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Anyone want to buy a brick wall?

Wednesday, 25 September 2013

Having just finished banging my head against this one it is now going spare. I know, I’m ranting again, but having just spent two days dealing with the 1&1 website support team in the sunny town of Bangalore or wherever (he slipped up when he mentioned his supervisor was at lunch. It was 6:30 pm at the time so.....) I need to unload. Badly.

Let me give you the skinny. Yesterday, while bored I decided to update the details of my website hosting since the email address was BtOpenworld address which they have closed down. While I was ferkling about I noticed that they had some free add-ons for my hosting package and one of these was a guest book, so I thought - why not?

After installing the basic simple version I went to my website and was greeted by a totally blank page. In fact none of my website pages were there any more. So I went in and uninstalled the guest book in the forlorn hope that this would put everything back as it was before the catastrophe. Er, no. Still screwed.

So I phoned the support desk and spoke to a very charming American lady who began to take me through the security checks to make sure that I was who I claimed to be and not some scallywag intent on causing mischief. Strangely, as we got further into the checks, the further her accent drifted from California to Calcutta. Hmm.

Well I’m not going to go into the pro’s and con’s of outsourcing and after about half an hour of trying this and that we arrived at a situation where my website was back on line again. Great. However anyone who has looked down the page can see that there is more so obviously this is not the end of the story eh?

Indeed it isn’t for later that day I went back to the website and blow me if it wasn’t now showing a page advertising the 1&1 hosting service rather than the rather amusing cat that is what should have greeted anyone who landed there.

Well work got in the way of play and so I had to leave it till I got home to attempt to sort it out and I once again called the 1&1 technical support line. Once again I was greeted by that now familiar Souther California lilt. ‘Oh you’re not catching me this time’ I thought and sure enough after a few minutes the strain began to be too much and, this time his, accent gradually drifted further East, back across the Atlantic, over Africa, past Saudi Arabia and finally settled down somewhere in what is one of our oldest civilizations. A bit warmer than Langley I suspect.

Anyway after another two hours of me explaining what had happened and him totally failing to understand what I was telling him it finally came out that I should not have been able to install that package (the Guest Book. It was way back up there in paragraph two. Do try to keep up) since it was incompatible with the hosting package I was running since I had built this website myself and not used their site builder. Fabulous. Thanks a bunch.

So it turns out that for reasons best known to the Guest Book installer it relocates your site home page re-directioning configuration. It took me another half hour to trawl round the settings in the hosting control panel which is a model of obfuscation. I have just got it back up again about twenty minutes ago but I’m not going to be too surprised if it goes tits-up again.

You know it really did me good to unload all of this here.

Oh, and anyone wondering why I have a picture of agent Scully in her nighty...... I just have. So there!