Russell Beattie

Whatever celestial object which was causing all my troubles must have moved out of the shadow of some other heavenly body and suddenly everything just worked tonight.

First, I called VeriSign ready for a battle. Instead I talked to a very reasonable woman who 1) Just took my word for the fact that I was really Russell 2) Sent me my password instantly (not in 24-48 hours) and 3) changed my domain name servers WHILE I WAS WAITING for the email. She could have done the classic help desk thing and just said, "I'll send your password to you now, it'll take a long time to get through our system (which should give me enough time to get off work so I don't have to talk to you again)." But she didn't. She actually helped me with my problem and resolved it instantly.

And, I got this email from the CEO. I'm amazed by it's complete denial of wrongdoing. I promise everyone on a stack of whatever religous book you want that I tried to log in every day - almost every waking hour - from Friday until Tuesday evening. And you ALL saw that my site was down for all that time. I'm not the type of guy who particularly likes chos and trouble, really. If my site was up and my email working, I'd have been content. I'd still have switched servers just because it was down for a day, but I wouldn't have been hysterical.

Regardless, he did offer to refund my money so we can let it pass and I'm ALL for that:

From: "CEO"
To: "Russell Beattie"
Subject: Re: October Charges
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2002 12:35:44 -0600

Hello Russell Beattie:

We did not cancel you, but rather you have been placed under restriction so that your site does not effect other paying customers as it has been. Please officially cancel the account, which a quick and painless process, so that we can resolve this and put this behind us. You can mention that I offered a credit for anything charged this month to your account on the cancellation, which I don't have a problem doing if you close your account.

Your site was only locked out for less than 24 hours, which was while we transferred you to another server. We explained several times how to login, and only during that less than 24 hour period was your email and web access blocked, which we have permission to do as you have agreed in our usage policy when others are effected. We have the original and response correspondence which clearly shows we did not ignore you, and informed you of the situation promptly. Without the cancellation, billing still has your status as open, and thus I can not refund you this month. However you take 2 minutes, and follow that link, I can refund the entire month instead of just prorating the days left. The only notices billing accepts are in the format explained here which is done for the protection of our clients: http://cwihosting.com/cwihosting.php?page=policy#cancellation

Regards:

Marcus Barnes

Ooof. Finally. I'm an Aquarius... someone read my sign... Was I seriously under a dark cloud? Did you see how quickly and easily it lifted? It's like that with my life sometimes.

Give my site about 24 hours and it should be back to russellbeattie.com ... Thank goodness... Then it'll be up and running. Only a week down. Coulda been worse. And hey, it's not like I'm some eCommerce site, right? I'm just some wacky iAddict...

-Russ