August 11th of 2008 after some nightmare hackers hit “Gadget’s Airstream Chronicles,” I made the move from IPower Web to Media Temple. I had some very positive recommendations from friends, and wanted a more aware and attentive web host. And for an extremely long time, Media Temple has been that host.
Recently though I’m not finding the company to be on its “A Game” that it was on.
I’d rather enjoy the scene at Hovenweep then be messing with an issue on my own web server!
Yesterday after arriving at Hovenweep National Monument I found a few cool things. Number 1, Hovenweep’s cell coverage has gotten even better. 4 bars at the visitor center, and 2-3 bars throughout the campground. I thought we’d be disconnected at camp, but not at all. The second thing I found since I had network was an e-mail from a regular reader letting me know that richcharpentier.com was down completely.
Ugh! My domain and server renewal were scheduled for August 11th, and my reader notified my August 12th…..coincidence?
So my first order of business after unhooking the Airstream and getting the awning out wasn’t what I had planned. The plan was to sit down on my Travel Chair, kick back and take in this amazing location. Instead I got on a support chat with Media Temple.
The tech that I reached told me my Domain Name Server had been repointed somewhere else. Repointed by ME! Ummmmm….no?!? We spent a good deal of time going back and forth, and the tech (Daryl) repeatedly told me it was my issue, not them. Finally he said he’d set my DNS back and in 24-48 hours all would be well.
That didn’t sit right with me. So today I drafted a note to Media Temple explaining my growing disappointment with them. In under an hour I received an e-mail back, and my site was back up. “Daryl” from yesterday was totally wrong.
First of all, let me start with apologizing for the inconvenience of your site going down. I can see that you paid for your yearly domain renewal 30 days in advance, as usual, on 7/12/15. Our automated system should have automatically renewed your domain with our registrar, but for some reason, it failed to do so. In my three years at (mt) Media Temple, this is the first time I’ve seen this, and I sincerely apologize for that mistake on our system’s part. I am sure that it won’t happen again.
That being said, what happens when a domain is not renewed with our registrar, is that they put a hold on the domain. That hold causes the nameservers and DNS to get pointed to our registrar, which is why it seemed to the agent that they were pointed away from (mt) Media Temple. That wasn’t exactly the case; once the domain was renewed, they would have pointed back to (mt) Media Temple’s nameservers automatically.
Ah, there you go. Big thanks to Brian from Media Temple’s tech support team. And a sad face sticker goes to the chat support tech who didn’t listen to what I was saying, and did what the phone company always used to do. The customer did it, not us.
The whole issue in the end was resolved in under an hour by a competent tech. My support request was not kind, and after being a client for 7 years now I do expect points for being a loyal long term customer.
In the end, super happy to know the site is back up. I’m sitting on a fence as to what to do next…..a recent client did a clean install over at Go Daddy (they own Media Temple now by the way), and the site is blazing fast with pretty amazing support. Might be time to move…..