StartLogic
“Horror Story” September, 2007
SQUASH
Tom Phillips - An Independent Computer Consultant
Solving problems with computers since 1972
StartLogic
“Horror Story” September, 2007
On September 12, 2007 I noticed during the day that I had
not received any email. I went
to the site of StartLogic (my web
hosting company) and created a “case”.
Shortly thereafter, my email began working again.
I put the matter behind me. When
tech support responded to my case, they could offer no explanation other than a
“glitch”.
During the next three days I moved a lot of new content to
my site. After each
“batch” I would go to the site, check things out to insure that I had not
forgotten anything and then check the statistics for the site.
Each visit was normal - everything was where it was suppose to be.
On the morning of the 16th I received a new joke
which I packaged and prepared to move to the site.
But, when I attempted to login via FTP - the login failed.
Strange. I attempted to
check the site stats, but once again, - the login failed.
I tried the web site - and shock - the date of the last update was
September 8th - not the September 15th last night.
This time I called StartLogic
tech support and reported these problems.
The first problem was that some of my links had been “hard-wired” to
ST93… the StartLogic server with my
web site. Tech support said
that my site had been moved to their ST26… server.
OK - fine. Changing
these ST93… references to my domain name fixed both the FTP and statistics
login problem. BUT - why was
my site back-leveled? In
addition, all of the content that I had moved on Thursday the 13th
through Saturday the 15th was gone.
Tech support could see that my site had been moved but could not or would
not give me a reason. Nor
could they explain the data loss, only to explain that it was my responsibility
to re-build the “lost” data. This
was not acceptable. I doubt
anyone outside of StartLogic personnel
would say that this was in keeping with their “Industry Best Practices”
policy.
The tech support manager offered to do a restore with a
data set he had which was dated September 10th.
I said to go ahead, thinking that the 10th was better than the
8th. When I tried
the site the next day I got warnings about too many files, but the major problem
was that the site now reported a date of September 6th.
The restore solution was worst that the original problem.
I call this manager and he “un-did” the restore.
Now I’m back to September 8th.
Over the course of the next week I made repeated calls, talking with the tech support people including a manager. Nothing… Stuck… No answers and no explanation, although I got plenty of sympathy. At least my email was still working. In addition I received a “friendly” ear in billing - she wrote a “letter to management” explaining my problem.
I still have not heard from the tech support manager who promised to keep me informed, nor the “letter to management” folks.
September 25th - moving to HostMaster ....
This went very well due to a very nice person in the StartLogic billing department. She emailed me the transfer codes for HostMaster, released my domain and updated the DNS server names. The switch took minutes. I pray that she doesn’t get punished for being helpful. Now all that’s missing is a refund.
When I inquired about the credit, I was asked to provide credit card information about the charge used to renew the account back in February. It turns out that the account was extended for three years but my credit card was not charged ... seems that StartLogic was providing free service and I was getting what I had paid for.
So, I guess it’s a happy ending for both parties, after all.
I don’t know what happened to StartLogic. This is not the company I knew. Till this problem, I could only find good things to say about their service. Now … I would only recommend them to my competition.
While searching the web looking for a new hosting company I found this very interesting site:
Page last updated: February
18, 2008 