You may have noticed that this website has undergone a complete renovation.

This was a matter of really bad timing and an incompetent internet hosting service. After a few “misunderstandings” last Friday, the Nexcess accounting department allowed a service cancellation ticket to go through, causing all of my sites (which includes sites that clients pay me to manage) to be not only taken offline, but deleted.

I’ve been struggling to recover what I could since then, and the angry calls from clients have not made it easy to finish Into the Looking Glass.

In some cases, it was just easier for me to make an entirely new site, rather than hope and wait for Nexcess to try to find backups. Thankfully, I’ve been doing this for almost 20 years, and it’s pretty easy to put together a WordPress site in a couple of hours. (Shout out to Envato and Elementor for making it even easier.)

Unfortunately, my blog posts will all need to be recreated. That won’t be too difficult for the short ones, but the Quantum Leap reviews with 50 images on each one will have to wait.

Oh well. My policy is that when something burns down, build back better. I’m pretty happy with the new site design, although it still needs work (and testing). Pardon the dust.

I’ll end this by ranting about Nexcess, the web hosting service that really pissed me off this weekend…

I started using their WordPress hosting when they were still LiquidWeb, at least six years ago. LiquidWeb was an amazing company with great customer service, a reliable and easy-to-use product, and I recommended them openly.

Then, maybe two years ago, Nexcess took over. They called it a partnership, but since all traces of LiquidWeb dissolved immediately, I don’t buy it. As is often the case in the tech industry, when a big company swallows up a small, great company, they trashed it. (See: ConnectWise.)

Customer service became awful. The UI became a complicated mess, where even creating and hosting WordPress sites was a chore. I had tons of issues migrating sites, which was never a problem when LiquidWeb ran the show. And, of course, the prices went up on new services, so expanding my grandfathered hosting deal with LiquidWeb was out of the question.

Friday’s final straw was the deletion of my entire account based on miscommunication from their accounts department. They did this after business hours on a Friday, when their accounts department has the weekend off, so I couldn’t even talk to anyone about the issue until Monday. That’s a great start. I had to deal with pissed off clients all weekend.

When I finally reached someone on Monday, they told me I had to pay a reactivation fee, and they couldn’t even guarantee that backups of all my sites would be available. And I would have to start a new account, with new service, at higher prices (of course). Their “customer service” rep refused to talk to me any further about it until I opened my wallet. With the stacked on fees, and the need to start new service, they were basically asking me to cough up around $600 just to maybe get my sites back.

This is all in the face of the fact that they sent me an email about a missed payment on Thursday, and I immediately paid the invoice. The best I can tell is that they just forgot to pull the cancellation ticket, but instead of apologizing, they’re holding my website backups hostage (if they even have them). I’ve been a paying enterprise customer for at least six years, so the management of this whole debacle blew my mind.

I’m walking away from that dumpster fire. Nexcess sucks, and I miss LiquidWeb.