So a few days ago all my websites went out of commission for almost 3 days. The end result was I started contemplating the possibility that all my blogs over the past couple of years had been wiped out and lost. At one point things got so bad I was starting to think my web hosting company was actually going out of business without notice. Eventually with a lot of upset emails coming from me, my service was restored and my latest blog post was gone and lost, sigh, oh well. One thing that got me frustrated was that it was a result of my service provider upgrading their equipment and in the process they sort of lost 3 different websites I maintained. I think up to now I was operating under the assumption that if you pay a company to host your websites and they operate 24/7, they should be able to assure you should have worry free service.
However, I now believe that this assumption is a bit of a delusion. Website hosting services are getting less and less expensive and the incentive for quality service is dropping. A couple of years ago if there was a technical problem I could contact someone and they would get it resolved in a couple of hours. Now it seems that if I contact someone they more likely ignore me unless I start to raise a stink over it. It’s like the customer support people on the other end have to handle so much more work for the same pay that get easily overloaded allowing them to only have time to handle the customers that yell the loudest.
So this brings me back to the fact that having my own blog is actually feeling too technically challenging for me. All I ever wanted to do was just write. But lately what I see is that I have to constantly work with something called CPanel, perform software upgrades that seem to occur every month, and with each upgrade have to worry about incompatibility problems that inevitably occur. Now on top of that it seems I may need to do data backups of my blogs after every post to cover myself in the event my websites go down or even if my web hosting company goes belly up without notice.
MY BRAIN HURTS! I do not want to have to constantly worry about how to back up my websites. I do not want to have to constantly figure out how to update my website software and software plug-ins. I do not want to have to figure out who to bug to determine why some features work sometime and not others. It all feels so messy. I JUST WANT TO WRITE and have the computer figure out the rest.
It’s not just with my websites, but even at work, as I watch how technical support in many areas is dropping in quality as corporations outsource to lower paid workers in India. And this is not a statement about the quality of support in India, but more the quality of support when you want to pay less and less for it. I’ve witnessed how quality workers in India, discover that they can get paid more for their higher quality service, and move on, always sort of assuring that the person filling in the lower paid positions is going to be the least knowledgable and experienced person. Because as soon as the junior person becomes more knowledgable and experienced they will want higher pay and will move on.
But, let me stop ranting. I guess I’m starting to sound like a GRUMPY OLD MAN. If I keep writing on this topic I’ll probably be starting my paragraphs with: “You know when I was a kid …” Hmm that gives me some ideas … suppose in the future I experience another technical snafu and I lose the entire “tiredmiddleagedman” blog and website, maybe instead of trying to restore my website I’ll just start over with a new website. I’ll call it www.grumpyoldman.com or www.grouchyoldman.com. In the newer blog I’ll recant stories of the past, repeat them over and over again with added embellishments until readers beg me to stop.