My hellish descent into website tech-support Hades

NET RESULTS:Your site starts to suffer from hosting service glitches. Steel yourself as you seek assistance, writes Karlin Lillington

SARTRE WAS wrong. Hell is not other people – hell is tech support.

As I have been reminded during several weeks of problems with the hosting service that minds my small herd of websites, my weblog and my discussion board, there’s no hell quite like the hell of being trapped in a tech glitch you cannot fix yourself.

In a most undignified way, you are tossed, weeping with frustration and only a desiccated husk of your former, pre-glitch self, at the feet of the powers that be in tech support.

They alone can deign to fix your problem or leave you in a crumpled heap of misery.

In my case, the problem seems to be related to some work done on the hosting services’ systems after a denial of service (DOS) attack – where huge numbers of computers hit a site and request pages, overloading the server’s ability to deal with them.

The DOS attacks were apparently made on some of the larger sites at the hosting service, definitely not my small sites. However, they had knock-on effects across the hosting company and caused lingering problems for a number of people. One of them seems to be me.

The hosting company is gently insistent that there are no longer any problems. The person answering my e-mailed tech support queries says he cannot duplicate the problems on any of my sites and asks if I can give more detail. So I do.

He writes back cheerfully that my site problems were due to scheduled maintenance, linking to a notice on a part of the site I never knew existed, where the tech support people hide network availability and maintenance notices away from those of us who might find them helpful or useful.

Nowhere obvious in the support area can I find a single indication that, somewhere on the website, this page of notices exists.

When I point out that most certainly this is not the case – as the problem happened during hours well outside the scheduled maintenance and continues to occur – I am told that the problem is therefore probably not a problem at all, but simply due to the fact that, at some hours, the internet can be busier than others and sites will run a bit slower.

At this point I begin to get irate (the second phase after phase one, the initial polite inquiry, on the road to tech-support hell).

I write a prickly e-mail about knowing the difference, after years of running various websites, blogs and boards, between peak demand times on the net when sites might run a bit more lazily and an actual glitch affecting whether the site responds at all.

Then, flush with the satisfaction of speaking my mind but in creeping panic, I go back and tone the e-mail down. This, the contrite e-mail that borders on abject begging, is phase three on the tech highway to hell.

I am, after all, dependent on this or some similar person handling my support “ticket” feeling kind enough to actually resolve the issue.

Over the next two days, I send a number of e-mails every time all the sites go down, giving the exact time I have the problem (phase four, misguided optimism that someone cares). Each time, the sites are inaccessible for two to three minutes, then they come back up.

I assume, foolishly I am sure, that it will be useful to tech support to have these details. Maybe they can go look at error logs. I can go look at error logs for my sites too but (a key part of tech-support hell), like most people with some but not enough tech capability, I won’t be able to glean much that is meaningful from them, certainly not enough to fix anything.

Which leads to phase five: delusions. One begins to imagine a little Dantean stopover in tech-support hell, where those of us who have sinned during our lifetime (maybe making too many unnecessarily cruel jibes about Bill Gates) are forced to sit and read an endlessly spewing error log file that we almost but cannot quite understand, for eternity.

Two days go by and no one from the hosting company responds to these small bulletins of despair.

Meanwhile, people who visit my weblog and discussion board are sending me e-mails and messages about problems with the sites. They run slowly. Or they don’t run at all. What is wrong?

Alas, I don’t know. I send an e-mail once again to tech support asking if they have, in the past two days of silence, gained any insight into the problem with my account (phase six, suppressed sarcasm).

Then I send one in which I politely state that I will have to move to a new hosting service if they cannot resolve the problem in the next two days (phase seven, hopeless rebellion).

Time goes by. No response (see phase seven). Meanwhile my sites glitch up regularly, usually just when I am making a post to my board or blog, causing me to lose it. Lose the post that is, but increasingly, causing me to just “lose it” as well.

I can feel my will to live draining away. As I enter phase eight (dawning sense and a hope of redemption), does anyone know a good, reliable hosting service?

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[ www.techno-culture.com ]