Live & Kern

As I recover from that mega-Monopoly game, I have had the best of intentions to post something about this:

Hopefully I still will. But right now I’m more irate about the Internets than the blankets.

This blog and those other ones are hosted with Network Solutions. Not the cheapest, for sure. But I haven’t had any trouble with down-time in the past two years either. So what’s the problem?

It’s the economy, stupid.

(To be clear, I do not think you are stupid. I think you are incredibly smart. Otherwise, how’d you get here?)

My hosting plan for those other blogs was expiring. When I called to renew, the salesman recommended a different plan — two years on the new plan was only $40 higher than one year with the current plan. Yay! Sale made!

The problem came when I tried to switch everything over to the new plan. For some reason the PTBs at Network Solutions could change the e-mail addresses over to the new plan, but couldn’t pick up everything connected to the old account and glue it to the new one. And, for some reason, I can’t get an FTP client to work with that account. (I’m not dumb; I’ve used FTP clients before. It’s not rocket science.)

I finally resorted to calling customer service, which had no solution — the FTP client worked fine for them, so it must work fine for everyone, they said. Instead, they wanted me to buy an extra month of the service on the old plan (because by now it’s been a week, and that plan has expired) while I figure it all out.

It seemed dumb to pay for both, even for a month. (Also, it would have pretty much canceled any savings.) So now I have one year of service on the old plan, canceled the new plan, and have promised them that I will be searching to a new hosting company before the year is up.

AARGH!

Also, I found it amazing that the company had my credit card information on file to make a new charge, but I had to read the card number, expiration date and security code — for the same card — to get a refund on the other plan.

AARGH.