Update on March 12, 2002

I no longer use Jumpline.com for my domain hosting. Their total level of incompetence has forced me to quickly sign up with another hosting service (Telaserv [now Boxnix]) and change my DNS entry to point to the new site.

Here's a brief synopsis of what happened. A few weeks ago I started getting email and even a snail mail from them about some fantastic new upgrade they were going to do. I expected a few bumps, but nothing like what I got!

About 10:00 Sunday night I got a call from a friend who said email to me was bouncing. He knew about the Jumpline upgrade, so he thought it may be more serious than a temporary glitch and decided to let me know.

Well I started doing a little investigating. I verified that mail to all addresses on my domain was failing. Then I tried to ssh into the server and found that I couldn't do that. Then I tried the web based domain admin tool URL and found I couldn't even access that! I looked at their support page and found a slew of problems they were working on. I read one blurb that said the old admin tool URL was going to have a link to the new tool's URL. Well, someone must have forgotten that step. I used the new URL and was greeted with a completely new admin tool. Fine.

At this point I believe I figured out what the problem was with the email. When I went to the "email and ftp users" tool it showed no users present. I had ten to fifteen addresses set up before! At this point I fired off a customer support request, but then decided it was time to switch anyway. After applying for the new hosting service, I went back and tried to figure out ways to copy my web pages off Jumpline. (Amazingly, my web page was still up.) I'd already found ssh didn't work. There was no web-based "filemanager" in the new admin tool. Then I found out FTP wasn't working either! I said "screw it," I'd made a backup of the web pages about a month ago and hadn't added much since.

Sometime later I noticed the web page still being served from Jumpline wasn't even my latest one! Changes I'd made as early as the Saturday on the weekend prior to the weekend the trouble started were gone! All my "last modified" times at the bottom of the pages were March 5. That was the day they "restored" the web pages from the snapshot. But they made the snapshot a few days before that. It's a good thing I don't run a commercial site! (Actually, according to a usenet group, several commercial sites were impacted by this. Some folks are talking lawsuit....)

At first I was steamed that they didn't maintain the modification times of the files, but then I was really steamed that they had not even copied over all my changes.

On Monday, March 11 I started investigating just going ahead and pulling the plug on the account even though the new DNS entry for the new host hadn't propogated through the net. I tried calling their 800 number. They were not answering that. A recording would just say to file an online support request. So then I sent the billing department an email saying to cancel my account immediately. I also said for them to not bill my credit card again. (We'll see how that turns out.) Then I found the "cancel service" form on their web page and filled that out. Then just to be safe, I printed out the email I sent to the billing department and faxed it to them. I'm tempted to send a registered letter also so there can be no doubt when I informed them to turn off my account. (Update on 4/26/2002: I did send a letter to them with return-receipt requested just so I could prove I sent them something on that date in case I had to dispute the charge. It appears, however, that I didn't have to worry -- no charge has appeared on my credit card to date.)

After about eighteen hours, I got a response to the original support request I filed. They said that the reason my email was failing was because my DNS entry was pointed to the wrong server. Well, DUH. That's because I was in the process of switching to a different hosting provider by that point. The original email problem had nothing to do with that!

My friend and someone he knows run a website for their church. This was hosted on Jumpline. Apparently they moved the MySQL database access option from the $20 plan (which they were on) to the $25 plan. So they turned off database access while they still had church membership data in the database. Initially they had no way of recovering the data, but I think that was eventually resolved.

Folks on usenet also report that the "power apps" and programs they load on the machine for you now consume part of your allotted space! So if it takes 15 megabytes to hold the apps, that only leaves you with 35 meg for your site on that "50 meg" plan you thought you were buying.

So... the long and short of it is that if you want to host a domain somwhere, you should stay away from Jumpline.com.

Update on September 2, 2004

I notice Jumpline is still around, so the trouble appears to not have run them out of business. That's a pity as that level of incompetence deserves complete failure. I've stuck with Boxnix and have had a really good experience with them. Their customer support is really great and has almost always had a fix for any problems I had within a couple of hours of reporting it.