So my (now ex-) hosting company tells me they have been emailing me for weeks to inform me they will terminate my account as I haven’t paid for the second part of the semi-annual subscription (after many years of paying promptly).

ONLY I DIDN’T GET ANY EMAILS. So ten years work on my web hosting was wiped out completely and irrevocably on the 14th September 2009. FUBAR.

When I sent emails to support, they were supposed to autorespond with a ticket number: I didn’t and still don’t get them. Not in spam, not anywhere. But they think they’ve sent them. The same must have been true of the warning emails they sent me. I guess I can’t blame the hosts (because they thought they were emailing me and I was ignoring them) and I can’t blame me because I’ve just been using the service (including support requests) up until the last day and had no intention not to pay. But it’s still a massive pain in the proverbial. Other than this catastrophic fail, they’ve been reasonable hosts.

Of course I have backups of most of it, but it is always intensely painful to reconstruct this kind of stuff, and causes problems for the various people I’m helping out as a favour.

Lesson: pay a few dollars more a month (literally $10) to have someone you can speak to on the phone.

Let’s hope this doesn’t happen with the new hosts, who have been great so far.