I mentioned back somewhere (I think it was here, on my proper site) that this week promised a range of different things. I was deliberately non-committal on what defined a ‘thing’ since I had a funny feeling it would be a challenging few days in the making.

I wasn’t wrong.

I’ve been enduring some misbehaviour from one of my clients’ sites since the server was migrated. It’s a WordPress build.

Character set issues, to start with. This I could handle. And some distinctly paradoxical behaviour concerning W3 Total Cache. Again, odd but not impossible to overcome.

Then all of a sudden, WHAMMO. The whole damn site comes to a halt. The sort of thing that if it was in a military environment, would be accompanied by the grinding and gnashing of cogs and the scream of metal on hot metal.

This happened Friday. Obligingly – as a client of the webhost, and on behalf of a client (so their client’s client, if you’re talking webhost) – I felt compelled to alert the same guys that carried out the server migration (caused by a RAID array failure which one of my geeky friends suggested was crypto for we don’t have a fucking clue what happened but we’re inches from losing all your data so please bear with us while we schedule another nervous breakdown on your behalf).

Today came the aftermath and the start of a desperate effort to actually fix the bastard. Obviously we wouldn’t expect this to be handled over the weekend, since we only have a dedicated server with them. Obviously if we had a VPS or shared server, we’d expect primary care, but this being about 10 times more expensive, it’s a proper back of  the queue job.

I can’t mention the name of the web host because my client had asked me not to diss them. I’m not sure why, but I won’t because I’m nice like that (and if you search hard enough on Twitter you’ll find it easy enough).

Well, I haven’t been fed as much BS as I have been today for, well, about three days.

Turns out when the data was migrated across, it fell into a different structure. So now when the database is using the old structure, the site is throwing a proper ninny and churning out all sorts of garbage a la ‘headers’ and ‘invalid arrays’ and such.

But they either forgot – or didn’t deem it necessary – to tell me that this was the case.

I’m not a big fan of emoticons but here’s one that I feel is necessary in this situation:

As we near the end of another day of general uselessness I felt compelled to share this tidbit with my client. They’re not awfully tech-savvy so I broke the above scenario down into Teletubby language.

When pressing them (the web host) on the possible perambulations that could have led to the site meltdown, he told me something in tech language that approximates this:

“Yeah, we replaced your bridge that is used for carrying tanks, with one that is made of jelly. It’s still a bridge, mind.”

“Oh, and while we’re at it, there’s actually a section of bridge missing altogether. You might not notice, but then, if you use it, you probably will.”

We should be done soon. Done for, or done, I know not. But done, one way or the other.

Thanks again for your patience.

I hope this is heartburn, and not the onset of a coronary.

Tuesday brings great promise, glory, and a chance to do another video which will doubtless be inspired by this latest fiasco.

How many times do you accept utter crap from a supplier before sending them poo in a box?

And did I mention I still haven’t got that refund from Tesco, yet? Or a certificate from Tresham Institute for a course I finished in August last year?