Saturday, January 22, 2022
It’s possible that those who are intermittent readers of my blog may not have noticed that there has no way to access the blog the past two weeks. It “headed south,” as the expression goes, and entered the Nocturnal Realm of the Living (GoDaddy) Deal. According to one of my oldest friends, Harley Lond, GoDaddy decided a while back to shift everyone making use of its services onto a new server. To put it mildly, things did not go well in the transition. Now, for some people such as the author of this blog, this was only a minor albeit exceptionally irritating inconvenience. It’s not as if I have a huge audience; but for someone such Harley Lond whose website (ONVIDEO) is a source of much needed remuneration, this snafu on GoDaddy’s part can hardly be easily excused. Mr. Lond had to spend dozens of hours on the phone trying to get GoDaddy’s customer representatives to solve the technical problems that GoDaddy seems not to have anticipated. A good chunk of that time was spent “on hold,” waiting for the handful of customer assistants to work their way through the queue line and help equally desperate bloggers and site owners.
For the most part, the customer reps tried very hard, but they were having to contend with a rip tide of flawed miscalculations on GodDaddy’s part. They were lifeguards whose own access to technology was barely keeping them afloat, letting alone enabling them to rescue those who had been jettisoned by the arrogant bureaucracy in charge of GoDaddy’s infrastructure. Whoever the VP of DNS might be should get a good talking’ to, as in being given his or her walking papers.
If I mischaracterized anything in this situation, I am more than willing to post a rebuttal from GoDaddy. In the meantime, I leave you with this image of how my readership cratered two weeks ago. The canyon of blank space between the vertical blue bars in the chart beneath represents the inexcusable demolition of my blog’s readership, which can only be attributed to glib assumptions on GoDaddy’s part that because GoDaddy owns the technology, it is entitled to do exactly whatever it wants, whenever it wants, without regard to the impact on the efforts I make to keep this blog buoyant.
I’m not sure how long it will take me to regain some of December’s momentum, but I can only hope that at least a few of my readers won’t have assumed that the complete absence of past blog entries meant that I had decided to play Prospero with “my book.” Perhaps most of them will eventually drift back into the habit of checking in on my blog, but in the meantime I am the one who has lost out, with no recognition of my loss from the corporate entity.
I look forward to sharing some new thoughts and links in the days and weeks ahead, assuming that GoDaddy will stop playing a fort-da, ping-pong game with my blog.
About Bill Mohr