My roleplay site: it gets worse...

So ... previously, we knew that my roleplay site's new webhost is run by incompetent morons.

Today we find out that not only are they incompetent morons, they're actually doing it on purpose, because they're actively trying to lose the majority of the customers.

Their "migration" of services involves yanking the hard drives off the mainframes at one end, shipping them overnight to the other end, then plugging them back in. As in, physically move the hardware from the west coast to the east coast through the mail. Instead of doing something sane, such as rsync. Also, they apparently didn't bother to make any backups before they started, and as far as anyone can tell they aren't being terribly organized about labelling which disk is what IP address. The servers are being brought back online one by one more or less at random, as the techs have to plug them in one at a time.

A number of other customers have discovered that they've lost their data permanently due to screwups while this has been going on. What a surprise. And so now, instead of being mildly relieved that the server is down and I can't get to my games, now I have to worry (e.g., sit around in dazed panic) about the possibility that when it does come back, it might come back blanked.

I don't think there are sufficient words to express just how far into the realm of suckiness all of this is.

All of this is available for reading at a lovely thread over on webhostingtalk. I'll admit I haven't read through everything there is to see about the details, but as I'm understanding it now, the webhost is really a front company for some kind of Russian mob organization. Their modus operandi is to buy a webhost company, do a migration in the most retarded way possible, lose the majority of the customers in the process, and then blame it on the webhost company they bought so that they can demand to pay only a fraction of the originally agreed-upon price.

If this were fiction it would make for a good story. :p

Meanwhile I'll continue to sit in a bit of a daze, hoping the site will come back soon, and that it will be intact. If I'm really lucky, their last backup occurred after the last time I posted; there were a few days where absolutely nothing was going on, so I might stand a chance of not having lost anything. If I lost anything I wrote since the beginning of May, well, fortuitously I've been saving each and every post into a file so I could count it for SFR. So I have mine at least. It remains to be seen whether anyone else's interim posts are still extant, because if those aren't there then a number of mine are moot.

Oh, and as for SFR. I wrote 610 words toward Temple last night. More on that in a future blog entry devoted to that subject when I come out of my daze.