Yesterday my site was sporting this message:

Good thing I have backups or this story could have taken quite the narrative turn…

My FORMER ISP has always had an absolutely terrible service process. I chose them six years ago because… well, honestly I have no idea why. It may have been a very low-involvement decision. This morning when I discovered the problem, things went like this around here:

Michael: Wait, what site is this? Is it (free service I use for something else)?
Me: No, no, it’s my ISP, you know, the one we pay for.
Michael: Have you called them?
Me: No. They do not have a support phone number. How this works is, you open a ticket and wait for them to email you. Then you send a response and wait for them to email you some more.
Michael: What?
Me: Yes, they suck. We need a new one.

The problem with ANY online help desk is that you send in your request in what you THINK is perfectly plain language, and then they respond with a question you think you’ve already provided the answer to, and then, five hours later, they respond to YOUR response with something so vauge you have to do four Google searches just to find out what they are talking about.

But NO MORE. Now I’m hosting with hostgator, where they have 24 hour LIVE support, so I can skip the five hour wait and go straight to Googling. And no, they totally aren’t paying me to say this.