Seriously, I have been waiting for this day to arrive since I renewed my domain on May 3rd. You see, I was away in Awana Kijal, attending an annual seminar when I received an SMS from Pat and sifu Jason, who alerted me that my blog had been taken off-line.

Coaster

Now, this was what happened.. I received a reminder email from my host a couple of days before my domain expired. The auto-generated email “reminded” me to renew my domain to avoid interruption of service, bla bla bla. So I sent them an email and asked them, “What about my webhost package? Don’t I have to renew that as well?” but as you can guess, nobody replied me. But the auto-generated email came, confirming that their system had indeed received my “inquiry”. OK.. *rolls eyes*

So off I went to Awana Kijal, and I completely forgot about my expired domain. Wifi wasn’t free at Awana, in fact, the 30-day TM Hotspot prepaid card cost RM 28 but since I wasn’t going to fully utilize it, I didn’t buy it. And the internet access at the Business Centre costs a whooping RM 30 for a-freaking-hour. Cut-throat, I tell you.

Awana Kijal

So J and I drove to Kemaman town, about 17 km away, found a cyber cafe and I managed to renew my domain.

Hey, I even blogged about this at my sister’s because well, I figured some of you might be smart enough to locate me there :)

And the next few days were spent waiting for my blog to get back online. And I had even started looking for a new webhost because I was quite sure my current one had gone bankrupt. But you know, eventhough it’s up again, I have kind of made my mind to switch hosts because this current host is just too unreliable. They do not communicate with their customers, they don’t send us emails to inform us about the upgrade they were going to carry out (so that we could at least back up our stuff), they don’t take enough time to explain stuff (especially to tech-idiots like me), they send too many auto-generated emails and are not “personal” enough, they are not contactable (this is the biggest NO NO) via phone AND they don’t reply emails, especially when I was at the brink of tearing my hair out.

I need a host who will take care of my webhosting needs. I need a webhost who understands that though I might be late in renewing my stuff, I will do it. I need a webhost who trusts that I will not owe them money and run away. I need a webhost who will take some time to explain nicely to me what MySQL is and how to back-up my blog. I need a webhost who is contactable, either by phone or email (though I won’t expect you to be working on Sundays and public holidays because I know how important holidays are). Most importantly, I need a webhost who, well, listens to me :)

I ain’t being too demanding, am I?