Asymptomatic

Ah, the heck with it. I don't write a lot about a whole lot here any more, because most of what I am excited to share revolves around Habari. But then, all of the people who talk about what to write about on a blog tell you to write about things that you have passion about. And I've never not done that, but I'm purposefully filtering out a lot of Habari stuff because I feel like my audience doesn't care. Which is just a weird thought. Anyway, no more of that madness.

Something that has been tryingly amusing lately are a certain type of email that shows up on the mailing lists. As I've mentioned to people in person a few times, Habari certainly isn't talked about as much as some other blog software, but I've been tracking the usual channels for Habari buzz, and there are usually 50 to 70 new people noticing Habari every day. Which I think is pretty good, and would love to see increase.

As a result of that ramp-up of attention, we're seeing an influx of new users. A lot of Habari's users are polyglots and English isn't their first language. So when folks start messages with, "Habari is bad," I am forced to wonder whether they're using their limited English skills as best they can, or whether they're coming from some other software and just looking to pick a fight. Either way, let's talk about a better approach....

I had a strange confluence of events over the past couple days. In the mail, I have received a few notices about services that I can attach to my Fios connection at home. I don't have interest in Fios TV now that Verizon dropped the ball and we went ahead with satellite instead, but the new 15/15 service is very attractive. I would love to be able to push as much data out as I pull down.

The same day that notice arrived in the mail, I got email on the Verizon billing account. Apparently, the credit card attached to that account is about to expire, and if I want the autopay to continue then I need to update the number via the site they provide. So I decided to update my billing info and see if there was a way to update my service to 15/15 at the same time.

I logged into the site, and to make a hideous story short: I couldn't do it. I'd get as far as entering some information, and it would tell me that the tool (for payment, mind you) was unavailable. Also unavailable was my ability to read email through their web interface. What kind of ISP is so broken that they don't let you pay or read email? Verizon, apparently....

I've been hosting my own content on the web since, oh, 1995. I've been on many hosts over that time, moving sites from host to host. During that time, I've been on some good hosts and some really awful hosts, and I have really yet to find the ultimate host that I can recommend unreservedly.

Perhaps you have been having sites hosted long enough to have acquired some horror stories. A while back, I had my sites hosted with a company called A World Wide Mall. AWWM was pretty reasonably priced, but as with most hosts, the customer service was pretty lousy. And one day, the guy who ran the service decided to fold up the company and move on without notifying any customers. He just took his datacenter and left. With all of my data. Lovely.

I'm sure that folks have similar (or worse) stories. I have had service where I thought I was getting protected backup and redundant storage, when really it was all on one box and when the box died, I lost a lot. I tried hosting at 1&1 once, and after playing with it, I immediately filled out their cancellation form. Total time with their service: about 5 minutes....