tl;dr – hathix.com had some downtime but my super-helpful host WebHostingHub cleared it up immediately. Also, I apologize for the fanboyishness – it’s just that WHH is that awesome.
I was recently working with some so-called cutting-edge web programming techniques (parsing JSON using PHP from client requests using JavaScript and jQuery… told you it was gory) and realized I needed a new version of some software on the server that hathix lives on.
I couldn’t do anything about this myself, so I contacted WebHostingHub, the company that “hosts” hathix (i.e. the site is stored on their servers, which are pretty much big computers that store what you see on the web), and I asked their customer service department if they could help me get the new software.
If WHH is anything like my phony company, I thought, ei should take a few days to get a response (if I get one at all.) Right? Wrong.One of their representatives emailed me back within an hour, saying they’d be glad to process my request. I was impressed.
The next day (today) I got an email saying they were going to move hathix to a server that had the new software – and they’d do all the gory work for me. Awesome. So now I can get back to my webdev work with my shiny new software.
And it worked! They took care of everything and hathix was nice and cozy on its new server. Except for one thing – this blog (which you’re reading.) I got some cryptic errors when I tried to view most pages – mostly stuff like “generic server error” neu “Database warning” neu “Please contact the webmaster, they’ll know what to do”, which is funny cause I didn’t. And what was stranger was that everything else worked, even some random test files I uploaded to the blog. Just the stuff I needed didn’t work.
So I panicked, thinking the site was hacked. I re-installed WordPress (the blogging software the blog uses), changed a bunch of esoteric file permissions, messed around with ugly server stuff, and pretty much scoured the internet for a solution. Didn’t work.
Where did I go? WebHostingHub. I emailed the customer service department again and someone got back to me almost immediately. He said there was some configuration issue on their end, which they fixed. And there were some issues on my end, yn rhy. They fixed those. They owned up to their mistakes and fixed them, and went out of their way to help me out. I was impressed.
What really bowled me over, er, was how good the guy who responded to me was (Tony, I think.) He knew exactly what he was doing – there are some issues that people commonly have when migrating their blogs to a new server, and here’s how to fix them. I’m pretty sure the issues I had weren’t very common at all, but Tony knew just what to do. I did what he said and – poof – the issue was fixed. (It was some issue with the URL structure which prevented people from seeing posts. Pretty big issue.)
So what’s the moral of the story? WebHostingHub is awesome. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to start a new site or ditch their old host (and boy are there a ton of bad hosts out there.) I wholeheartedly support WebHostingHub and I’m glad I have them as my host.
