Many of you have noticed that MyVeronaNJ.com wasn’t its regular self for the last four days. Here’s what went wrong and what we’ve done to make sure it doesn’t go wrong again.
You see our Web site over the Internet thanks to a hosting company. In May, we outgrew our first hosting company and switched to a second that seemed better able to handle our rapid expansion. We paid, in full in advance, for a 12-month contract for what was billed as “unlimited” hosting.
Except that it wasn’t. Without warning, Host #2 knocked us off the Internet on the premise that we had made “excessive” use of their services. Much as we have grown, and much as we’d like to to think that we’re the center of everyone’s universe, MyVeronaNJ.com is not now big enough to be a burden on anybody’s hosting service.
But wait, it gets better. Host #2 had a solution for us: Switch to a new contract with them that was a 40-fold increase in cost. We considered that for, oh, half a nanosecond and declined. We then spent 48 hours prying our site from the clutches of Host #2, something that should have been a great deal easier than it was given how much of a burden we had purportedly been to them.
But even after we got the site back, it wasn’t working right. I could see it and work on it, as could our tech person. None of our readers could however, and it wasn’t until very early this morning that we discovered why: Host #2 had planted a piece of code into our system to block you from getting to the site. If you think this is a new level of ugly on the Internet, we’d have to agree.
We don’t know why Host #2 went to such lengths to mess with MyVeronaNJ.com. If they had come to us with a reasonable plan for revising our contract, we would have considered it. Our new contract with Host #3 is a three-fold increase over our old costs, which seems realistic both in terms of where we are now, and where we intend to go in 2011.
Host #3 has a unique system that will grow with us as we grow, and we expect to grow a lot in the year ahead. We’ll be bringing you more stories, more photos, more videos and above all, more ideas for helping you to see Verona in a fresh new light.
We thank you for your patience and e-mails of support during a very difficult time.
Glad to have you back!
Care to divulge Host #2’s name? Enquiring minds want to know. :)
Call me crazy, but I’m going to wait until Host#2 has completed our request for a refund and the payment has cleared.
And if that refund doesn’t come through, there are a lot of lawyers in Verona….
It is nice to have you back where you belong – online!
We almost might prefer reminding Host#2 that large parts of “The Sopranos” were shot here.
Let’s see…the Sopranos… I like that strategy.
Now, to rescue my poor little blog from the clutches of GoDaddy. My happy place has vanished.
I love My VernonaNJ – – this site is my muse!
Wherever you are on the planet, it helps to channel some Jersey attitude every now and then.