The irony of complaining

Irony has a way of sneaking up on us. Just after I posted about not being able to keep up with my mail, two things happened: e-mails I sent to others bounced back with a message that said “blacklisted” and e-mail to my site stopped completely. My first thought was, “Wow, these readers take me seriously!” I was taken aback and relieved at the same time. A bit upset, I turned off my computer at about 3 p.m. Wednesday.

I didn’t boot up again until noon on Thursday. By then, I couldn’t get into my site at all—it always timed out. I tried my other sites, all subdomains. I couldn’t get into any of them. We called friends and relatives near Seattle and in Maryland. No one could get in.

I spent the next 10.5 hours trying to get into my site. Mind you, I pay a hosting company, I pay for all kinds of virus controls and firewalls, I pay for daily backup service at both my hosting company and my home, I pay for high-speed internet, I donate to my theme developer. Still, after 10.5 hours of mostly on-line chats (some over an hour long) I was told there was nothing to do but wait and see if it comes back up. I was even told I could not get my website backup file from the host until the site was accessible by me. What good is that?

Because I could not connect with my site, I couldn’t get my e-mail. And not just mail for HoneyBeeSuite, but mail for three other family blogs and one non-profit organization. I was freaking out.

It turns out that Comcast did all kinds of tests and blamed BlueHost. BlueHost did all kinds of tests and blamed Comcast. Each told me they could do nothing and I kept going back and forth between the two. After I gave up (that is, after I got timed out by BlueHost) I spent the night tossing and turning and trying to decide what I was going to do with my life now that I had no connection to the world. I considered rare insect surveys in the jungle where no ISPs lurk.

But here’s the moral of the story: the stuff I learned in that ten-hour period is amazing! I learned about CPU throttling, I learned how to run a traceroute, I learned about sites like megaproxy.com, gtmetrix.com, and downforeveryoneorjustme.com. I learned how to copy and paste from the command prompt—something I never knew I might need to know. I learned about hops (nothing to do with beer, unfortunately) and about millisecond spikes and loading parameters. Then I learned about more diagnostic sites like internetsupervision.com and telnet and helpful sites like howtogeek.com. I also learned there are some awesome online chatists out there—and some who need to transition to another line of work.

Early this morning my husband appeared with his laptop. “Look! Quick! Before it goes away!” And there is was, HoneyBeeSuite in all its glory. Not only that, but 30+ spam-checker approved comments (and hundreds of the other kind). That’s where the irony comes in . . . I was suddenly so grateful for all that mail—all that mail I have no time to answer!

At least for the moment things are back to normal. I apologize if I’m boring you with all this internet nonsense, but it’s all part of blogging for bees. For you geeky types, the problem appeared to be related to a 183 ms spike at hop 3. Doesn’t that tell you everything?

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite