Avoid This ISP

Sharply increased Oscar traffic last night caused Hollywood Elsewhere to slow to a crawl and then crash this morning. It was my fault, of course, and I’m apologizing up and down. The staffers at the recently merged Softlayer/Orbit-The Planet, HE’s Texas-based server, failed to cope with the situation to my satisfaction. All they did was speak Martian Klaatu. And when the site crashed early this morning, they did nothing until I called up and hammered and brought hell. They could have simply re-booted the server but it took them forever to do this, and even now it’s loading too slowly.

Finally a senior level person came on the line and, for the first and only time since the troubles began last night, offered a solution, which was to double the memory . Which I immediately agreed to pay for.

But in the meantime please, please avoid doing business with these guys — I’m warning the world. They’re Texas nerds, they operate at a snail’s pace, and their refusal to speak simply and plainly, in the manner of, say, Andy Griffith or Clem Kadiddlehopper jest a sittin’ on the front porch and talkin’ about how to fix these goldurned dadblasted server issues, prolongs the conversation time and again because I always have to stop them in the middle of one of their Martian Obscura sentences and say, “I’m sorry, but could you re-phrase what you just said in plain, front-porch, tattered-overalls English?”

I am going to sever my relationship with these bozos at the first opportunity. Klaatu Barada Seeyalater.

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33 thoughts on “Avoid This ISP”

  5. @Jim Peacock

    Re: Texas

    Jeff hates the flyover states–we’re all Rodney Dangerfield to him (no respect). Which is kind of funny because the last I checked, here in Oklahoma, we did pick TSN as best picture and Fincher as best director.

    As frustrating as it must have been, having enough traffic to crash your site is a good problem to have.

    Here’s hoping the anger has subsided somewhat before SXSW. Jeff could really have a good time there if he’ll just let it happen.

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  8. FWIW, just to follow up, Austin is a considerable tech-sector base. But Wells wouldn’t know that. He gets all his learning from documentaries.

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  11. When the site was down all morning, I’m sure I wasn’t alone in thinking that Wells had drunkenly deleted the entire blog in a Lexian-style retirement after slumping into a pit of King’s Speech-related despair. “What’s the point of going on in a world where Tom Hooper wins over David Fincher?”

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  12. Not alone Eloi.

    I am trying to think of an equivalent to the HE 2011 Oscar night disaster. Would be like Nate Silver or Andrew Sullivan’s site going down on Election night, or Pete King not tweeting during the Super Bowl, or Vulture down during the series finale of Jersey Shore. Was surprised that Jeff just shut it down entirely. Thought he might tweet like Sasha did while her site went dark, but that’s not the full HE experience. Those Starbuck baristas must have had a front row seat to a def con 5 meltdown.

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  15. Don’t know if I’m the only one, but I’ve actually had trouble with this site for a couple weeks now, if not longer. I blamed it on the motion ads, but it does seem to be working better today.

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  18. Speaking of the site, am I the only one who has a problem with those annoyingly wide gray side margins? No matter how I view the site, a lot of side scrolling is involved.

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