Once again, I find myself at the mercy of the webhosting gods – who all hate my guts.
Today’s scheduled post, “Robotech in Comics”, is gonna have to be postponed til later on. See, I was working on it last night when all hell broke loose on my site. Suddenly, I was getting database errors and the site would not show up. Sadly, this has happened before.
In the past, it’s usually been related to someone else on the server that hosts my sites, abusing the whole database calls kind of stuff, overwhelming the system and crashing mysql. My first reaction was to check other database driven sites that I host with them and, sure enough, they were erroring out as well.
Frustrated, I contacted tech support which, I’ve come to realize, is off somewhere in Russia. I know this because of the names and the broken English. After twenty minutes, they informed me that my problem lay in the fact that my databases had no users associated with them. Seeing as how they USED to just twenty-five minutes ago, I asked if they could check and see how this could’ve happened.
Silly me.
Instead, the person I was speaking with replied, “Please add database user. Will solve problem.”
It’s the whole tech support cliche, “Have you tried rebooting it? Do that while I’m waiting. Let me know when the computer comes back up.” I know there’s a reason for that cliche – most of them are born of truth. You really should reboot your computer before calling tech support. Most of the time, that will fix the problem.
So, I did as I was told even though I knew there was a larger problem. I told the person that I’d added the user to the database and granted them privileges. Then I waited. And I waited. Finally, I said, “I still don’t see my websites coming up – how about you?”
Response: “Sir, please add database user. This will solve problem.” (for some reason, database users were disappearing so even when I reset them, they just vanished again.)
To which I thudded my head on my desk until that pain overrode the other pain and I saw pretty, pretty stars…
Eventually, (we’re going on an hour and halfish now), the person admitted that there might be other things going on and said, “Experts are working on the problem now. We will fix it as soon as possible, unfortunately we don’t have an estimate time.”
So, I went to bed. This means that the Robotech post is incomplete (it has no photos and, let’s face it – those are the best part. Well, not the -best- part, I mean – I think I’m pretty amusing when I talk about these things) and won’t be published today.
Also, I will make the plunge this weekend – find a new web host and begin the tedious task of migrating everything over. I have put this off long enough and need to just get it done once and for all. I am not looking forward to this.
~P
