Back

gimme-five is back online, at least for the time being.  Here is a timeline of what happened:

Friday Afternoon: Everything is ok, I leave work to meet Jessica at the Austin City Grill.  We eat Mexican food and it is delicious.  The waiter winks at Jessica, but luckily my anger is offset by the fact that the restaurant is entirely powered by wind energy.  Cool!

Friday Night: Jessica and I leave Washington, DC to return to Herndon, VA, where we go to see the Da Vinci Code.  Readers of gimme-five were right, I didn’t like it very much.  But then again I hadn’t read the book.  Jessica had read it and she did enjoy the movie.

Friday Late Night: I check gimme-five, as I always do before I go to bed, and notice it is down.

Saturday Morning: gimme-five is still down.  I check my webhost, Blazernetwork.com and notice that only their front page on their website works.  I try calling them but get redirected to an answering machine.

Saturday Afternoon: gimme-five is still down.  I write a few emails to Blazer Network and get no response.  I have come to expect a lack of response, however, since every time I’ve had a problem in 2006, I have received no response from them.  Oh well.

Saturday Night: I have a bit of fun.  At night I check gimme-five and notice it’s still down before bed.

Sunday Morning: I try calling Blazer network yet again.  Now I get an answering machine that tells me an “emergency management team” has been hired to “set things right.”  I call BS and leave a message asking them to give me permission to transfer my domain.  No response.

Sunday Afternoon: I ask Doug, one of gimme-five’s founders, if I can use his webserver to host gimme-five, he says yes.  I do some research and find that gimme-five’s domain is registered through ENOM.com.  gimme-five comes back online for about 10 minutes and luckily in those 10 minutes I backed up every file I had.

Sunday Night: I do nothing gimme-five related.

Monday: I try looking at Enom to see if I can transfer the domain.  They say I must do it through Blazer Network.  Blazer network has still not responded to any of my emails or calls.  Great.  Also, I find that no emails sent to my address at gimme-five.com have gone through.  Wonderful.

Tuesday: I call Enom and get a great tech support guy who transfers my domain very quickly to godaddy.com.  I change the nameservers and point them towards dreamhost (Doug’s web server).  gimme-five goes back online tuesday evening.  Thank goodness.

Blazer Network sucks.  DO NOT BUY HOSTING WITH THEM.  They provided me one year of good service, and for the first four months of my second year, gimme-five has been down for a total of about 9 days, 7 of which were consecutive.  This happens despite the fact that they guarantee 99.9% uptime.  BS.

I’m going to try to get a refund, and I will keep you all updated about how that goes.  Sorry that this post is just a rant, but I’m just informing you all what happened.

The moral of the story is to do some research before you invest money in a web hosting service.  A good place to find these is www.webhostingstuff.com .  Do not just google their name, because you will get a lot of good “reviews” that the web host paid for.  Find real people to give you real opinions.

That’s all now, goodbye.