Folks:
Went up to Taipei yesterday. Came today to find that my web hosting company in the US was eaten by PeoplePC, which, in the best tradition of fine corporate service, simply dropped the web hosting services and left me high and dry. My websites on the Gospel of Mark, Taiwan, and Sri Lanka are gone. Also gone are all the adjustments to my blogs and blog-related pics and photos (I have them all backed up; no worries). I'm so glad I switched to Flickr for hosting stuff so some stuff is still up. The old Ev1 website now automatically redirects you to PeoplePC so there is no information available on what happened to my stuff -- the company didn't even have the grace to put a page up explaining that Ev1 is gone and directing the finder to inform the website manager for the site in question. Instead they redirect you to a page that gives you the hard sell (for former AOL members!).
There was an outtage yesterday, so it may be that my site is lost due to the outtage (but the former home page redirects you to a hard sell page, implying that the web hosting services are gone), but of course there was no information on that on the members website. When you called, naturally you couldn't get a human being, just a voicemail system that after many minutes informs you that there is an outtage and directs you to call again later. If you Google PeoplePC you don't get the homepage -- the first hit is a page that does the hard sell. PeoplePC is definitely all about selling.
The mailing that was sent out gave no indication that this would happen -- quite the opposite; it stated that web hosting services would not be affected.
Unfortunately I have finals in the PHD program here for the next two weeks. So it may be several weeks before I have all the problems fixed and all my sites back up. So sorry for the inconvenience and ugliness of the blog. Also expect light blogging while I put my on-line existence back together.
Michael
[Taiwan] [PeoplePC]
6 comments:
That sucks. I use a hosting call easycgi.com, have been using them for two years now and has always been well.
-CSU Student
I wondered what had happened - I headed over to the "Teaching English in Taiwan" page to look up a picture that I like there, and couldn't reach the site. Sorry about all the work you've apparently lost there. I hope they discover they've made a mistake and find a way to restore the content.
They ought to have a back-up--any decent IT company backs up before they do anything. However, getting access to the back-up data is an entirely different story.
I can only suggest that you try hosting your own domain. It costs something like $40 for two years, and you get a lot more control over your website.
It doesn't prevent buy-outs, but it helps to preserve your data. Good luck tryiing to recover it all. I really enjoyed your photos and comments and I hope you can get it all back online when you get some time.
If you don't have backups, you can pull your old pages from the Wayback site. Example:
http://web.archive.org/web/20060427090308/http://users2.ev1.net/~turton/teach_index.html
Search for lost stuff here:
http://www.archive.org/web/web.php
I'm sorry to hear about your site. Thanks again for Sunday. My next visit will be more Taichung focused so I'll bring a bottle or two of wine. Poagao wants to come along as well, so while you guys talk Taiwan politics I'll seek sanctuary in the grape.
Condolences.
I was also wondering what happened to the site but didn't want to pester you about it since I thought that you were in the process of massively upgrading it.
I hope you are eventually able to get in contact with the IT people of your old web service provider and recover your data.
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