It is all painfully simple… yet stupid…
I pay for 150Mbytes of database for the pub. Our current database (100,000+ posts, thousands of PMs, etc.) is about 75Mbytes which we compress and backup every day.
In order to resolve the virus nightmare I replaced all the files on the server. As part of this process I created a full backup of the SQL database.
Mathematicians among you will realise that 75Mbytes (actually 76,429,244 bytes) of our database and 75Mbytes of a carbon copy slightly exceed our 150Mbyte limit.
It was all working when I left for Limassol at about 11:30 UK time…
When I got back I had a message from Easyspace about the Pub. I called back, waited for 10 minutes listening to the most outrageous series of hold messages (along the lines of ‘why the fuck don’t you e-mail us instead) and music to be told that our database was over quota. ‘No problem’ says your favourite barman, ‘I will purchase more space’ (not realising at the time that the problem was caused by the backup…
So I immediately went on-line and ordered another 200Mbytes of web space… then discovered that the pub was ‘down’ as they had denied access to the database because we had exceeded 150Mbytes.
Several e-mails and phone calls (another 20 minutes of inane ‘hold’ messages) and I’m informed that the ‘techies’ can’t fix it and they go home at 5:30 anyway and they’ve passed it to admin but they probably won’t fix it today, blah fucking blah fucking blah!
This morning, after hearing nothing and raising a whole load more support ‘tickets’ I got an answer: -
Your ticket was passed to our senior technicans at 9.30pm last night. They will be dealing with this from this monring at 8am onwards.
The fact that their technical people can’t spell ‘technicians’ or even ‘morning’ didn’t bode well for a prompt resolution to our problem.
I had to go to ‘werk’ this morning so sent them a message telling them I would be out and not contactable on my normal number. Heard nothing.
When I got back we’d still got no response to all my messages – zero, nil, nada. I called them again and spent another ten on their ‘0870’ number (gawd knows what that costs) only to be told that is had been ‘prioritized’. I should fucking well hope it had after 24 hours!
I did ask ‘brain dead’ why it took an hour or so to cut us off but 24 hours to put us back on again (actually twenty-one hours after paying for the upgrade) but no response was forthcoming…
3:06pm I get a message from Chris Durnion saying “Hi, see Iaians response above”. Of course there is no response from ‘Iaian’ above nor any response from anybody since 08:34am…
3:57pm Message from Allan:
Hi,
This should be working in arround 15 minutes
Thanks for Contacting Easyspace Support.
(ignore the fact that he can’t spell ‘around’ this is good news surely?
4:20pm Get back from walking the dogs… message on the answering machine “your site is now working”
But it bloody isn’t working!
5:32pm Message from Shishir Mahajan
Hi,
I am afraid the site is up and running fine, could you please confirm what part of your website is not working?
Kind Regards
It is sickening that after spending so much time and effort to combat the actions of a hacker the site is actually brought down by some complete arsehole in Admin at Easyspace – I urge you not to host web sites with them. This is basically gross incompetence, ignorance and the most appalling customer service…
What a complete bunch of utter, utter arseholes!
