Sometimes you have to stop and smell the roses. Or take a picture of Greenwood Street looking up the hill to Stanton Heights. Either way you’re interacting with the world in some way, stopping to look at stuff. Not so worried about time, time, time, but willing to see life as a sequence of events, you go from one to the next, and if you don’t get there precisely at 5pm then well, that’s ok. You saw something cool along the way.

Of course other times you really want to get to where you’re going, and the sights aren’t that interesting, but they waylay you nonetheless.

I had hoped to make a tremendous amount of progress on our corporate site yesterday but I got waylaid by some emergency client work. One of our clients sites got shut down by their host, Hostgator. Apparently they were using up too many resources. Why that is I’m not sure. I think the developer who originally put their site together did a really crappy job, but I can’t say. I’ve never really looked too hard at it.

Of course then it gets shut down for taking too many resources away on a virtual server and it’s emergency central. I can’t blame em really. Their site was totally down. I talked with Hostgator’s support and they said to just respond to the email tech support ticket that they say they sent, but didn’t, and it’d get turned back on. I tell them to resend it, and they do. So we respond back saying “turn the site back on”. But they won’t. Not until we document exactly what we’ve done to insure it won’t happen again.

At this point the client is freaking out, and we convince them to go onto the Rackspace Cloud, spend a little more money, and then we can figure it all out. Hostgator wouldn’t even let us run the site to see what kinds of errors it was kicking or anything. It’s kind of hard to figure out what the problem is with a WordPress site if you can’t turn it on.

Sure we could have put it on a whole ‘nother test server, but what would be the point of that? Why not just turn it on in the same location but live. Same problme for Hostgator, but we get the site up. Even when I said, “ok we’re going to go witha a dedicated server, but in the meantime till we switch it over, can oyu make the site live?” but they wouldn’t. So they lost the business of the client.

If they had just worked with us, and not been so rude on the phone with the attitude that we were taking advantage of them they’d have probably turned a little money every month from someone using a virtual hosting account, into an over 130 buck a month dedicated hosting account… But instead they decide that customer service is best when it’s rude, and perfunctory, so there ya go.

We grabbed the site, stuck it on the cloud, and it’s running like a dream. It was crap on the Hostgator site. Ran like crap. Obviously it bogged their server down, because they shut the puppy down. Now though it’s flying, and someone else igs getting their money.

What’s my point of this story? I didn’t plan on doing any of that yesterday. Staying on hold with Hostgator for long stretches arguing with their techs. Digging around a file manager in CPanel, investigating a wordpress installation I had nothing to do with. Etc. These were ‘roses’ that were stuck in my face that I had no choice but to smell, rather than work on the OrcaPack corporate site.

So today I get to do it a bit more. This morning I had more client work, and then the boys came home and I had a 3 year old sitting on my shoulders while I tried to work, so back to the Moglo I go. And on the way I decided to stop for a few minutes and take a picture of a typical Pittsburgh street.

Why not right? Gotta stop and smell the roses.