To all of you idiotic backhoe operators..this goes out to you. Moved to a new server this weekend. All would be swell, excluding two things. First and foremost, they set the fucker up with a broken mysqld.

The finally got it fixed, a little slower than I would have liked, and I could have fixed it myself, but I flatly refused to do it based solely on the grounds that it wasn't my problem. Besides I was curious as to how good the "24/7" support is. Let me say this: it isn't.

I opened the trouble ticket at 4:52 PM EST. The first response came nearly an hour later, and it was just saying that it was assigned to someone. Ok, not great, but not bad.

25 minutes later, the person it was assigned to responded by CLOSING the ticket with the response "Please provide your IP address, and I will take a look.". Now this may be a shortcoming of the trouble ticket system (looks home brew), but CLOSING a ticket is irritating. Moreover, they just set the fucking server up that day...so why don't they have the IP address?

At the very minimum this should have been something I could have filled out when the trouble ticket was submitted.. Hell, on the trouble tickets screen, there is space for the IP address, but no place to enter it when I submit it. So, dutifully I respond, six minutes after the ticket is closed.

20 minutes later the tech response is: "Thank you. I will also need your root password, as the one we have on file is not working at this time."

Understandable you might think, as I surely have promptly changed my root password. Not so. It was still the pass I set the account up with. /me sighs

Responded with root password 10 minutes after ticket closed. I begin monitoring the server logins to see when the tech will login. For those of you keeping score, it's shortly before 7.

After nearly 2.5 hours without a login, I begin to get irate. I call the 24/7 support line repeatedly. No answer at all. In fact, it just rings and rings until a pre-recorded message tells me that "the number isn't valid" before hanging up. I am getting angry.

Chalking it up to it being a friday and some tech blowing off work or the like, I stop watching at 10 and go to drink. When I toddle off to bed (around threeish) there is a response waiting. at 12:45am the ticket is closed with the response " MySQL is reinstalling now, which will fix the issue. This is a known bug with MySQL/cPanel on CentOS systems. We have corrected the problem, and you should be all set in about 15 minutes."

Let me start by saying this: If this is a "known" issue, it's not one I found. Because I spent nearly two hours crawling forums and googling the precise issue, and NOWHERE did I find this "known" issue. As far as I can tell, this "known" issue is called "We fucked up". Either way, I am not sold that this company sucks, but this was a lousy first experience.

Now, back to Mr. Backhoe. Some asshole has managed to not only fuck up a link in Pittsburgh, but for a while on Sunday, NYC was reacting horribly. End result? Speeds to my server have sucked big fat sack. At first I was nervous that the server link was the issue, thinking I may have just switched to a dedicated server on some POS line, but that's apparently not the issue.

I had someone in VA downloading large maps (Chuck, to be precise) and he was getting them just as fast as expected. It was taking me around 30 times longer to get them, and it appeared to be a bottleneck in pittsburgh. For further affirmation I had friends in Maine and California hit the server for data, and I logged in to a box in Texas to do the same. All met with fine results. The issue lay in the fact that I live in SW PA.

Of course.