I've been having one or two problems with my web-hosting provider. This time six months ago, I was lavishing praise upon them for being very reliable, but not long after that things started getting worse. Aside from a general increase in unreliability, there were a number of pretty significant problems.

1. I discovered, the hard way, that their disk quotas were hard limits
2. The machine I was being hosted on was very slow for a week, which meant half the time my weblog wouldn't rebuild properly when I posted
3. Their solution to this problem was to move me to another machine... without letting me know the IP address or timing in advance. Which meant the morning after the switch, I woke up to find myself stuck with a severely broken DNS record.
4. For several weeks, I could only sporadically access my own webpage from home. The problem turned out to be Qwest over-enthusiastically blocking ICMP, which killed Path MTU Discovery. As far as I can tell, they only worked this out after I politely suggested it might be the problem.
5. Only days after they'd recovered from this long and significant outage they sent me an invoice.

There's bad timing, and there's bad timing. So yes, I think it's time to move on. I'm in the process of setting up MT on the new provider, and taking the opportunity to fix a few of the things that are more egregiously wrong with my blog. Hopefully I can drop the TTL down and get the DNS to switch over more smoothly this time, except for Javablogs which will, of course, continue caching the old IP until it is next rebooted, regardless of TTL..

Anyway, today my blog was unreachable from about 9am, and continued to be so all day. At about 6:30pm, I gave their support number a ring, ready to finally tell them just how pissed off I was at the service, outages, and general pile of annoyance I had experienced.

Well, I was about to. Then the lady on the other end of the line told me about the fire that completely shut down their co-lo. Ouch. I feel a bit guilty now.