Well, where does one even begin? Yes, this is a new personal site, although not the first. Due to the utter ineptitude of the local hosting company I was using, I severed ties with them after several years and took the decision to start anew.
What was the problem exactly? Well, turns out my site has been completely inaccessible to anyone outside of South Africa, and, to make matters worse, I have absolutely no idea how long this was the case.
If I reflect on this, there were red flags for sure. For starters, the statistics plug-in I had installed had remained unchanged for God knows how long. To be fair, I wasn’t actively monitoring stats daily so I just attributed this to slow traffic. That was until I tweeted about a recent post I made. A friend of mine in the UK advised that he was getting a 403 forbidden error.
Well shit, what to do now? Firstly, I ensured that there were no plug-ins or settings causing the error. Secondly, I tested multiple browsers – no change. Finally, after testing access from several locations via VPN, all of them produced the same error. It was time to log a support ticket.
So, I log the support ticket. I detail my trouble-shooting and also mention that I’m unable to update the site’s PHP because my cPanel access was removed. They removed cPanel access in order to make it a chargeable ‘feature’. So what does the support agent do? He updates the PHP and marks the ticket as resolved. Afterwards, the support agent still has the audacity to ask me to rate his performance because he will get an incentive.
The fact that whenever they mail me I get a warning that their email has failed its domain’s authentication requirements and that it may be spoofed or improperly forwarded, is further cause for concern. Failing the DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication) check is not encouraging at all.
Normally, I’d have reopened the ticket and re-explained the issue and that it was in fact not resolved. But why should I have to? Yes, it’s perfectly acceptable to start a sentence with a conjunction. Just don’t overuse it. I digress, I’m not about to spend countless eons repeating myself to a person who is clearly either inept or just too lazy to care about my problem. So, I ended my business with them. Good riddance.