New host up and running...

Well, as promised, the contract with our old hosting provider, who will not be named again, or mentioned again after this paragraph, has been terminated. The site is now up and running on new servers, and everything is working great.

We've got some new features that will be rolling out over the next few weeks.

• Our bar search will now provide a more accurate distance on search results.
• The Blog has been given a facelift
• The Bar Search page will be getting a facelift
• Bar owner pages will begin to be promoted in January
• Location based ad serving should become available by the end of January
• The Event Calendar should be in beta testing by February.

Look for all this and more as we get ready to usher in 2008!

The Last Straw with Lunarpages®

On 9/11/2007, roughly one day after LetzGoOut.com was launched, our soon-to-be former web hosting provider, Lunarpages®, disabled the site. The reason for this was that, in its initial launch, the site needed to build its search catalog, and LunarPages® found that act to be too resource intensive.

Rather than call my cell phone, which they do have on file, they sent an email to a yahoo account that I had when I first set up hosting of my first site with them a few years back, and had since informed them, on several occasions, that I do not use that address anymore.

The whole ordeal could have been handled over the phone in one call in less than 10 minutes, but instead, took about 18 hours, countless support tickets sent back and forth with absolutely no assistance whatsoever in explaining what the issue with my site was. At the time, I had no idea what the offending script was, and they not only could not tell me, but refused to let me back onto the site until I could confirm that this script would not run again when they did let me in.

After talking to several different support people (notice the ommission of the word "tech" as I feel it would be inappropriate to categorize these people as such), and several conversations with support managers, I was finally able to get the name of the script that had run, and was able to convince them that if they were to let me on to my site, I could disable the script permenantly. I could work around this without impacting the user experience of the site. By 9/12, the site was running again, and continued to do so for the next 97 days.

Then, on the morning of 12/18, the site went down again. There was no phone call. There was no email. Not even to the yahoo address that I told them not to use anymore, but that was still recieving their monthly newsletter and billing notifications.

After submitting a support ticket, a process that requires logging on with a username and password, I was told that they didn't have any information about why my site was down, but I would need to provide username and credit card information (last 4 digits) before they would share information with me as it became available.

Fast forward about 2 hours. I am thanked for confirming who I was, and am told that there is still no known reason for the site being down.

In light of the fact that there is no reason for the site being down, I make the obvious request that they reenable it.

Three hours later, and after several phone calls yielding similar lack of information or attempt to resolve, I am forwarded an email that they claim was sent to me explaining the issue. I read it. It is dated 9/11/2007. The site had been taken down because of something that had been resolved 97 days earlier.

I have since confirmed that the script HAS NOT run since. Not even once. It was purely an error on their part. Several hours later when I was finally able to pin a supervisor down on the phone to actually get the issue resolved, one of their support supervisors did confirm this. No compensation was offered, and the explaination as to why it happened in the first place, as well as why it took close to 8 hours to get to the point of figuring out the problem and getting it resolved. The only consolation offered was that the admin from September was no longer with the company. That didn't offer any consolation whatsoever, as HE actually had reason for doing what he did, though the notification sent was to the wrong address and action taken was extreme.

The only other thing offered to attempt to rectify the issue here was to provide a direcet phone extension to this supervisor, should any such issue arrise again. He assured me that if he did not answer, I could leave a voicemail and he would return my call immediately.

Fifteen minutes later, it did.

That's right. After a mere fifteen (15) minutes, the site was taken offline by them again. Exact same symptoms.

I called the number.

It rang.

And rang.

And rang.

No answer, no voicemail. Nothing.

The support ticket that followed that was answered about 6 hours later from somebody in Faisalbad, Pakistan stating that he didn't know what database was at fault, so he reenabled all of them. Amazingly, this course of action actually fixed the problem.

When I tried to ask WHY it happened again, he cited the reason for the disabling as the issue that was resolved 97 days earlier, and took the position that the reason for this was actually my fault, not theirs.

This will be the last entry I make to this site as hosted on Lunarpages®. The site will be relocated to a new, reliable, and competent host by the week's end. It had been intended to house the site here as it grew, and scale to a higher level hosting plan as traffic built up. It is clear now that this host will not be appropriate as this site reaches its potential.

That is all that LetzGoOut.com wants for Christmas.

Hope you all get what you want as well this holiday season.

Brian Davey
President, LetzGoOut.com