no-one called Agustin Bates/Perry Peters/Jessy Pratt in Mangalore India) and tell me there is nothing to do until your account is "migrated" when it is precisely the migration that has gone horribly and catastrophically wrong. I was caught between a rock and a hard place by YOUR new system that I don't care about or even understand. You should have explained it up front. You didn't.
Now you have lost 10% of your customer base and you have the arrogance to tell me that only a "tiny fraction" of all the migrations have gone wrong. Are you trying to tell me I'm a "difficult" client because I'm in the "tiny fraction"? Would you rather I just shut up and left? And you expect me to take this rubbish? When you say "... we’re able to move 95%+ of accounts without customer participation ..." what you're actually saying that you are screwing up 1 in 20 sites. And then you sound surprised when I get upset? As Dr Phil would say, "What were you thinking??"
Now you know why I got upset. I don't respond well to bullshit.

WebHost4Life: why I got so angry | About the Endurance International Group (EIG) | WebHost4Life breaks FishWisePro web site for 12 days | WebHost4Life domain registration fiasco

About the Endurance International Group (EIG)

After being stuffed around for weeks by WebHost4Life and the (mis)management team that bought it, I have been reading the Endurance International Group's web site more closely. It has been an interesting read, mainly because of what they don't tell you. Take, for example, the following:

"Acquisitions are a key component of our growth strategy. Using a proprietary methodology, we have completed acquisitions with more than 30 hosting companies and migrated more than half-a-million customers onto our platform since 2001."

They omit to list all these acquisitions. I wonder why? Here is a list I compiled, using Google to search for the fax number used by their legal department. It seems that David C. Bryson, General Counsel, is a busy man with all these clients.

• www.2slick.com
• AccountSupport *
• www.apollohosting.com *
• www.berryinfosysllc.com
• www.bizland.com *
• www.bluedomino.com *
• www.carielweb.com
• www.computersconcepts.net
• www.dollar2host.com
• www.dot5hosting.com *
• DomainHost *
• www.easycgi.com *
• www.ehost.com *
• www.entryhost.com *
• www.fatcow.com *
• www.freeyellow.com *
• www.globat.com *
• www.hostaday.com
• www.hostcentric.com *
• www.hostingbyexcel.com
• www.hostwithmenow.com
• www.hostyoursite.com *
• www.hypermart.net *
• IMOutdoorsHosting *
• www.ipage.com
• www.ipower.com *
• IpowerWeb *
• www.myresellerhome.com
• www.networkshosting.com *
• www.osullivansystems.com
• www.powweb.com *
• www.purehost.com *
• www.readyhosting.co.uk
• www.readyhosting.com *
• www.sabapro.com
• www.southeastweb.com
• www.spry.com *
• www.startlogic.com *
• www.tighthost.com
• www.usanethosting.com *
• www.VirtualAve.net *
• www.vpslink.com *
• www.web2010.com
• www.webdevhosting.com
• www.webhost4life.com *
• WebstrikeSolutions
• www.xeran.com *
• YourWebHosting *
• www.zipitdesigns.com

If my experience is anything to go by, the only way they are going to grow is through acquisitions, and even then they manage to persuade a significant percentage to change hosting providers during the process. According to www.web-hosting-top.com, WebHost4Life's hosted domains grew for 2007-2009 from 62,076 to 70,669 domains. In 2010 the decline has set in, so that by April 19, 2010 they are down to 63,379 domains, a loss of 11.5% in just 4 months. My guess is that most of those 7,290 domains are sites that were screwed up by their "migration" process.
Speaking of migration, here is the "Migration Experience for Customers" spin

Through the migration "wheel" technology, the vast majority of accounts can be moved to the Endurance platform with minimal customer involvement. We don’t just move files, we activate accounts on our system — paying attention to the smallest of details — even changes to settings and scripts are handled automatically.
In fact, we’re able to move 95%+ of accounts without customer participation — and, we offer intuitive tools for assisting the remaining customers in their transitions.

They fail to mention what percentage of those "migrated" web sites actually work after they have been moved. Also, they state that they move 95% of the accounts without customer participation before the move, because most of the customer "participation" happens after they realise their web site is no longer working, the database is corrupt or old, or the settings are completely screwed up.

While we will see an increase in support traffic during this time, the vast majority of contacts are simple customer-education issues that our agents are trained to coach customers through.

What they fail to point out is that the only "help" they actually are capable of providing is "customer-education issues", because they are unable to do any technical changes at the "technical support" desk themselves. They simply log a call and leave it to overworked and incompetent technicians to "fix". Often this takes so long that the customer has already left by the time they get to attend to the problem.
During the "migration" process a number of other changes occur, such as the imposition of a $35 "cancellation fee". Unless you specifically kick up a fuss, this fee is deducted from money you may already have paid, and the remainder is refunded. Spot the ripoff. Now contrast this with the statement

At Endurance, our mission is to "Delight customers and help them succeed by profitably delivering superior solutions and an outstanding customer experience." This holds true for all of our customers, and especially those who go through the migration process.

If this is the case, why does the call centre not have any of the contact details of EIG, such as the name, email address and phone number of the CEO? Because the last thing the CEO wants to do is listen to the complaints of outraged customers whose web sites and data have been destroyed, and whose businesses have been impacted by the callous avarice of EIG.
I checked on the Web Host Directory Awards page and not a single EIG company is listed in their awards. I guess that's no surprise, really.
Update: The Better Business Bureau lists some of the hosting companies shown above. I have marked them with a star (*)

WebHost4Life: why I got so angry | About the Endurance International Group (EIG) | WebHost4Life breaks FishWisePro web site for 12 days | WebHost4Life domain registration fiasco | Why EIG is called Endurance International

Your Copier Could Be Spying On You

CBS ran a story about how many copiers have built-in hard drives that retain digital copies of documents that can later fall into the wrong hands. Great for industrial espionage and crime syndicates. Just wheel in a new copier, take the old one away, and start reading those old copies. I heard about it on Security Now! podcast #245.

SA Politics in a nutshell

Trevor Hoah is brilliant. He summarises the SA political media circus so well.

FIFA's Official Match Fixing

We were warned a long time ago that FIFA would rip off South Africa during 2010. Now the chickens are coming home to roost, and the tourists are staying away.

The Kruger National Park recently dumped some 25 000 rooms on the market, after Match Services, for whom they had been reserved, failed to sell them. It paid no penalties for relinquishing the reservations, so the park now has only a few weeks left to try to sell the empty beds.

Match Services is the organisation that was granted monopoly rights by FIFA to sell tickets and tour packages to foreign visitors. Match is part-owned by a company run by Phillipe Blatter, the nephew of FIFA president Sepp Blatter. It has been cavalier in its treatment of South African businesses and rapacious in its sales to foreign tourists.

The same happened with more than two thirds of the nearly two million rooms Match originally reserved. Many of the hotels, lodges and B&Bs that agreed to Match's harsh terms, because it seemed to be the only chance of participating in the promised World Cup bonanza, are now stuck with tons of unsold inventory and little time to sell it.
Meanwhile, tour operators are expected to pay a whopping $30 000 licence fee to Match for every country in which they wish to sell packages. For a foreign operator serving only its own country, that's bad enough. But for a South African tour operator with clients all over the world, the initial outlay to Match could be crippling. If your company gets two groups each from five countries, that's over a million rand you have to recoup from ten paying customers, just to take care of the Match mafia.
Clearly, only the really big operators can afford such an extortionate shake-down, so smaller businesses are left out in the cold. So much for developing the tourism industry in South Africa.
As if this isn't enough, Match charges massive markups, including 35% on World Cup tickets themselves. Rooms were sold to Match at the kind of knock-down prices only a monopolist can demand: it insisted on paying 2007 rates. Reports vary, but talk in tourism circles suggests that international guests pay anywhere between 50% and 500% more than regular high season rack rates for rooms resold by Match.

Read the full story "Who is ripping off whom?" at The Daily Maverick. And then there's the book "FOUL!" by Andrew Jennings. He has a most interesting web site, http://www.transparencyinsport.org

What does 99.999% mean?

When someone promises "99.999%" uptime, they're probably lying. It's a goal of many IT professionals, but seldom achieved.
Just do the maths to figure out why. 99.999% of 1 year is 365*0.99999 which is 364 days, 23 hours 54 minutes and 44.6 seconds. So if your server reboot takes longer than 5 minutes, you have already run out of time, even in a year. I have created a table with the allowable downtime for various percentages:

%	Per Year	Per Month
99.999%	5 mins	25 sec
99.99%	52 mins	4 min 22 sec
99.9%	8 hrs 45 mins	43 mins
99%	3 days 15.6 hrs	7 hrs 18 mins
95%	18 days 6 hours	36.5 hours

Percentages are often used to hide unpleasant facts. For example, a condom that is 95% effective means that if you have sex more than 20 times, you might as well not bother, because 95% means 19 times out of 20 you're protected, and the twentieth time it will fail, if not sooner.

File Compare made easy and fast

File comparison is not a trivial programming task, so I have learnt to rely on the efforts of others. The text editor I use, EditPad Pro, has great line-by-line comparisons, and in many cases that's all I've needed. Until recently.
I successfully managed to screw up a perfectly good working program, DataMover, and have spent several days fixing it again. Now that the dust has settled, I have the luxury of going back and looking at an older version of the code to see all the changes. The screen shot above is an example of some of the changes.
I discovered ExamDiff (the free version) some time ago, and its icon has been on my desktop for some time, where I can drag and drop files that need comparing. The free version only does line-by-line comparison, so today I tried the "pro" version, which highlights the actual changes along the line, as shown above. Click on the image to get a better view.
It's awesome! Had I been in less of a hurry some time ago, I would have experimented and found out all the awesome extra goodies that ExamDiff Pro could do. This is going to save me a lot of time, not to mention confusion. I have happily paid the $35 to register the product. I should have done this months ago.

WebHost4Life breaks FishWisePro web site for 12 days

FishWisePro is a web site that provides information on all known species of fish. It is published by the author of www.fishwise.co.za, Dennis Polack. I have been privileged to help Dennis by developing the web site pages that extract the data from a SQL database and display it for the user.
We chose WebHost4Life last year because they offered enough disk space and database space to support a large database such as this. Now they have "transitioned" the site to their "new platform" and predictably it doesn't work.
I visited the site today only to discover the site is completely blank. Fortunately the data upload is going according to schedule, because we reorganised the database structure, and I re-generated all the data support pages to match the structure a week ago. I wonder how long the site will be down this time?
Update 28 March (day 1): I logged ticket no 6883865 and called international long distance to the USA to their "support" number. So far all I have is the following boilerplate response:

Hello,
Thank you for contacting Support.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. I have checked your website http://fishwisepro.com and I was able to duplicate the issue. I have asked a member of our team who specializes in website issue to review your account. You should be hearing from this specialists within 24-48 hours. If you have any questions in the meantime, please let us know and be sure to refer to the link http://www.webhost4life.com/member/sconsole for the quickest service.
Thank you for choosing WebHost4Life, we appreciate your support.
Sincerely,
Bryan Smith
Customer Support

So basically they haven't admitted it but they have screwed up and now I must wait for 2 days for them to look into it. I'm willing to bet it takes longer than 48 hours.
Update Tuesday 30 March (day 3): as expected, the issue is not resolved, so I have changed the front page on the old platform in the hope of embarrassing them into changing to the new platform. My wife calls this "guerilla warfare". I call it revenge. As soon as they let me edit the files on the "new platform" I will be able to fix any errors, or at least tell them what's broken. Right now they are just wasting everyone's time.
Update Thursday (day 5): It's now 5 days since they stuffed it up, and finally we are on the new platform after much begging and pleading. Overnight they screwed up the site again, redirecting everything to a blank page. But at least now I have access to the files so I can repair the damage. The migration is 34 days late. Not bad for a 2-bit hosting company.
Friday 2 April, 14h20 SAST (day 6): I came in to the office to work on the web site (it's a public holiday in SA) and was greeted with an HTTP error 503. Basically that means the web server is broken. Last night the SQL Server vcnsql82.webhost4life.com was broken or flaky. Today its backup wizard doesn't work. They are obviously having a great time in the server room. I wonder how many days it will take to fix?
Update Saturday (day 7): According to ticket #6902824 the problem was resolved after 22 hours, but the site still isn't working. So now we have had to reopen the ticket. That means the site has been unusable for pretty much an entire week.
I'm not the conspiratorial sort, but I get suspicious about the slow progress in fixing these problems. Especially when they offer a special "Premium Support" option for an additional $29.95 per month. Read between the lines in this sales pitch:

All of your support will be delivered by a team of North American-based Premium Agents.
You'll have access to a customized online Support Console that you can use and route online requests to our Premium agents.
All of your requests will be expedited. So if your Premium Agent needs assistance fulfilling your request, our Tier II agents and Engineers will give it special priority.

Does that mean I'm not getting support from North American-based agents at present? Does it mean that "normal" support requests don't get priority? The usually say that I should expect a response within 24-48 hours, and in the "how did we do?" survey they ask if the problem was resolved within 72 hours.

What Makes a Premium Agent?
The most experienced agents, those with the longest tenure at WebHost4Life;
Agents with the highest internal quality scores, based on audits conducted by our Management Team;
Customer Favorites! Premium Agents consistently receive high customer-satisfaction ratings from customers like you.

In other words if you pay four times the "Advanced Hosting Plan" you get the "A" team who are not nearly as useless as the current "B" team. Spot the ripoff. Now there is talk of a class action lawsuit in the USA, and a community action group of current and past WebHost4Life customers.

Update Sunday (day 8): It is now 8 days since the site was transferred, and the "B" team still insists on trying to stuff up the site. I have finally fixed it myself. Hopefully they don't break anything else.
Wednesday 7th (day 9): The site is down again, and remained flaky the whole day. It either gave out partial pages or refused connections completely. I had to report the problem twice, because the first "help" chat agent refused to log the fault. Ticket #6918854 says they are still "researching" the problem. It took them 5 hours to start working on the issue.
Sunday 11 April (day 10): Site up and down again, refusing connections. Error page not working, stats not working. So far I have been in contact with their abysmal chat line 17 times in 2 weeks. Total time wasted: in excess of 24 working hours. Cost: at least $1200, excluding phone calls and bandwidth costs.

Monday 12 April (day 11): Site still refusing connections some of the time. I wasted 3 hours this morning trying to make a simple change to the site. It seems that there is some kind of delay between uploading the new pages and being able to see them. Stats seem to have been fixed. Error page is still broken. I chatted to a "sales" agent this afternoon and asked her the difference between the "old platform" and the "new platform". She got an error visiting the new platform. Theoretically it should be the same speed or faster than the old, but it isn't. Informal testing shows it to be 30% slower, if it works at all.
Update: one of their "Escalated Support" people said he was getting fast load times (within 1 sec) measured using a Firefox add-in called "lori". Here are my results:

"Old platform": Time to first byte: 5.8 sec, time to completion: 43.8 sec
"New platform": Time to first byte: 17 sec, time to completion: 63.9 sec. Depending on how you do the maths, that's anything from 45% to 193% slower on the "new" platform.

Wed 14 April: The refused connections problem seems to have been solved, thanks to the efforts of a competent technician in the "Escalated Support" department, but the server response times are patchy, from being really fast to painfully slow. At least it works, sort of. Maybe I'll get to keep my job. We are still a long way from their mission statement:

Delight customers and help them succeed by profitably delivering superior solutions and an outstanding customer experience.

Their customers think otherwise.
Thursday 15 April (day 12): last night these bright sparks enhanced my outstanding customer experience by deleting the Mustang.co.za SQL database. I wonder what else they plan to break?

Friday 16 April: It turns out they didn't delete the database, just took it offline for 12 hours. That means the database servers will only be 99.863% reliable this year, even if nothing else goes wrong.

Saturday 17 April: Discovered that the Visitor Stats last updated: 04/13/2010 4:55 PM EDT, which was a day before the SQL servers had their glitch. So there are no visitor stats for 13,14,15,16 and 17 April. Their standard response:

I was able to duplicate your issue. In order to investigate further, I need to escalate the issue to one of our technical specialists. You should be hearing from this specialist within 24-48 hours.

They also changed the stats settings to use AWStats instead of Webalyzer. I wonder why they did that?
Mon 19 April: Today's "outstanding customer experience" is the discovery that the FTP service has been randomly refusing connections all weekend. And another day's worth of server logs is missing. I'm really not looking for these problems: I note them as I bump into them, that's all.

WebHost4Life: why I got so angry | About the Endurance International Group (EIG) | WebHost4Life breaks FishWisePro web site for 12 days | WebHost4Life domain registration fiasco