12 Mar 2010 Thanks to Hostway, An Unintended Hiatus for Our Blog

Since March 1, this blog had been on an unintended hiatus, as posts written for it were not publishing to the site.

So we were writing, but you weren’t seeing.

Since 2003, this blog has been published by ftp from Blogger, which has been owned by Google for most of that time, to our nationalcenter.org website hosted by Hostway. When publishing went dead, the question was: Is Blogger not sending the files, or is Hostway blocking the files?

Our queries to both firms revealed that each considered the other responsible. With that kind of response, we weren’t getting anywhere.

In an effort to break the logjam, we opened a hosting account at Network Solutions (a competitor of Hostway’s) and attempted to publish the blog there. It worked, which pretty much means that Google-owned Blogger is off the hook, and Hostway must have been the problem all along. To publish the blog now, we are publishing it to Network Solutions, and manually moving the files from our server space there to our server space at Hostway.

It is a cumbersome and inelegant solution, but it at least means the blog’s posts are once again visible to readers here at nationalcenter.org, and to those who subscribe to our RSS feed. It also means you will see a bunch of posts in coming days to catch folks up — in abbreviated form at least — with a few of the things we have been up to during the unintended hiatus.

I would like to think Hostway’s technical support will fix its problem and start accepting incoming ftp files from Blogger as it has since 2003, but I can’t say things are looking good. Although I have had numerous email exchanges and phone conversations with Hostway personnel about the problem, today I received the following email from Hostway:

Hello,Please accept our sincere apologies for the delay and any inconveniences caused in our services.

We will need some additional information on the issue you are experiencing so we can further troubleshoot. Please provide us with step by step instructions and all necessary information so we can replicate the error on our end. We appreciate your elaboration in this matter.

Thank you!

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us again.

It seems that Hostway’s technical support staff has yet to grasp what I’ve been telling them for more than ten days: that sometime on or just before March 1, Hostway began blocking files coming in via ftp from Blogger. Either that, or Hostway is pretending it doesn’t understand. So I’m not at all sure we can rely on Hostway to repair the problem, though thanks to our Network Solutions workaround, our readers at least should be able to see our posts while we execute a more permanent solution.

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