What happened?

Last week Wednesday night eHostSource.com upgraded their servers. After being off-line for over 24 hours, I sent them an email about the downtime. They responded:

"We knew things would not be seamless, however, we NEVER anticipated all the problems that have occurred. We are still in the office now working on these issues. We will not stop until we have them resolved. I assure you that we will not forget about you."

I wonder if they're still working on it at this moment - they must be very tired! Well, now it's March 29th and if you try to access www.birddigiscoping.com you will still receive the following error:

Forbidden
You don't have permission to access / on this server.
Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS) Server at www.birddigiscoping.com Port 80

This is just totally unacceptable. At the recommendation of another birder I changed my provider to Verio.com (too bad they didn't name their company “Vireo”). Anyway, my transfer wasn't seamless either, but I was able to restore just about everything in less than a day. Unfortunately, because the staff at eHostSource are so inept, I wasn't able to keep the original domain name.

My new domain is www.birddigiscoper.com.

What's working:

• I can post new blogs.
• You can comment on them.
• My digiscoping gallery is on-line.
• RSS and ATOM feeds are on-line.
• Redirecting link from the old site is installed.
  
• My new email: mike@birddigiscoper.com

What isn't working:

• Everything is working great!

If www.birddigiscoping.com ever comes back on-line, I'll install a redirecting link to the new website. Though the original site had great search engine position, top Google ranking isn't everything. I thought it was more important to get my website back on-line as soon as possible even if it meant a domain name change. I'm sure if enough bloggers out there post about it, word will get out to all readers of Mike's Birding and Digiscoping Blog.

There may be a few tweaks and bugs remaining. Should you find any problems, I would appreciate it if you report them via email mcdomik@gmail.com.

Lastly, remember to backup, backup, backup your files!

Thank you for your patience!

Addendum - March 30th, 2009:

I tried to email them today:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

support@ehostsource.com

Technical details of permanent failure:
Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 554 554 5.7.1 : Relay access denied (state 14).

Mike McDowell