MacHighway

Moving to Bluehost.com

Hosting, Websites, WordPress / By / / , / 9 minutes of reading

Because of the outage at MacHighway.com, which last for about 5 days for me, but even longer for other clients, I decided that it was time to move to a different (better) hosting service. MacHighway was a local Denver company when I first signed up with them almost six years ago, but they have bought by another company, at least once, perhaps more? They are now owned by Deluxe. The quality of the technical support from MacHighway has deteriorated during the past year or so, as it has been offshored. The offshore tech support resources don’t seem to be at all familiar with the Macintosh, so they have lost their niche reason for attracting customers. They are really now simply providing cPanel virtual hosting on Linux servers, like most other hosting services. What drove my decision to leave MacHighway was a combination of the lack of support, along with the lack of communication. I think that I may have been one of the first to post about the outage on both Facebook and Twitter, since for part of the outage, MacHighway’s own web servers were offline, leaving customers with no way to contact support. Even when they got their main web server and their support site back online, there was not much communication. Their network status page did not reflect the outage. They have closed their call center due to COVID-19 concerns, and their online chat assistance was not active. Migrating to a new Hosting Service Below I have outlined […]

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Back online again!

Hosting, Websites / By / / / 2 minutes of reading

My web hosting provider, MacHighway.com, apparently botched a datacenter migration, and on Saturday, 9 October 2021 at approximately 20:00 UTC all of my hosted domains, websites, and email went offline. MacHighway did a horrible job of alerting affected customers, and didn’t post any updates for some time. Even their own websites were offline for awhile. They eventually posted on Twitter and Facebook, but only provided updates about once per day, and several times claimed they were “95%” restored or “all systems back online” when many clients were still down. On Tuesday, they posted on Twitter that if you were still experiencing issues to reach out to support at Deluxe, MacHighway’s parent company. I emailed them Tuesday night, and only got an automated reply. That reply email, though, had a phone number to contact support at Deluxe, so I called them this morning. Unlike the folks at MacHighway, the support team at Deluxe actually answers their phone, and I was able to speak with two support people. They were able to see the same issue that I had reported 24 hours earlier, that the external, internet-facing DNS name servers were returning the wrong IP addresses for hosted domains. The escalated the issue to their tier 3 admin team. By about 1600 UTC today, 13 October 2021, Deluxe or MacHighway had finally resolved the DNS issue, and I began receiving email again, and my websites have come back online! I may edit this post later with more details, but for now, I’m

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Moved to MacHighway

Computers, Hosting, Websites / By / / / 2 minutes of reading

As I noted in December, my former web hosting service, GoDaddy, announced in December that they were going to revoke access to us the Mailman mailing list manager that is included by default in their Linux cPanel hosting accounts. I use Mailman for my personal use, as well as to manage several discussion lists for the MacinTech Macintosh Users’ Group. GoDaddy claimed that it was due to spammers misusing the service, but I don’t really believe that for a second… First, I’ve gotten more spam while being hosting by GoDaddy than any other service that I have ever used, so I have a hard time believing that they take any actions to prevent spam! They also began advertising their own bulk email service just days after the announcement that they were turning off Mailman, which I can’t believe is a coincidence. I had moved my web sites to GoDaddy out of convenience when I was no longer able to host them myself after CenturyLink botched a DSL upgrade, leaving me offline for several weeks. In any event, in early January, I signed up with local Denver-based web hosting service MacHighway. There package is actually less expensive than GoDaddy. It’s also a bonus that they cater specifically to Macintosh users, so their instructions don’t reference Windows for everything, although they seem fairly platform-nuetral overall. So far, I am very pleased with MacHighway. The setup was easy. I have had to put in a couple of support tickets for things like requesting shell access, which is probably not

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