My apologies for the disappearance of large swathes of Submit Response—most of the pages hosted under this domain will be back online by the end of the day.

The problem, for those interested in such things, was this: any attempt to edit a file on my server, or to upload a new file, resulted in that file instantly turning into an empty file. And, so, whenever anyone left a comment on the weblog, the page they were commenting on, and all the index pages would - poof! - dissappear.

This very peculiar behaviour had me stumped, but my hosts worked it out: I was over my hosting quota. You’d’ve thought that would trigger an email alert, rather than prompting the server to wig out completely in a way that my host’s own tech support man described over the ‘phone as ‘really strange’ and ‘not anything I’ve seen before’, wouldn’t you?

Hey ho.

Same day support service aside, I’m tempted to move to a different host, or buy a dirt cheap PC to stick in a cupboard and do it myself, where I’d have no one to blame but myself for cocking up.

This is why: in the email Simply.com sent to warn that they were migrating to new servers, they witheld information, and their telephone support dept. needs a kick in the face.

I’ve no idea how these things are normally done, but Simply.com chose to archive all the stuff on their servers on March 3rd, a full fortnight before they planned to migrate, but didn’t tell their customers this. Fortunately, I have a backup of stuff uploaded in that fortnight, which wasn’t much, and, better yet, the MySQL databases were left untouched. But not telling customers that their websites would suddenly roll back a fortnight in time? Sucks. Also sucky: the support bloke I spoke to on the ‘phone, who was rude, clueless and blamed all the problems on ‘management decisions’ on which he had ‘no comment’. Bullshit, mate.

Normal rubbish-spouting service will resume shortly.