Another good title for this column would be “Why You Should Never Host With HostMonster”. Or even another good one might be something like “HostMonster And The Incredible Display Of Incompetence, And How They Are So Disinterested In Their Customers That They Would Rather Cancel Their Accounts Than To Make Money, So I Don’t Know How They Even Stay In Business, But They Should Probably Be Shut Down, Bombed, Or Both”. That would be a pretty long title, but it gets the point across. So let me tell you what happened.

Now this is pretty high-tech stuff, and I have to admit, I wouldn’t understand it if I hadn’t been in IT for fifteen years, and spent four years as an Internet Systems Engineer. So I don’t expect you to get it all, but I’ll try to use some awesome analogies. But I absolutely must write about this, because they pissed me off so bad I almost went postal on them. Through Live Chat. Yeah. It was that bad. Read on, dear friends, loved ones and enemies. Come with me on a little journey of customer disservice, ridiculous policy and guarantees of dissatisfaction.

So I got my monthly billing charge from GoDaddy yesterday. I’ve been hosting with these guys for the last five years or so. Not bad. But not great. And if you’ve ever tried to navigate their site, you’ll see how terrible their interface is. I’ve been making changes to the website and the admin side of it for five years and I still don’t understand their completely counter-intuitive shitty-ass poorly designed interface. I’ve never seen anything so terribly disorganized and just – well, plain you can’t navigate it. And plus their hosting platform still only supports PHP 4. I want to start coding in PHP 5. Plus they’re expensive. And really? Enough with the Danika Patrick shit. She’s kind of pretty, but really – she’s not that hot, and since she never takes her leather jacket off, she doesn’t really make a good mascot. I mean, does she have to be on every damn page of your site? Come on, guys. I’m just sayin.

So I decided to move my sites to a new host that does support PHP 5, because welcome to 2010, guys. I went to hostmonster because the price was right, and I’ve been with them before. I used to host with them back in like 2004. Can’t be that bad, right? Well I get signed up, get the name servers changed on all my domain names, and boom – it propagated right away. This was the fastest internet propagation of DNS changes I’ve ever seen. Within like a minute, if you went to spacebrew.com, it was showing the hostmonster placeholder. Yeah. It was fast. So I started moving the site. I got it all moved and the wordpress files and everything put back up in about an hour. So the site didn’t suffer that much downtime, and I only lost about a million bucks. Not that big of a deal.

Then I start trying to add my addon domains. Now these are domains they host for free on your account that point to a directory in your main site. And all three of my kids have their own domain names. So I moved layniefaith.com. It checks to make sure you’ve changed the nameservers on your registrar. If you have it knows you own the domain, so it adds it to your account. Good to go. Baileyray.com, same thing. I go to add calliechristine.com, and that’s where they put on the brakes. It couldn’t verify that I owned it, even though I’d changed the name servers. Well the problem was that I used to host with hostmonster, and my account name was different back then, and calliechristine.com was still listed under that account. The account is inactive. But that doesn’t matter.

Now get this; here’s the best analogy I can come up with: let’s say you want to park your car in storage. They say, “Well you have parked that car here before, in a different storage unit. So unless you remove the listing of that car from that storage unit, you can’t start parking it in this new unit.” Okay, well here’s my title showing I own the car. Here’s my driver’s license saying I am who I say I am. Here’s some money so I can start parking in your new storage unit. I don’t care about that old account. I don’t plan to park in that old unit ever again. But trust me I own the car, because here it is, I’m driving it! See? It’s not stuck in that old unit! “Well sir you must remove it from that old account first.” Okay, well let me logon to that old account so I can. “Well, sir, the account is inactive, you can’t logon.” Okay, well then just delete it. Here’s my ID showing that it was indeed I who owned the old account. “Oh. Okay, well I’m out of excuses sir, we just really don’t want your money, and we don’t want you to park your Ferrari here.” Oh. Okay, well give me my damn money back so I can go somewhere else.

This is the best image I can find to represent what I think of these people. That’s the easiest way to explain what happened, and I’m not making it up. Incompetent idiots. So when I moved the name servers back to GoDaddy, this time the propagation took forever. So my domain name was still pointing to the shitty ass hostmonster servers, and they deleted everything when they canceled the account. So my site was down for a time. It’s back up now, and it’s not on either of those hosts. Because for you, loyal fans, followers and freedom fighters, I stayed up just about all night connected to my file transfer protocol, putting all my files and content and databases and email accounts and settings back to the way they were originally. That’s how much I care. I don’t want your reading experience to be interrupted. You can thank me later.

Anyway, yes, technically, I guess this company could be added to the list of those who need to be bombed out of business, because I can’t understand what business practice would prevent you from wanting to make money. I mean, really, it was only like 60 bucks for a year of hosting. But I’d take that if I ran a business. That’s what they do is host websites. So why wouldn’t they want to host my site again? Well because they didn’t know how to go in and uncheck the box next to calliechristine.com saying it was locked in a prior account. Ridiculous. Rolleyes. Reaaalllly frustrating. But now it’s back up.

Just So You Know™ Oh, and happy Towel Day, everyone.