zensden is hosted on a dedicated server at IPOWER (well, has been, and hopefully will be just long enough for me to move it elsewhere).   My partner and I had originally had some of our client's work at IPOWER servers as well.  We moved our clients off when they were down for three days last year.   I shrugged and figured that an occasional outage of a couple days wouldn't bother me much for my casual development work - there were widespread power outages in California at that time.   But it's been five full days this time and if there are mitigating circumstances I haven't heard of them.   I'm pissed.   I'm more pissed about the long hold times total lack of any real salient information coming from IPOWER than I am about the outage itself.

Friday night, when posting my usual docket entries to the message board and trying to shove in a few more interesting docs from the SCOX bankruptcy dockets, I found the site was down giving multiple errors.   I ssh'd in and found I could not write any files.  The last message in the log was a Drive Seek/Complete error.  

I have a life so after half an hour on hold Friday night, I gave up.

Saturday after being on hold 15 minutes I tried their live chat. Never mind the grisly, garish color, it was 15 minutes more before "Chad Smith" (I almost believe it - whoTF would choose THAT for a pseudonym?) came on line.   All I got from him is "we do not assist with problems with dedicated servers ... please contact your system administrator".   Well after 20 years as a professional Systems Programmer and Systems Admin this systems admin is at a complete loss on how to deal with a hard disk error from three thousand miles away, especially with the assistance of a poorly trained monkey on the other end of a neon pink chat screen.

Another half hour later (my phone was still blaring out their inane hold music) when someone did finally pick up II explained the situation again was  told "they would try to reboot the server and if that didn't fix it I would have to pay for someone to fix it (which in their generosity, they promised would be refunded if it turned out to be a hardware problem and not a configuration problem).

I bit my tounge, since I had a scrape of that last log message, and said OK.

Sunday afternoon, The IP address was not even pinging now. I figured they had done the bounce, which naturally failed.  I called back.  No there was no other news attached to the ticket, could I try back later?

Late Sunday night.   They had indeed tried to reboot which failed with a disk problem.  Real big news, that.  At least they weren't trying to extort more money from me now.    Remember that at this point the box had been down two full days.   I was told that I would hear from them in 24-48 hours.

Tonight, 48 hours later.  The box has been down since Friday (It was working Thursday ... I had posted to my message board that then).   I was on hold an hour and a half before some useless jackass picked up the phone.    He said they're "running behind" on service to  dedicated servers.  He said I should hear back from them in a day or two.

IPOWER's web site says they're having a sale on web hosting.  Gee, doesn't their sale look just yummy?

I think I've found another company as incompetent as SCOX.   A pity they're not a publicly traded company, I'd love to short them out the wazoo.   I only put zensden on there after I had moved all my clients off, so everything from my business and the software I've developed has long been safe, but, (time to kick myself!) my most recent zensden backup is months back. ( I do have the ybsnarfz tables saved somewhere, though finding them may be a headache.   I want my server back long enough to get the zensden posts, then I'll be moving elsewhere.