Thrashing Stinks » Site Info

More TextDrive.com Hell

JB — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 14:26:28 +0000

This morning, perhaps by a TextDrive staff member, or perhaps by a fanboy customer of theirs, I received email asking me to confirm a subscription to a gay porn mailing list. Seems someone took it upon themselves to try to get my email address subscribed.

This is the level of maturity involved with these people. Keep it coming, guys. Dig yourself in deeper and deeper and spread the bad word even further every time you push me to make another front-page post here.

Oh TextDrive. Oh Joyent.

JB — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 15:14:53 +0000

I thought the following two quotes from textdrive.com CEO Dean Allen were pretty amusing. Then I laughed even harder when the server I was referencing for the press release crashed (confirmed it was not simply network connectivity between myself and it).

What’s changing at TextDrive? Nothing, really: we’ll continue strong with shared hosting, and now also ramp up our dedicated and business hosting lines.

Enter TextDrive, where, despite the small miracle that is StrongSpace, we could use a bit of help on the application front (hearing TextPanel referred to as vapourware hurts, man). We do however have the server thing down cold, and thus the two companies, combined, now have their respective ambitions rendered limitless.

I’m baaaaack

JB — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 04:32:45 +0000

For those of you who were subscribed to the previous RSS feed and have found it no longer works, I apologize. The new RSS feed link can be found in the sidebar. The old feed stopped working because I took the web hosting switch as an opportunity to revert back to Wordpress from Textpattern. Since each of those packages publishes its feed via a different URL, well… you get the idea.

At any rate, I am happy to say that the hosting switch has been very painless, aside from its unpleasant emergency nature (more on that later, as promised).

This past weekend, my sister and I drove up to southern Georgia to hang out with my father. Everyone had a great time hiking in the woods and hanging out. As I’d hoped we would, we spent some time working on the broken 1965 VW engine in his so-called dune buggy (more like a woods utility vehicle): 1 step forward, 1 step back.

Moving hosting

JB — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 04:02:03 +0000

Update 12/6/2005: GREETINGS, “non-existent” Filepile users. Not very sporting to be discussing this article from a closed-registration site, right? (I have a bunch of visitors coming to this article from http://discuss.filepile.org/, which is viewable only by those with an elusive Filepile account)

Anyway. Original info below.

Well, my time with textdrive.com has come to an end. Turns out they don’t like upset customers. The President and COO, Jason Hoffman, outright called a customer a “dick” (me) and an “asshole” (me), then put a ticket into their system to have my account cancelled “this weekend”. All of this after I politely emailed them a long concerned letter weeks ago asking about the stability problems with their servers, then followed up in their forums on 11/24/2005 with a louder plea and complaint (which was met with a bunch of hand-waving dismissiveness and no answers).

I will have plenty of details about this after my move to new hosting, don’t worry. I have the forum threads (where the conversation happened) saved locally to disk.

PhD or not, Mr. Hoffman’s not quite as intelligent as he thinks he is if calling an angry customer a “dick” is acceptable to him.

Turns out, a large number of his existing customers watched the thread closely and have emailed me with their similar astonishment at this guy.

If you want a zip file containing the saved forum pages, it’s right here.

TextDrive Hosting Problems

JB — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 06:02:02 +0000

Boy would it be awful nice if TextDrive, my hosting company, could get their shit together. The shared-server host my site, domain, and email are on has been up and down close to 3-4 times per week for the last 3 weeks. At the time of this offline write-up, the box is up, but the load is 31 (it was 20 5 minutes ago).

What’s cool too is the web stats system I paid for no longer functioning due to a licensing transition problem which could have been avoided had the migration to new servers been planned more comprehensively.

Did I forget to mention that every time the box goes down hard it has to perform a filesystem check for 10+ minutes because they’re not using any sort of journaling filesystem?

I’ve just about had enough.

Siesta: Posting resumes Sunday PM

JB — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Have a good weekend.