Howdy one and all. Welcome back from Hades! This short report is from an IT professionals visit to the dominion of fire.

First of all, DO NOT USE OR SUPPORT HiYaCorp! They care not for their customers and mislead them. I would really like to use other more descriptive words however my mother and father raised me better.

As some of you might have noticed this and several other sites I maintain have been very unstable over the last three months. Well, I was leasing space on a server “owned” by HiYa Corp. It turns out they (HiYa Corp) are owned by Ambient Solutions and neither of them own the servers they lease out space on, but they (Ambient and HiYa Corp) lease the servers from Burst.net.

Without going into the depths of fire, one of those three has continually turned off switches, ports and web sites, and entire servers without notifying any of those who lease space from them (or in my case those that lease from those that lease). The final straw occurred on May 7th 2006 when one of these companies decided to format the hard drive on the server where I leased space, without notification and without pointing the web sites of their customers (and their customer’s customers) to another server. Next they posted that they would be back up in 8 hours. 30 hours later they reposted that it will be another 8 plus hours before the web sites would be restored. All of this is just compounded with issues too numerous to discuss.

Needless to say, the customers whose web sites I host and maintain, and more importantly, their e-mail accounts, do not want to be “down” that long. I had to make some snap decisions and move all the web sites to another server, redirect the web sites, re create the e-mail accounts and then go to each customer’s site and re configure their e-mail accounts accordingly.

As you can guess HiYaCorp, Ambient and Burst do not feel that my literal 36 hours of work caused directly by their mess up, lack of communication, carelessness and deception should cost them anything. As a business man, there is no way I would even consider billing my customers, after all none of this was caused by them.

The main lesson here is that if you have a web site, know that at some point it will go down for maintenance, if you have critical information or needs of e-mail, make sure who you are dealing with and as much as I like supporting the underdog, you just might want to consider paying more and supporting one of the “big boys” directly.

Well, I gotta go before I get angry. To all of the customers whose web sites I hosted and continue to host, I apologize for the problems caused. To the trio of deception, well, check your forums and support pages for exactly what I think of you.
Until we meet again, have a virus free week!