ASP.NET Programmer

Webhost4Life Web Hosting Sucks

Let me tell about the week I have had, all courtesy of the incompetent techs running Webhost4life hosting service. The week starts with my Movable Type admin panel being mysteriously unavailable. The main site is still up mind you, but no way to actually edit or post anything. So the support request goes in, and they first try to change the main cgi file over to a pl file thus triggering a mountain of errors. Their response to this was, “can you figure out what all these errors are about?” You dumb idiot. You changed the file extension. This has worked as is for the past 4 years. Why do you now think changing the file extension is the answer? So another tech changes it back to cgi and gets me in. Great, but when I go to publish nothing has write access. A day goes by and now I can write to one directory, but not another. Still basically can’t post. Another day goes by, and I’m back to normal. Not so fast sparky. I get a seperate email that morning saying that they’ve switched servers on me overnight and so all my ODBC connections are now on the fritz. The site has effectively been offline for hours. It would have been nice to send me the email the day before so I could have the code gracefully fall over to the new server. Now that that is fixed, none of the image files work even though they are full qualified urls. Incompetance like this has to be rewarded. I’ve spent the last day pulling all the data down off the WebHost4Life server and loading it up to Godaddy. I’ve also put the blog on WordPress which makes my life so much easier. Moveable Type was a headache and a pain in the ass. Five years ago there wasn’t much better out there though. So that was my week.

Truthfully if this was WebHost’s first f$&k up, I could probably give them another chance, but this seems to be a perpetual issue. The site will go down for a couple to 10 minutes at a time then be right back up. No one has an explanation for what caused the hiccup. I keep running into file upload buffer limits where they have to clear something on their side. They always seem to be changing servers or screwing with something that breaks my site. Logically if you are going to have everyone point to the e drive as the web root, wouldn’t you maintain that drive letter when you relocated it to a new server? I know this is way too logical. The biggest irritant is just that they are never on top of things. They let issues sit for days at a time before responding. Customer support is not a high priority.

Please do me a favor and never use Webhost4life for your web host. You’re just asking for trouble.

Thunderbird Error: Cannot connect to SMTP Server

On my rebuilt machine, I was trying to connect up to my email account on webhost4life using Thunderbird. Great Outlook alternative that is free for those who are interested (part of the Mozilla initiative). Anyway once I set this up, mail came flowing in fine, but it wasn’t going out to save anything. I’d just get an error message saying: Cannot connect to SMTP Server. I had the reference to the SMTP format correct for webhost4life (mail.webserver.com) and the user name and password were accurate. After several turns at it from Telnet, I discovered the port was the issue. It was receiving mail fine on the default 110 port, but 25 just wasn’t wanting to send. After some tinkering, 366 seemed to cooperate so that is what it came to be set as. To update the port, simply go to Tools > Account Settings > Outgoing SMTP Server > click Edit on the server in question and update the port underneath the server name. Nothing is to say that 366 will work for you. Its best to check with your webhost.

Another hiccup I ran across. If you have several email accounts setup in Firebird and several SMTP servers to go with them, make sure that all the accounts pointing to their correct server. I was trying to send out from email address B and constantly getting ‘this user does not exist on the recipient server’ which I knew they did. It turns out it was trying to use the SMTP server from email address A thus wasn’t relaying properly. Once it was changed, all was well. To update the SMTP server, simply go under Tools > Account Settings > Highlight the email address in question and pick the correct SMTP server from the drop down. By default, this will most likely be pointing to the first SMTP server you set up.