This was the last straw. I’d been hosting with Startlogic.com for several years, and the service starting going downhill about a year ago, and then it snowballed -- fast -- after the first of this year. Trying to get help from tech support was like trying to get a toddler to recite Shakespeare. I’d hold on the phone for an hour only to either get disconnected and have to get back on hold for another hour, or to finally talk to someone who had no idea what the hell I was talking about, and so they’d “put in a support ticket” for me, which of course I could have done myself without all the holding on the phone. And then, perhaps 48 hours later, the support ticket would either get closed without being resolved, or else there’d be a request for more information... a request that made it clear they had no clue what the hell the problem was in the first place.

Or else it was like living in the movie Brazil: This is an actual email from Startlogic:

We need login information of the domain ‘thebonnieblackfaerie.com’ to unlock. I have sent the domain login information to the domain Administrative e-mail address thechick@flickfilosopher.com . Please check the e-mail and get back to us with the login information of the domain.

So, they need information that they already have, but in case I don’t have it to send to them, they’re sending it to me, and could I please send it to them?

Oh, and did I mention, I had already sent them the information they were sending to me so that I could send it to them?

It was like trying to get tech support from mentally challenged baby squirrels.

So I spent the entire weekend switching over to Web host Fused Network, which I picked because in my research on Web hosts lately -- I knew I’d have to dump Startlogic soon -- I learned that Fused seems to have the best reputation for support at a still-reasonable price. (If you Google “fused network sucks” you get 83 responses. Which is amazingly few. Even the best companies get complaints -- Google “mother teresa sucks” and you get almost 70,000 responses -- but most of these Fused results are actually along the lines of “if your web host sucks, try Fused Network.”)

And it’s true that my my Web hosting is now going to cost me twice as much as it did at Startlogic (though Bonnie’s, since she has much lower traffic, is actually a little cheaper than it was at Startlogic). But it will be worth it if the service continues to measure up to what I’ve seen this weekend. There are always tenacious little problems that crop up when you’re moving a big, fairly complicated site like this one to a new host, but the tech support people at Fused have been amazing. Questions were answered by email instantly. Whether it was 8am or 1am. Fused worked all weekend with me to get it back into the same shape it was in before Startlogic broke it.

Except it’s much faster than it was before.

I cringe, though, every time I click on a link here, or submit a comment, or post something new. After 48 straight hours of every little thing I did cascading into a dozen oddities and error messages that required two dozen little tweaks to the server or to the Movable Type installation to fix... which would then cascade into a dozen more weirdnesses... I’m a little nervous. And definitely sleep-deprived.

I think everything is working fine now. But please let me know if you run into any strange behavior.