Zack Rippy

No, I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth, though the site has been pretty much inaccessible for two weeks now. My host, iPowerWeb, was transitioning many of their accounts to a new hosting platform. In the process, some DNS records were not updated correctly, effectively knocking me offline.

This is the first real problem I’ve had with iPowerWeb, but it was a big one. IPowerWeb is a host that has always been excellent for me. I have never had real problems with them and for the money, they can’t be beat. Where “you get what you pay for” comes into play is with customer service / response times. I have literally called them seven times in the last two weeks. Every time, I gave up after over an hour waiting to speak to someone. Last night, I finally got someone on the phone. I explained the problem and he insisted that “Your domain is up, there just is nothing there.” I explained that their DNS was directing my domain to the old host, because ftp.zackrippy.com was correctly pointed to the new address and all my files were there. He still did not believe or understand me. I finally just told him, “Look, point all the DNS requests for ANYTHING at zackrippy.com to the address to which ftp.zackrippy.com points. He (hesitantly) said he would see what he could do and could I please hold. This was after waiting ninety minutes to get a human on the phone in the first place. After 45 more minutes waiting for him to come back to me, I hung up. This morning, everything is working. I guess he did what I asked. AGGH. I am not going to cancel my service at this point, but I will seriously consider switching to 1and1 or some other host when my contract with IPowerWeb expires.

Anyways – brief recap:

Christmas was a lot of fun. We had Christmas with just our family and then had everyone over for Christmas dinner/lunch, followed by a nice afternoon of doing nothing. Much of the time surrounding Christmas was spent working upstairs. We have an unfinished “bonus” room upstairs that we in the process of completing and turning into an eventual family/theater room. Marie’s parents have put in a terrific floor, framed in a bathroom and done numerous other things up there. My grandfather did the majority of the wiring over Christmas weekend. It will be great once it is all finished and it’s awesome having incredibly skilled, perfectionist relatives helping out so much!

New Year’s Eve went well. We had our annual party and there had to be over forty people in our house. I think everyone had a good time. I tried to recover with the kids on the first, while Marie hit the sales with a vengeance, spending most (all) of the day running from one store to the next.

That about wraps up the last couple weeks. Happy 2008 to everyone.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 9:43 am and is filed under In My Life, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.