Infinology Sucks

I wanted to talk about Infinology in a setting dedicated just to it.

We signed up with Infinology as a webhost for the Piker Press some years back. To their credit, back in that day, they were fast and efficient, and we got good working space for our $$.

In 2006, there were more than a few weekends when the site was messed up and we couldn't access the ezine, but our hits were high and I just figured those were days when the Googlebots were sitting around reading through our archives and forums, hogging up the bandwidth. No worries.

Then, in November, we had days of down time, and investigation indicated a problem with Infinology's servers. The Press came back up, much to our relief -- but with one odd and extremely aggravating change: all our image files since the beginning of June had been erased. Every cover, every illustration, every photograph. All. People wanting to go back through the archives and read the comics got blank pages. Articles that used photos to explain content were bald bits of text.

Now I don't know about anyone else, but when I look for info on something, and the webpage comes up with messed up graphics or pictures, I don't bother with it, and generally sneer at the content. Losing all those images was a rude blow, and what really made it rude-issimo was that Infinology never said, "Sorry! We backed up our files, everything is still there" or even "Sorry! We've destroyed six months of files, can we help you in any way?" or even "Sorry, we'll try not to let that happen again."

Infinology sucks. Sometime between noon on Saturday, February 24th and Monday morning of the 26th, the site went down. And so did the business relationship between Infinology and the Piker Press. We sent "trouble tickets" that went unacknowledged; email that went unanswered; phone calls for help that were sent automatically to an answering machine -- and were never returned.

A team of techs from various points in the world on our end discovered that there was a problem with the Cold Fusion translation in INFINOLOGY's servers. Their problem, utterly ignored, just as they ignored our plight.

No choice, we've moved to a new webhost. In a matter of a day or two, we should be back on the Web again, having lost a shitload of readers with two weeks' damn downtime.

Infinology sucks.