Silence of the Mind

I just finally got around to canceling my old hosting for the first domain I ever purchased. I've had it hosted at Wyenet for I believe 7 years now. Unfortunately over the years the performance went downhill to the point that I pulled photo hosting off them and put on a new domain I registered and hosted at 1and1.net. It only lasted a year there before I decided that having different hosting scattered all over the place was getting ridiculous and got a VPS with wiredtree.com and consolidated both all my domains as well as my mothers into it.

What was interesting was that my domain was so recognizable that when the cancel order went though I got a call from one of the senior partners asking if there was anything they could do to retain my business. He attempted to talk up the new network they'd been moving customers to(they had been a reseller of CI Host for the longest time but got tired of losing business due to overloaded servers there) and offered help moving my account there.

I had to stop him there to tell him I'd gotten a VPS and had consolidated all my domains, but did tell him I'd keep him in mind in the future. He said to stay in touch and they'd be happy to cut me a deal should I wish to return in the future. I may look into it too, the VPS is ok, but now that I don't have any significant photohosting(smugmug is doing it all) I am not sure I need a full up VPS(esp since the one I can afford is rather ram shy).

I just found it interesting that they considered my domain name so noteworthy.

EDIT: Actually it was 8 years to the day almost...last Friday was the 8 year mark.

I've always been fairly happy with my webhost, both for performance and cost reasons. But tonight underscored the other reason I like them. I called Tech Sup because i was getting a mail rejected whenever I tried to send mail. I'd checked to see if /var was full or if any of the other partitions were, and all appeared well.

I told the guy this when I spoke with him, specifying which host I was on(both my domain name and the actual host I'm on) and he starts checking into whats going on, then comments "Ah, there it is. Have you run top to see it yet?" and was genuinely surprised when I told him that top is disabled for users. He told me what he was seeing and we talked about it a bit as he restarted smtp(someone had installed some thing that didn't play nicely with sendmail) and commented that the load he was seeing had already dropped from 90 to 40, and was slowly going down and that when it hit about 8 or so I should be able to sent mail again. I told him about the time I saw a server with a load of 1200(mailserver that mounted mailboxes via NFS to a Netapp, and the Netapp was continually rebooting) and then off I went.

I love that I get an actual unixy type person that doesn't treat me like a moron and listens to what I'm telling him when I call.