Incommunicado

Sometimes something we count on as solid and secure is a facade. My other website, which connects to the public me, has been hosted for the last several years by a service whose website boasts photos of multiple, huge datacenters in impressive buildings in multiple cities. They promise bullet-proof uptime. They sell security and confidence and they delivered their product as promised until last week. Without warning, the lights went out. Promises of return to service by 7:00pm were made day after day. Then yesterday, on their support page, the truth came out. Some of their customers' websites had been farmed out to rented server space. The company providing that space had been acquired by another and drives containing websites were put on a truck (instead of in the promised airplane) and shipped across the country to live in different machines that no one bothered to find out were not compatible with said drives. Oh, and by the way, two of the servers hadn't even been owned by the acquired company but belonged to yet someone else. They were left behind in the move and the drives and data have not been recoverable. So, my website along with about 600 others was simply lost to the ether. Stuff happens. But the company I have been dealing with, the only one I knew existed until yesterday, is trying to slough blame off onto these other guys. It's infuriating! They offered two free months of service for my trouble, for which they got an earful. Yes, I can re-upload my site so I really only lost my log files and a bunch of email along with a weeks' frustration and email isolation. But it goes to show you that things are often not what they appear to be and you really can't count on anything of this world. And the worst part of all this is, it's a metaphor for my own character.