Every now and then, do you have something happens that just completely rocks the foundation of your world?  That’s what happened yesterday when I went to my personal Web site.

Look, Dick! Look, Jane! See That Page! That Is Not My Home Page, Dick. That Is Not My Page, Jane! That Is Someone Else’s Page, Dick! Run, Tears, Run!

After two hours of tech support and much kvetching and wringing of hands, the bottom line is that someone had let my ten year-old, paid-in-advance, told-it-was-renewed Web domain name expire. And although the domain registrar sent out reminder emails to my hosting company through two rounds of grace periods, someone swooped in the day it expired and purchased it. (Man, I thought that kind of stuff ended years ago! Being able to auto-renew my domain name so I didn’t have to worry about this was part of why I picked my Web host.  I was anxious about this scenario from the start, and it was one of the first hosts to promise to facilitate the auto-renewals.)

It was strangely emotional.  This was the Web domain I acquired back when I was an grad student … where I hosted all the translations of folk tales we used when I taught teachers in Lithuania that are still accessed years later… where we still host the shadow play we made in collaboration with first graders at my first library job … where we hosted our first podcasts at my current job … where I took my first stab at blogging … where I posted most of my presentations.  All the links I had posted in articles and books … now lead to a goofy fake site. It was like a time capsule of my digital life.

Tech services told me cheerfully that all my files are still present on their server, so there really is no problem. I not-so-cheerfully reminded her that, if files are on a server but the URLs don’t work anymore, so nobody can read them, then we’ve sort of defeated the point of a Web page.  She was unimpressed.

The capper was being told there was a possibility that the business office could buy back my domain name, but the email I sent to the business office bounced back.  (A friend of mine says that everyone writes fiction … they’re the polite emails we send when we are ticked off.)  And although I wish I could pull myself together, step back, and say that it was all an object lesson and how we librarians should learn from the cruddy customer service I got yesterday … instead, Dear Reader, I am doing my best Little Women fit, involving much flailing of fists and, “It’s not fair, Marmee.”

Since I had a scare in the past year with the same company in which my Web content was hacked by a very creepy home page, complete with ominous sound track, and since my efforts to reach the business office seem to be a bust, and since my host is no longer showing up on any Top Ten Web Hosts list, I think maybe it’s time to pull myself up by my bootstraps, find a new host, and call it my chance to Move On Up to The East Side and find myself a new Deluxe Apartment In the Sky.

So … can you pass me a tissue and share your experiences about what hosting companies have worked with you?  Here’s what I’m looking for:

• Web design templates  (my days of HTML design are over)
• Less than $100/year (imagine my surprise that my current Web host is actually one of the more expensive ones out there … so much for loyalty)
• Ability to upload files via FTP and/or a Web-based console
  
• “Forever” domain hosting (and I mean forever)
• Reliable, preferably non-scripted 24/7 customer support, including customer support that can boot your case up to a supervisor when you ask nicely, ask a second time, ask a third or fourth time, and use words like “immediately” and “legal department”
• Are there any sites out there that would host a wiki as part of the site? Or SQL to install the Etherpad package on the site? That’d be kind of nice instead of scattering wiki projects across the Web…
• WordPress as a built-in option in case I get nostalgic for my old blog that truthfully I haven’t used in years since I started here but heck, let’s throw it in just in case so I don’t get annoyed later
• Ability to password-protect selected pages
  
• Ability to upload podcasts and videos with embedded players
  
• Ability to embed other multimedia content (e.g., Google Maps, a Twitter feed, Google Books, etc.)

Things I don’t need:

• A bunch of email accounts
  
• A bunch of subdomains
  
• To set up a store on the site
  
• To set up a discussion forum
  
• To have support getting my site listed in Google searches
  
• Extraordinary amounts of bandwidth or file storage

Sadly, I learned on Twitter that an esteemed library colleague just found herself in a similar situation, so if you help me, I’ll pass your ideas on to her, too.

Oh … and any ideas for a swell new domain name?

Sniff. Thanks a lot. Sniff Sniff.

Signed,

Dick and Jane

This entry was posted on Monday, June 7th, 2010 at 7:41 am and is filed under Web sites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.