Namesco, who have hosted my website since it started just over 20 years ago, decided to move everything from a UK server farm to one in The Netherlands. The changeover should have happened on 26th August … when my website went off line and webmail stopped working. Fortunately, normal email was unaffected.
I gave them a week to sort it out, without chasing, but on 3rd September I got cross: this is the Facebook post I made
I’m not happy with Namesco!
They’ve hosted my blog for just over 20 years, with very little problem. Last week, they decided to move everything from a UK server farm to one in The Netherlands. For me, it didn’t work. There was a phone call from someone last Friday, just before their phone lines closed for the weekend, saying that my WordPress was out of date, and I’d have to pay £180. I emphasised that my WordPress was definitely up to date. After they’d hung up, it occurred to me that the theme I use is elderly, and might be causing the problem, so I accessed the support site and added that to the support ticket. By this morning, nothing had happened, and there was no update to the support ticket.
So I rang them. Support lines busy, so I was on “music on hold” for five minutes, which is fair enough. The person I spoke to was polite (as was I !), and said he’d have to go away and speak to his team leader. He let me know that the the team leader was busy, and after ten minutes came back to say that the team leader was still busy, so he would escalate the support ticket and someone would definitely get back to me within 24 hours. All that was fine, and he was clearly doing his best – good support there even if no resolution was reached.
Nevertheless, I’m extremely cross that they didn’t keep the old server up until the new one was functioning. Webmail is also down, though I can access both it and support stuff through my normal control panel. I do pay them for website backups, so hopefully there won’t be massive problems getting things back once the problem is sorted.
However, no-one did ever contact me within 24 hours, and then it was the weekend (when they don’t answer phones). Yesterday I was busy, but my website was still off line when I tried in the morning. However, when I checked my website at lunchtime today, it was back on line. Hoo-bloody-ray!
I’m very glad that they’ve managed to restore it, but remain rather peeved that it’s taken a fortnight! I’ve made a couple of entries retrospectively, to keep the blog current.