The failed transition

PowWeb was once a pretty nice low buget host.

Things changed when a company called "Endurance International" offered lots of money to the owner(S) of PowWeb, and they decided to accept it.

The first impression

I was a moderator of their community forum, and we were informed about the take over a few weeks before other users.

My first reflex was to backup everything, again, just in case.

Then, search for the "Endurance International" on the web.

Within a few seconds, I found their web pages and some horror stories of their past take over, and it assured me.

Why was I assured by some horror sotries? As it shows at least they have actually taken over some other hosts, and they are not absolute newbie in doing so.

Then, I prepared my backup host for eventual possibly sudden switch-over.

The first contact with Endurance

Soon after we were informed, a guy from Endurance appeared in the moderator's section in the forum, and we started to ask questions.

I made a list of things I wanted to know.

We received some answers, but many questions remained unanswered.

And it was clear that the Endurance guy didn't know much about PowWeb ....

I knew right away that we are dealing with not so professional people, as all truly professional people I knew would have studied about the matter you are going to handle before coming into contact.

Not enoough preparation is a bad sign.

Interlude

Why am I writing this story?

Because it was an interesting experience and I'm kind of a guy who likes to share a fun with others.

So, I was dying to tell all sorts of funny episodes to fellow users of PowWeb, but withholding them back due to humanitarian considerations for some employees of Endurance/PowWeb.

Now, they officially banned me from their Forum, I don't think they appreciated my humanitarian consideration and I will be talking about all I want to say.

Also, other hosts can learn from series of costly mistakes made by incompetent and lying people of Endurance so that they can offer better services to us, users.

The test account

Although the guy from Endurance knew very little about existing conditions/terms of PowWeb, we were very eager to know what Endurance has been offering.

We knew already that hosts operated by Endurance had been offering pretty obsolete package with very hight price setting.

Neverthless, we needed to prepare ourselves for upcoming transition of our own sites, and also for assisting fellow users as we moderators had been always doing.

So, we asked for the testing account on the existing Endurance platform to see and test things around.

Wihtin a day or two, we've identified several items to be confirmed, to be taken care of.

Among these was the bug of RewriteRule handling.

All requests for a directory wasn't properly treated with RewriteRules, and it would break almost all additional domains configured with RewriteRules.

I thought it's a serius enough bug that wouldn't go un-noticed for more than a day or two, normally.

As the bug seems to have existed much longer than that, it means nobody was using RewriteRule for creating additional domain on the Endurance platform, and the near total lack of experience of Endurance in these area.

And it was confirmed by the response by Endurance tech VP to the bug report I gave.

He didn't even recognized the problem properly.

Knowing their very low technical level, I started to suggest implementing more or less industry standard way of handling addiitonal domain.

That would eliminate the need for using RewriteRule for most people, and thus the need for trying to support them (without necessary knowledge/ability).

Their plan

Also, I asked the Endurance representative about their plan for upcoming transition.

It's like a battle, IMO. Any massive operation needs a good battle plan.

I thought they have clear battle plan established well before they decided to make the purchase offer, since without the detailed battle plan, you can't estimate the cost and without fairly precise estimate, you can't make a good offer.

Again, surprise or no surprise, they didn't have any plan to show us.

They only told us that they plan to "train us, moderators, so that we would act as a sort of front line agent for trouble shooting," sort of things.

Clearly, the guy wasn't even aware that we are not employees, or he was just thinking that we can be exploited as a freebie work force.

And they also told us that their plan was not to tell about what was to come, as much as possible.

They called it "withholding". But you know what it is. They wanted to hide the truth about upcoming transition, as much as possible, and they did that.

In short, they were so scared about the possibility of clients massively leaving that they chose to hide the truth as much as possoble and as long as possible.

I noticed their general attitude was pretty much similar to that of a "Scared little boy".

Poor little boy is so scared about someone noticing he isn't a good boy and he lies.

To hide the truth, he keep lying, and get more scared about people finding about it.

... to be continued