Thursday April 10
18:55
Arrrgh! Databases Screwed Up
Lately I’ve been moving my websites over to my new webhost, Cirtex. I’m doing the process myself rather than getting Cirtex to do it because, basically, I only trust myself to do it. I want to make sure every last thing is tested and working. I have a lot of history tied up in my websites..
Today, when testing one of my sites, I discovered that some of my databases got screwed up on the move over. The cause? Character set and collation options. My previous webhost uses a version of MySQL which is pre-”character set and collation options”, Cirtex uses a later version.
I knew that, and I thought I’d caught every possible snag related to collation options in this post but I hadn’t. Despite using phpMyAdmin for both the export and the import, today I found some text fields had been chopped. It seems that the export from the old MySQL server contained characters such as the accented ‘e’ in cafe and other control characters. When imported into the new server, phpMyAdmin didn’t like those characters and chopped the text without warning. The solution seems to be to open the exported file in Editpad Lite, convert to UTF8, and then upload that file.
It is very annoying - and scary, because I only found it by accident. I was testing something else at the time when I noticed a truncated value. I was already very wary that after I finish the move and cancel the old webhosting package, I’d suddenly find something wrong - not I’m VERY VERY wary that will happen. I’ll need to go through extensive testing.
Luckily there has been no damage to The Korean Blog List, but some of my other sites will need their entire databases redoing - and retesting, of course. Thankfully, in the end there will me more benefits than just having moved webhosts - I’ll have tidied up my sites, have verified copies that I know I can restore, and I’ll be on servers that handle character sets correctly - so I shouldn’t have this problem again. If I stayed with my current webhost, I might suddenly find a new server thrust upon me and not have the leisure to get things right.
Tuesday March 25
17:53
Moving Domains Between Webhosting Companies
Yesterday I moved The Korean Blog List to a new hosting company. I faced some technical challenges during the transfer, so to remind me of the solutions to them and the tools I used, I’ve written this: Moving Hosting Companies - Solving Technical Issues.
It’s primarily aimed at me - for when I’m moving domains in the future - but hopefully the page will help anyone else faced with similar site-move problems. Some of the solutions were difficult to track down.
Note: It is not a document about choosing a web host company, though obviously I’d recommend the company I’m using for that. I’ve included details on how to get half price hosting with that company at the bottom of the page.
Tuesday March 11
12:31
My experience with dotserving.com is almost over
…but not quite.
Despite the fact that they never set up my account because they couldn’t get “voice confirmation” that I existed, dotserving charged my credit card. So in dotserving’s eyes, I exist enough to charge my card, but don’t exist enough to get the account I’d paid for.
I’d been emailing the *owner* with presales queries 2-3 days before signing up. I’d told them which of their current users had referred me. All of that meant nothing. Until they heard my sweet voice, I only existed for card charging purposes, not account using purposes.
I say “almost over, but not quite” because dotserving had the choice of *cancelling* the charge on my card, or *refunding*. With a cancellation, the transaction simply disappears. With a refund, I lose the currency spread and movement between charging and refunding, approx 5-10%. Despite being clear to request a cancellation so that I am not charged anything, they processed it as a refund - so I’ll be charged something for this bad experience.
Dotserving claims that they called me, but couldn’t get through to me. With the call options on my phone, even if my phone is out of service, I’ll get a message to say that there was a call when I come back in service. There was no message - so in my opinion, that is just an excuse. Even if they did call and couldn’t get through to me, like they claim, pure business logic and customer service means that you send a notification mail, or you try again. I was customer number 666 (how appropriate, eh?) so they hardly are rushed off their feet. Once again, I’ll repeat that they knew which of their trusted customers had referred me, and I’d been in email contact with them for several days.
It really sounds like ass covering for slow service to me - they are probably not big enough to be able to handle new accounts during the night, but they don’t want to admit it. At the weekend dotserving tried to cover non and slow response to presales questions by claiming they had sent emails but I didn’t receive them. I gave them the benefit of the doubt about emails, but I now suspect that was ass covering also - or that their email servers lose emails.
Dotserving claim they responded to my support tickets within 20 minutes, and sent me mail with their log records to verify it. What they missed out is that the support replies were nothing but “wait 4-5 hours” until Billing comes in, in addition to the 4 hours I’d been waiting. They didn’t give a toss about solving the issue, or checking their systems. Again, if they’d made a call to me, that should have been on the system.
Rather than looking at this from a cool head business perspective and saying “We screwed up” or “We should review our procedures to ensure this doesn’t happen again”, the responses from dotserving’s owner have been “I wont debate this” and attempting to post on my blog.
I initially signed up for dotserving based on a friend’s recommendation. He has had no problems with them, and I should mention that in fairness. But I have had problems. If the support had actually bothered to try to resolve the issue and set up my account, or the replies this morning had been friendly and admitting they had issues, or they’d said “Hey, you had a bad experience, try the first month on us and you’ll see that we’re OK” (I’d have said no, but it would have been a good gesture), I’d probably not be writing this now. I suspect dotserving are one of those companies that are good as long as you don’t have any problems with the process - but in my case, they certainly fell down.
In the big picture of things, I’ve not lost a lot of money on this (assuming the refund goes through), and I didn’t give control of my website to them, so I had no downtime. I’ve only lost time and energy - so I should be thankful for that.
Rant over. Let’s hope the amount charged to my credit card isn’t too much.
Monday March 10
21:26
Finding A Webhost Is Tough
A few days ago I had some problems with my webhost, phpwebhosting.com, as one of the scripts I wrote for The Korean Blog List allegedy was responsible for slow response on the server.
What shocked me is that my webhost was complaining about 100 or so instances of a php script all running at the same time.
Imagine you have a website and suddenly a robot comes in and tries to follow every link - eg on a page which lists every blog entry for a year - then that’s not something that you can control. A webserver should handle that.
When getting a hosting package, one often thinks about how much bandwidth is allowed - but it became clear to me that bandwidth is a pretty useless measure if the servers are not set up to handle high volume. What’s the point of a 10,000 GB per month allowance if your server isn’t able to serve pages that quickly? It’s only useful for photos, warez, etc - which is not what I want.
I started looking around for another host, and eventually selected dotserving.com on the recommendation of a friend, paying with my credit card at lunchtime today. And already I regret it.
Despite boasts of 60 minutes response times, etc, etc, and a mail which said “Your account will be ready within 1-3 hours”, more than 4 hours later my account was still not setup. I contact the 24 hours support line to be told to wait another 4-5 hours until billing get in.
It is complete and utter PANTS customer service. All that crap about fast response, and the first thing they do is FAIL to meet their promise of setting up the account within 1-3 hours. It’s now 9 hours later and nothing. If I didn’t know that my friend is successfully being hosted by them, I’d think that dotserving had just taken my credit card money and run.
It has made me appreciate phpwebhosting.com. Sure, I might need something that gives me a bit more of a server to play with, but their account activation was instant, and I’ve had relatively few issues with them during the 5+ years I’ve been with them.
For the “make money fast” people: Do not try posting affiliate links to webhosting companies in the comments - they will not be approved!