MOMENTARY PANIC ABOUT OUR HOSTING ACCOUNT
by Hazed
Friday evening should be a time for relaxing. It’s the end of the working week, the start of the weekend, time to open a bottle of wine and put your feet (or equivalent) up.
So the last thing Alan needed on Friday, as he recovered from a trip out of London to deal with family business, was to receive an email telling us our hosting account had been cancelled!
Panic ensued, as you can imagine, and then Barb got on the phone to Melbourne, our hosting company, to ask them what the hell was going on.
It turned out that it was an old account, dating back to the days when we had a physical machine in their data centre, and before we moved to their cloud-based service. This account should have been cancelled back when we switched, but at the time Melbourne had not written the software to close accounts – so all they could do is to suspend the account. It was like the Hotel California – you could check out, but you could never leave.
From Melbourne’s point of view having a lot of suspended accounts on their books turned out to be quite useful because it made it look like they had a lot more accounts than they really did, which boosted the value of the company when it was sold recently.
Now they have finally managed to write the software to cancel accounts, so on Friday then ran a routine to identify all those dormant accounts which hadn’t had any activity on them, and sent out the cancellation notices, thus throwing us into a panic.
At least they hadn’t been charging us for the service all along!
