I'm so back!
Sunday, April 16, 2006Thought you got rid of me? You were so wrong! :-)
The story goes like this: I got myself a hosting at Total Choice a while ago right when I bought rusiczki.net. If I give it a thought and with a little help from AjaxWhois that was more than 2 years ago. I opted for a monthly payment plan because it was convenient for me and back then my personal site wasn’t that important and I thought, hey, what the heck, if I get bored I could just stop paying and they’ll kick me out.
A few months passed and I payed each month as the good boy that I am but then a month came when they caught me offguard without any money on my card. As much as I remember, two notifications came and I rushed to the bank to transfer money to my virtual card (back then BancPost’s card system was much more complicated) which I did and then sat peacefully seeing that my website is still working. The surprise came at the end of the month when I received the transaction list from the bank and there was no sign of the hosting payment. And there wasn’t any ever since.
The only explanation I could come up with is that right when I had to make that last payment they moved their payment processing to another system and I think I somehow got in a glitch and was forgotten about. And so for 2 years I had free hosting. Nice, huh? I never wrote about this on the blog for obvious reasons but I put up their badge on the left as a sign of silent gratitude.
Fast forward to one evening last weekend when I’m checking my e-mail night and rusiczki.net gives me an error. I check the details and see an error message saying that my account has been suspended. I gulped knowing the last time I made a full backup was quite a long time ago and then with some sweat on my forehead I headed for Total Choice’s support section. I submitted a ticket to the customer service and some kind fellow reactivated my account and said that I have to contact their billing department. As soon as I saw my website working the first reflex was to rush into the control panel section and do a full backup. After I made sure that it was downloading I contacted billing. They told me I have to pay $55, a year’s worth of hosting and they’ll reactivate my account. And the site went inaccessible again. I patiently waited for the backup to finish downloading praying for my Internet connection to hold and after I saw that everything was OK and made a few copies of the file to each of my hard drives I went to sleep smiling.
And this week I started looking for solutions. In fact I didn’t look very hard because I remembered quite a few people praising DreamHost and their cutting edge features (Ruby on Rails, CVS / SVN repository, shell access, etc). I also remembered that Alex had a promo code listed on his blog’s pages and to make a long story short a few days and minus $120 after I have secured a cool hosting plan for 2 years.
So here I am now, dreaming on DreamHost. And the future looks nice once again knowing that I’m a fully privileged paying customer not a pest riding some payment system glitch… :-)