Stuck In A Pagoda With Motoko Aoyama

What happened is this… I made the mistake of trusting MotokoAoyama.com with a local hosting company since its inception.

OK, maybe that’s too harsh of a criticism. In fact, it’s pretty snarky. But here’s what happened.

Since 2007 started, my former server company began having a series of little problems. The problems included frequent server outages (including one that took this site out for over a week) that made me want to tear my hair out and go postal.

The old company’s preferred method of support communication is e-mail. Which is fine in most cases, but when every server in your company is down, it tends to take the e-mail servers with you. Not exactly anyone’s idea of fun by a long shot – certainly not mine. Calling them only got me an answering machine. Talk about beyond impersonal. To their credit, I did get two months of credit from these guys after that last major server crash.

Then their method of billing changed. Instead of automatic billing, they merely sent invoices out every month or so. Unfortunately, it turned out to be “so” more than monthly, and they never seemed to come on the exact same day either. Once in a while I would be asked to pay for a month that hadn’t taken place yet. Not exactly the same way I would be running a cyber-railroad.

Still, I stayed with these guys. They were local, they were cool with my letting their little bill (about $7/month) take a back seat when I had to pay more important bills, and even though their owner plays the drums in a hair-metal oldies band (think Sha-Na-Na with Aqua Net instead of Brylcreem – their site is here but be warned – it will resize your browser involuntarily), they were OK as people. I had done business with the owner since he had operated the original dial-up ISP that I was with until I switched to Verizon DSL in 2005. Still, I questioned whether their servers were able to handle a WordPress blog like Stuck In A Pagoda.

Then, the day after I posted a long-overdue new theme and graphic on MotokoAoyama.com, things went kerplotz. I mentioned two paragraphs ago their rather odd invoicing system. The last time I got an invoice from these people was in late August or early September. No other e-mail communication – certainly not a pay up or get cut off notice – and certainly no phone call (or if they did try to call, they certainly didn’t leave me the courtesy of a voice mail).

On Saturday, October 6, 2007, some fucknuts at my now-former server company erased everything. I was pissed. A year and a half of hard work, erased by someone whose boss thinks he can outdrum Scott Asheton or Bill Bruford. I was out of the house and away from my PowerBook but ended up getting in an e-mail argument with the guy. My server was turned back on, but my request that my content be restored (which they could have done) was ignored. My only error here was not doing backups – work on Play It All Night Long was my main priority and I made the mistake of not doing them.

The owner’s response? “Maybe if you’d pay a year in advance, you wouldn’t have this problem.”

In other words, pay some Rikki Rokkett wannabe in advance for a year’s worth of average-to-questionable service and maybe I’d see MotokoAoyama.com Version 1.0 again.

I decided to think about it for a little bit first.

A few hours later, I pulled a second domain name (godscryschool.com – named after the martial arts dojo owned by Motoko Aoyama’s family in Love Hina) that I had owned as long as motokoaoyama.com itself (since March of 2004), found BlueHost.com through WordPress, and signed up the domain name.

Part of my Sunday evening of October 7, 2007 was spent rebuilding the design of Stuck In A Pagoda to resemble as closely as possible the design I had done on October 5.

At midnight, I arranged with Bluehost and GoDaddy to park MotokoAoyama.com at my new account. How did I make the arrangement with Bluehost? Over the phone. Score one for those guys. I then sent a previously composed severance e-mail to my now-former webhost, informing them of my decision and requesting a refund of the money I had paid them to restart the account (which had been offered by the owner during correspondence.) Hopefully, by the time this article posts (I set it to be posted around noon on Monday, October 8), I will have gotten that refund.

So now, two domain names – MotokoAoyama.com and GodsCrySchool.com – point to this website. The old content is gone, save for a couple of articles I had pre-composed. Very little of it is on Archive.org. But a new start always brings a fresh garden.

Moral of the story: Local doesn’t always mean good.