I’m writing in the new and improved Blogspot editing interface instead of in the WordPress interface today. That subject is one issue motivating my murderous rage. But there are at least two issues, I’ll get to the other one(s) in a minute.
The web host we have been utilizing to put ourselves online for about a decade chose this month to triple the cost of the online hosting that we had set up. Being the cheapskates that we always have been, we decided we could do better. Aside from which the Wife had found a new hosting company that looked good, run by some friendly people that she wouldn’t mind giving some more business to.
I mothballed my writing work and backed up WordPress and the website and waited for the procedure to complete for all the hosted websites that were going to have to transfer. After a week of struggle with the host she had selected, she was unable to get an account at their place that functioned to her satisfaction. The thing that ended her week’s work with them was when they sent a confirmation email for a scheduled data transfer to the wrong email address.
They sent an email containing usernames and passwords to an address that was not on file with them as being the administrator of the transfer. Let the enormity of the security breach that error represents sink in for a minute.
It’s the eleventh hour. The account we had at our existing hosting service was scheduled to bill us an obscene amount of money in less than 24 hours in order to keep up the hosting contract for the sites that we maintain for friends and associates, sites that don’t make us any money, and The Wife needed to find somewhere else for all of us to go. She poked around a little bit and ended up at c|net and an article by written by a security guy (there’s a bit of irony for you) recommending the best hosting services for 2020. She decided well hell, if you can’t trust him who can you trust, right? Wrong. Wrongity, wrong, wrong, wrongness. All kinds of wrongness.
She did do some basic checking. The Wife is not an idiot. The URL registration for the hosting service she selected had been in place since 1998. c|net itself is one of the oldest publications on the web, well respected for the reliability of its information. We hadn’t heard of this particular web host before but we trusted c|net to have done their homework before recommending the service. That was our mistake. We contacted CIS.net.
At CIS.net we were assigned Chris W. to be the account rep. We paid up front for 8 years because the cost savings was going to be great and we were going to be getting a higher level of support for less money. Chris W. asked for the same information that the previously intended hosting company had asked for. Ok. No big deal. It’s just passwords and usernames, right? They will have your data when this is all over. Either you trust your data host or you don’t trust them. If you don’t, why keep your data there?
They moved this blog and its website first (I’m always the guinea pig) and the data transferred with just a few hiccups. The blog looked like it should, just missing a few images. I wasn’t too surprised by this. What I was surprised by was the insistence that I had multiple databases associated with the WordPress installation that I was running and that was why the images went missing. I’ve kept local backups and cloud backups of all the work I’ve done for as long as I can remember. The images are duplicated in at least two places. Image restoration would be a simple thing considering how few images were missing. I was annoyed but not outraged, so the move continued.
The Wife got to work setting up an email server for a customer next (a paying customer. One of the few) It looked great when she finished it even if she did think so herself. Two hours later it all disappeared from CIS.net’s servers. She contacted our account representative to see if there was a backup of the work she had just completed. Chris W. said that they could save and restore all that work she had just done if she signed onto their backup plan. The costs were the same as for other hosting services we’d checked with, but slightly cheaper.
(most of you can probably tell where this is going now)
While waiting for them to back things up and restore the missing mail server she had just set up, we discovered that our previous host would let us pay by the month to keep the service running. We promptly paid them for another month so that at least we could stop worrying about them deleting the data from that end of the transfer. The next day during a check-in she noticed that the mail folders in the restored backup were structured… stupidly. Like someone who didn’t know what they were doing would set things up. This cludgy restoration (not her original work at all) did work, so she got the client’s system and phone returned to them and the we sat down to take a well-deserved break in a hectic week of non-stop data terror.
In the middle of what was just the first of several movies we were planning to watch, the phone rang. Another subscriber for the destination that our data was heading for at that very moment was calling to let us know that CIS.net was not what it presented itself to be. They exchanged emails and we abandoned our movie night. After several hours of rigorous research on the Wife’s part she discovered that our data was being transferred to a honeypot set up to scam fees off of people dumb enough to transfer their data to the host.
Needless to say, she pulled the plug on the transfers. Will get a refund from the credit card servicer for the payments we made to them already. We picked a third host, one we had heard of this time, and we started the transfers again. That was when the fun started. And when I say fun, I mean the murderous red rage. But a fun rage, y’know?
The owners of the honeypot, alerted to our intent to abandon them before they had made a cent off of us, proceeded to transfer all of our domains to their registrar, whoever that was. Then they went in and deleted our accounts and all of the data from our original host (decades of pointless backups made meaningful. Yay, I guess) they changed all the passwords they had access to for the data that had been transferred, they diverted related email addresses and engaged in other assorted assholish moves in order to try to keep us from clawing back our domains and our data. They hoped to make some money off of us. I don’t think they know who they are messing with. If they did they wouldn’t be messing with us. There is no money here to be had. Just pain. Happy to share the pain with them if that’s what they want.
That problem is getting rectified as I type. The WordPress on the new (third) hosting service will be available soon and I will migrate this over there when that task is done. Have migrated it over now that it is available. Migrated the words and expanded on them with some words suggested by the editor-in-chief. I hesitate to write too much here without backing it up because I still don’t know how secure this site is and I won’t know for sure until at least a week has passed (two weeks and I still don’t know. I parked a new domain for the blog today just in case. -ed) This is not helping me find my inner peace. Not helping me get past the rage at having my stuff messed with in this way.
That is the thing causing a murderous rage that I/we can fix. So we are fixing it, because we can. This is not the thing that is causing the most rage at the moment, believe it or not.
Today is our thirty-first anniversary as a couple, the Wife and I. Every year on our anniversary we celebrate our relationship doing the thing we bonded over all those years ago. We go to a theater and we have a movie marathon, two or three movies in a row. We have dinner out as well, but for the last decade or so we have gone to the Alamo Drafthouse to watch our movies, so we get dinner and a movie together. That just makes more time for movies. Win-win.
Not this year. This year the Orange Hate-Monkey has made it impossible to go to a theater and have a good time. He has broken a thirty-year tradition of ours with his bumbling lack of leadership during this coronavirus crisis. He hasn’t managed to kill a family member with this disease yet, but I’m sure he’ll get to that eventually.
Why do we miss the rituals put on hold by the COVID-19 pandemic?
To top it all off several friends and the Wife all felt compelled to let me know that the Blue Angels were going to do a fly-over to celebrate the healthcare workers that have risked everything to keep people alive over the last few months. The Blue Angels will be flying over Austin. On our anniversary. Because the Orange Hate-Monkey thinks a patriotic tribute is what we need in this time of crisis.
The fly-overs are his idea of dealing with a pandemic. Not making sure there are enough masks for the essential workers to rely on. Not making sure there is enough protective equipment for the healthcare workers. Not paying them and the rest of the essential workers more money. Not training more people to take the load off of them in this time of crisis. No. His idea is to make us all look up and marvel at our own stupidity in spending so much of our precious blood and treasure on a military machine that cannot keep us safe from the threats we are facing.
This is the next war that we failed to build an army to deal with, to paraphrase an old truism. This pandemic is what a failure of leadership looks like. Man those fighter jets sure look great up there. Too bad all those billions spent making them and training those pilots wasn’t used to research antiviral medicines instead. We might have been able to go out and enjoy the summer, or at least been able to go out and see a movie, have some dinner in a restaurant, if we had spent that wealth a little more wisely. We might have developed a Malaria vaccine, a general Influenza vaccine, who knows what, with that kind of investment.
Instead we are sheltering in our houses hoping the markets don’t run out of food before the summer is over. At least I can write Happy Anniversary to the Wife on the blog now. We got our end fixed. How about it, Donald Trump? Want to try your hand at doing your job now? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
