We’re back on the shared hosting.

When we migrated to a new server, in order to be faster, there were a number of technical glitches, and we seemed to muddle through them on the way to a site redesign.

Then, we were told, our server was “compromised” by an unknown third party. We don’t think we pose a national security threat, but regardless, we wuz hacked. We’re just going to chalk that one up to some devious governmental or anti-governmental or intergalactic authority. Seriously, we have no idea.

We don’t believe we have anyone’s pass word for anything because we don’t require that to post.  We use a virus scanner (just an off the shelf one) when collecting images. It’s always best for you to use your own virus scanner (we like free AVG, but of course there are lots out there)  when downloading anything from the internets, and, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer, please use common sense here.

And so, because we sooo brilliantly never deleted our shared hosting files, we’re back to square 1, with shared hosting for the time being.  Suffice it to say we’ve contracted with another company for different servers and we’ve hired our swat team to fix things up.

We’re firing our current server company and writing off a letter of complaint. We received instruction about the third party “compromise” to download all the files and then reprovision the server, and we started to do that — downloading all the files. That was taking hours. Then the server -in a snap- cut out. And we couldn’t access it at all. Then we were spending hours on the phone and in the chat with the support system, many of whom were excellent but, in the end, we asked, “So, we’re on our own?” and the answer was “Yes.” And, we were nickeled and dimed throughout ordering extra services on top of the server. We know that the company wasn’t trying to intentionally make things difficult so that we’d hire a monthly subscription to sys admin. We did receive an e mail saying that we wouldn’t be charged for that month of horrendousness and time-sucking wastefulness.  And user-alientation and depletion of what little good will we had left.

We have all of our image files, and now we’re in the midst of getting our SWAT team’s attention in the middle of their Christmas rush.  We’ll likely be fully functional in Jan 2011.

Merry Christmas, happy whatever-you-want, and best wishes for you and your loved ones.

As for us, bah humbug, we’re going with the airing of the grievances and the feats of physical strength around a virtual aluminum pole.