Hosting problems

It seems my crappy, cheap hosting provider turned off my service Thursday. Why? Because I didn't pay them. And why didn't I pay them? Because they never sent me a renewal notice, that's why.

Well, to be fair, they did send a notice. In fact, they sent three. They just sent them to the wrong e-mail address. They used the Yahoo! account that I only check about once a month anymore and they only gave me five days to respond. So by the time I actually got the notices, it was already too late.

What the heck happened? I specifically made a point of updating my contact information.

The problem was probably that I updated it in their domain manager, Plesk (which sucks, by the way), rather than their billing system. Apparently the two are not connected. Not that I even knew they had a separate billing database. Silly me, I assumed that if they had a place for the information in Plesk, then they must actually use it. But apparently not. No, I'm sure it makes much more sense to simply have a bunch of redundant information. I'm sure the other customers love that.

Anyway, I'm instituting nightly backups while I look for a new web host. I had been thinking of getting one anyway, as I kind of wanted subdomains and shell access, but up until now it just seemed like too much hassle. This just pisses me off, though. I could forgive a billing mix-up if the service were better, but if I can get something like BlueHost's plan (which includes subdomains, shell access, and RoR among other features) for only $2/month more, I say screw LowestHosting.

I guess this is a case of "you get what you pay for." Live and learn.

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