The Shadow Of The Extremely Skinny Tandy Hills Thin Man Thinking About Gators, Ukrainians & Mesquite Needles

Yes, that is the Shadow of the Extremely Skinny Tandy Hills Thin Man in the picture.

It is coming up on 3 in the afternoon. It is 90 degrees, currently. I have had me one of those days, so far, that has me feeling kicked in the gut.

Pretty much all self-inflicted.

Everything was going fine til I came in from swimming. After that, til a little after noon, I was stuck being dumbstruck trying to figure out a confusing problem on my web server.

My one longtime reader may remember way back in 2009 when my websites were being attacked by Ukrainians. As soon as I could, I moved my websites from IX Webhosting to Gator.

I have not had any Ukrainian problems with Gator. But, IX Webhosting's control panel was far easier to use than Gator's. With Gator's I'm always thinking I don't really understand this stuff all that well. With IX Webhosting I never thought that.

Anyway, after hours of straining my seldom strained brain, I figured out what was causing the problem. Short version. User error. Sort of.

My plan today had been to go to the Memorial Day BBQ at the Paradise Center, after hiking the Tandy Hills. When I was having my morning vexations I got a text message from Paradise Center hoping I could make it.

I made it late to the hills. Did not get back here til well after 2. I'm in no mood to do anything but eat the pizza that I just took out of the oven.

On an extremely happy note, someone did some brush clearing on the Tandy Hill's trails. I got poked by a Mesquite needle blowing in the wind a couple days ago. Those Mesquite needles are wicked weapons. I was pleased to see that the Mesquite that had attacked me had been summarily dealt with.

It is now time to eat pizza.

My Eyes On Texas Website Got Hacked Again

It has not been a good morning in Durango World.

My Eyes on Texas website got hacked by malware again. I think I caught it before Google did. I found out I had a problem when I clicked on my State Fair of Texas page to find it acting odd. I looked at the source code and saw the hacking code.

The hacking seems to always target the same pages, all of them the ones that get the most hits. Like Turner Falls Park.

My webpage about the Dallas Cowboy/Jerry Jones/Arlington Stadium building eminent domain abuse scandal also is one that has gotten hacked each time. If I were a paranoid sort I would suspect that nefarious Jerry Jones guy of being behind trying to shut me up about his new palace in Arlington.

I've Googled for info about my server, IX Webhosting, before and found a litany of complaints. Most of the complaints do not match my experience with my server. Yes, the Ukrainian support people can be a bit of a strain, but they usually end up being useful. Calling support has always been a good experience, friendly and efficient.

Many people have complained that the IX servers go down regularly. Some claiming it's an every day occurrence. That has not been my experience. Some claim the servers are slow and that there are email and spam problems. That also has not been my experience.

Yes, there was the time a couple years ago when my home page re-directed to Ebay. I called support and the problem was fixed while I was on the phone. I never did get an explanation as to how this could happen. Same with the hacking incidents. I followed IX's tech support instructions as to how to tighten FTP security. And then had the problem re-occur, this morning.

It's very perplexing. I had other things I wanted to do this morning than fix a website.

IX Web Hosting Outrage & Outage

My 2 long time readers may remember me mentioning my Web Host IX Webhosting's Ukrainian Support Center and the absurd responses I get from them when I have a little problem. Like my email not working. Or a couple months ago when tornadoes struck several states, including Kentucky, and my Web Host went down. I submitted a support ticket and was told there had been no downtime. So, I called the toll-free # to Kentucky and talked to a real person, an American, and told him the Ukrainians are claiming there was no downtime and are refusing downtime compensation. He then told the Ukrainians that there had been an outage and to give me downtime compensation.

So, on to today's nightmare. For several months I've been getting emails from the CEO of my web hosting company, Fathi Said, regarding moving their data center from Hopkinsville, Kentucky to Columbus, Ohio. I didn't much care as long as it didn't affect me.

And then a couple days ago in the latest email from Fathi I learned it would affect me. As in, well, I'll just go copy and paste their latest message on their help center webpage....

We are currently relocating all our servers and equipment from our present location in Hopkinsville, KY to our new state-of-the-art facility in Columbus, OH. The server relocation starts at 1am EST Saturday night. If your website or email service is unavailable after this time, please rest assured that our relocation team is working safely and securely to bring your service back up as fast as possible. We are expecting all services, including telephone support, to be back online by or before 8am EST on Sunday morning.

So, now do you see what I'm upset about? My websites all went down at midnight. It is now almost 5pm and they are still down. It was not til I read the above message did I realize they are actually physically moving the servers up to Ohio. I'm picturing a bunch of Kentuckians in pickup trucks heading north with my websites strapped down in back.

IX Webhosting is, supposedly, one of the biggest hosting companies in the world. Supposedly they have over 300,000 websites on their servers. I don't know how many are e-commerce websites that are making zilch today.

You can look at my AdSense stats from today in the above image and see I'm making zilch. Just one big $0.00.

So, I guess if they do ever come back online I'll be submitting a support ticket to the Ukrainians asking for downtime compensation. Again. And they'll tell me there was no downtime, there was no move to a new data center.

Now, usually when I get around to complaining or submitting a support ticket the problem is already fixed. I'll click on my website right now and see if that's the case this time. Nope. Still down. Earlier they at least had the courtesy to put up a page explaining why the websites were down. But, now it's just bringing up the basic "The page cannot be displayed" page.

I'm annoyed.

UPDATE: About an hour later and my websites are back working again, apparently successfully making the trip from Kentucky to Ohio.