Spin Ink

My host(old host by the time you read this) has been really good to me for the last 2.5 years I have been with them. The best part has been their response time, if I posted a support ticket, I had a response within minutes, 90% of the time. There have only been a few minor downtimes durring that period, the longest of which by far was around 6 hours. This was not a deal breaker for me though. I am leaving them because the admin would make changes to the server or have downtime and not tell me about it until I heard it from my clients and then submitted a support ticket to ask what happened. I found this to be completely unacceptable.

Most Recently, the admin decided to apply an update to the server that had been poorly tested. This update involved a migration of IMAP email from MBox to MailDir format, a changed certificate, and mucking with the acceptable authentication modes for the email server. This caused me more grief than you can possibly imagine. I received numerous phone calls from clients who were unable to access their email. Those that managed to work around the changes and actually get to their inbox’s, found them empty! In addition, the update had converted the IMAP MBox to MailDir and both formats were taking up space on the server. For some of my clients, who have extraordinary amounts of email, this caused them to exceed their storage quotas. I do not even want to think about how many hours I spent fixing everyones email accounts.

Ultimately, I ended up talking with the admin over the phone 3 different times while he manually fixed the directories for several of my clients IMAP accounts so that they were in proper MailDir format. He was a very nice guy and apologized for the trouble the update had caused and credited my account 1 month of hosting. While I accepted his apology, the damage had been done and it was clear that it was time to find a new hosting company.

Had they just sent me an email to tell me that this update was going to occur, I could have been more prepared and aware of what had happened. This would have decreased the downtime my clients experienced with their email accounts and I could have adjusted their quotas to make room for the duplicated email formats. Instead I had to spend countless hours fixing someone elses mess, catching grief from my clients, and all around screwing up 3 days of my Christmas vacation.