The Weekly Notes 2007
|
|||
|
Back to the Weekly Notes 2007 Archives Meltdown
Continued: Last week I discussed my problem with earthlink, my
internet service and hosting provider. I can now give more detail on that
struggle. The fact is I am unable to send email from any of the accounts on
my website, Wesoomi.com. This part of the service malfunctioned sometime
after My first attempt to correct the problem had me rechecking
all of my email settings and making sure earthlink had not given me some
left-handed notification of changes in the service that I might have missed.
I found no problems there. If they made changes, they did not tell me about
them. It is obvious that changes were made. In my next attempt I tried a chat session with one of
eathlink’s alleged customer service reps. That was completely
frustrating. This bozo’s going in assumption was that I had done
something wrong. He then assumed the mantle of the hero who was going to
straighten this bumbling user (me) out and save me from myself. About halfway
through the session I realized that he know less about email than I did. I
realized that he was quoting from technical bulletins I had already read.
After some jerking around, he finally seized on Norton as the culprit just so
he could bail out. He did not have a clue. That exchange is posted on The
Gaffer’s Variety this week. I have found this behavior to be typical of so-called
service technician’s. They have neither the experience nor the skills
to do what they are pretending to do. Their inexperience is complicated by
the fact that they are usually representing more than one company. They are
usually third world technicians working for a large outfit that has contracts
with many American companies. Many of these firms are located in After this fool bailed out, I decided I had had enough and
sent a letter of complaint to the CEO of earthlink. I also placed a copy of
that letter in the earthlink’s customer service email and I posted a
copy on William’s Corner for this week. I sent the letter and posted
the complaint on I do not regret using up this Weekly Notes column for this
discussion. Politics will not change for a week. The politicians just get
stupider and the media reports the same nonsense over and over again. I do
regret not having the time to work on and post the math and chemistry columns
with William’s Corner and The Gaffer’s Variety. I know many
people read those. I hope to renew them soon, when this struggle is resolved.
Presently, I am giving all of my time and energy to resolving my website
problem. All of my effort is being devoted to finding a viable web
hosting and ISP. I can tell you about that. It ain’t easy! Reading the
fine print takes time, lots of it. After checking out a number of firms over
a period of about a week, I have finally settled on Toast.net as an ISP. I
have still not selected a website host but I expect I will go with Toast for
that too. In the meantime, what you should know is Wesoomi.com could
just disappear if these earthlink people should decide to pull the plug on
me. With their current behavior, it would not surprise me one bit. I have two
possibilities right now. The first would be to somehow manage to transfer my
domain, Wesoomi.com, to a new hosting service without a delay. That would be
the least disruptive for you and me. I am looking into that possibility. In
theory, the domain belongs to me and earthlink cannot prevent my moving it.
In practice, they can make it very difficult. That is what I expect. As an alternative, I can create a new domain, Wesoomi.net,
and recreate my website on that domain. That would be more disruptive and
causes a discontinuity between me and my visitors. In that case, you should
remember the new domain address, Wesoomi.net. I hope that is not necessary,
but it would work. Either way, I will not be with earthlink much longer. If
this site disappears without notice, try both domain addresses until one of
them returns. I have learned several things from this. First is, from
now on I will always have an alternative to my main ISP. I will never again
fid myself in the desperate situation of having to quickly find an
alternative way to get online. I will always have two ISP’s. Another thing I discover is earthlink is grossly
overcharging me for the service they provide. I can get much more for much
less with some other website hosting service provide, about two thirds of the
money for more than double the capacity. My guess is, the service will be
more reliable too. It could not be much worse. I am thinking, this is
something that I should have done long ago. Once I have this conversion
worked out, I will know more. For now, that’s it. Please bear with me. Back to the Weekly Notes 2007 Archives |