For those of you who haven't been following my adventures with Net Identity and whomever they sold their web hosting to let me summarize.
Net Identity was a service that allows you to sign up to use a sub-domain thereby getting a personalized email address and URL. I have (had?) www.joseph.hewitt.org with a matching email address. I generally used it as a resume site while looking for work after Westwood Studios was closed. Lately it just points to this blog and I have just been using the space to store pictures and files that I link to on this blog, but I thought it was still worth paying for in case I wanted to do something with it in the future.
Tucows bought Net Identity a few years ago. They upgraded some stuff, re-vamped their web based email program, had a few growing pains. All-in-all nothing really too bad.
Tucows decided it didn't want to be in the web hosting business anymore and sold that part of the company to somebody else. They claimed we would get an email from that company with all sorts of update news and information. No email was ever received. At one point my site and all its content vanished. I made lots of complaints and never got an answer.
Ross Radar, from Tucows must have been ego searching and stumbled across my blog. He had always been in the forefront of getting information out before and somehow got me the attention of somebody at this new company. They restored my website from a back up. Only they left what appears to be the compressed file they transfered over from the back up on my site. This caused me to go over my storage limit. They attempted to bill me for this... twice. No correspondence from me to them about this have been answered to this day.
I have attempted to remove the file myself but don't seem to have FTP access to my site. I just tried to update my resume HTML and Word Document now that I was promoted to Creative Director at Interzone, but I still can't FTP into the site to upload the new versions.
I am paid up to March of next year but I've had it. I don't care so much about the website, but at least having the email address was nice. I have updated just my account across the web to the yahoo email address.
The way the original announcement was made I was thinking maybe Tucows still has the email part and its only the web hosting that the other company now controls. I don't know, I am just tired of all the hassle. Over Christmas break I am going to reconstruct all the content that is stored there either as blog posts here or store them elsewhere.
5 comments:
OUch. Sorry about this Joseph. I really wish it had gone better with Hostopia for you.
I don't know if this will help, but in January, we will be moving our Netidentity customers to a brand new management system that will allow you to change your CNAME/A Record to whatever you wish - no more lockin for your personalized domain name.
We actually just announced the launch of the new system today - http://hover.com/smr
You can check out the service and get a free trial at http://hover.com
If you have any questions, please let me know. I want to make this easy and pleasant for you, hopefully these upgrades will help.
/ross
PS - no ego searching, just heavy use of Friendfeed, Twitter search, et al :)
Following today's latest Netidenty e-mail outage (which means I currently don't have working Netidentity e-mail nor website) I've been idling a hour or so reading blogs of people complaining about Netidentity.
Like many others I've been a Mailbank / Netidentity customer for over a decade.
Then on your blog I find a plug for new new service from Ross Rader which looks like they might just be onto something which will keep my netidentity subscription alive - control of the DNS of my subdomain!
The preview videos on the hover.com site seem to indicate control over both A records (the website) and MX records (e-mail).
I'd love to keep the address I've had for years, but have a choice over any one of the hundreds of service providers for web and e-mail hosting, rather than being locked into one service.
If it gives my 'shared domain' the same functionality as a 'real domain' I'd be a very happy bunny. But I'm not counting my chickens yet......
Netidentity want me to renew my subscription this week. But Ross Rader offered a three month extension after the last week long outage!
This email service has cost me dearly in terms of my professional and personal life.
I am not going to renew.
They are the worst!!
@Phil Edmonds
The new Hover service will perhaps work for your website, but you'll never be able to edit MX records for the domain edmonds.net because you're sharing this domain with many others. You could change your email address to anything@phil.edmonds.net but changing is not what you want of course. I think you're either unhappy for not being able to get away from Tucows, or you're unhappy because you need to change your email address. The second option may be the better one though.
When I put up this blog years ago, I signed up for a yahoo email address because I didn't want to spam my netidentity email address. But over the years, I've started using that yahoo email address more and more. Even after my mother used it to take one of those surveys which put me on a billion spam lists. I like yahoo's web client better than all the others I've tried.
I liked having the netidentity address though because it looks better than giving out a yahoo email address, especially on things like a resume.
I think I'm due to renew in March so I have a little while to see how things fall out.
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