So, the ISP who hosts jgreely.com has been sending email since February announcing an upcoming transition to a new platform.
On November 2nd, they sent one that said “we may not get to your domain before our November 28th deadline, so if you don’t want it to be shut off, you might want to run our migration tool yourself and do your own testing.”
On November 15th, they sent a friendly reminder.
On November 16th, they said the migration had been completed successfully, and I should now update my registrar with their new name servers.
Not being an idiot, I queried the new servers, and found: no MX record, no A records, and only one lonely little CNAME pointing ftp.jgreely.com to (nonexistent) www.jgreely.com. The new IP address, available only from their web console, did not listen for SMTP, POP, or IMAP, but a manual connection to port 80 showed that my trivial home page was there. The control panel also showed that my mail config had been modified, but that no data had been copied over from the old server (someone clearly doesn’t understand how IMAP works…).
There is no published support email address. Their online chat never connects. I spent 72 minutes on hold waiting for someone to pick up, and ten minutes explaining the problem to an arrogant moron. I demanded he escalate the call, and he put me on hold for another 20 minutes. I explained the problem again, in detail, and this guy understood, and said they’d regenerate the zone file and it would be fine in a little while.
And, oh-by-the-way, since the transition of my domain was marked complete in their system, the old server could be shut down at any time. But if I noticed it and called, they’d be happy to turn it back on for a little while.
Two hours later, dig still shows no MX, no A, and one pointless CNAME.
Oh, and the “obsolete platform” had shell access; the shiny new one does not. It does, however, have a lot of overpriced add-on services, like “backup/restore” (!), SEO optimization, blahblahblah. And while on hold for over an hour, they kept telling me how paid audio and video services would “keep customers on my site longer”, and other bullshit.
If they don’t get their shit together Real Soon Now, I’ll name and shame them. And, of course, move the account elsewhere. Maybe I’ll just host it on Amazon and run it myself.
[Update: DNS and old email finally showed up. I haven’t switched yet, since it takes a while for name server changes to propagate, and I still don’t really trust these clowns. First, I’m going to backup my mail archives, then switch the IMAP config to point to the old IP address, then create a brand new account that points to the new IP addresses, so I don’t lose days of incoming mail.]