One of Those Nightmares

She bought the software on a Thursday. On Friday, she bought the Installation Service. Normally, I’d expect to spend about 2 hours in tech support for the software purchase, and about 4 hours on the installation service. Reasonable for the cost of the two items.

I had the initial part of the work done within a few hours, while juggling it with other things. Then we ran into an issue with her hosting account. She was using a Reseller Account, and we were installing Automation software. The server had a setting which was incompatible with our system. She asked the host to change it. They said they did. But it wasn’t changed. She asked again. They asked which site she wanted it changed for. She said all of them – she needed new accounts to have that setting automatically. They said, “This setting has the name ‘protection’ in it. It exists to protect the server, if we turn it off, something will be unprotected.”

So their final answer was, “no, we can’t change this setting, because it exists, and says protection, so we have to leave it on.” Never mind that the setting doesn’t really protect anything serious, and that situations under which it would be an issue are very isolated. Every hosting company we have ever dealt with, up to this one, has had this setting off. This company left it on, out of paranoia, not out of any understanding of what it actually was. The weekend occurred during the exchange. By the time they concluded this, we were four days into things.

So she had to move hosts. She moved to our hosting – she got better help doing so that way, and we KNEW the software would all work there. Moving the sites took a day.

We had to change all of the file settings on the files since the old host required different settings than ours. When we did so, we found there were also a series of file ownership problems – we had to have support reset those on all of the sites, then we were able to reset the file permissions.

Then we had to reset her domain nameserver IPs. Turns out her old host had the domain name, and she had no controls for it. He promised to set them. They took a LONG time to resolve. She could not check them, or change them. So she moved the domain to HER reseller account in eNom. When she did so, ALL of her domain settings were lost. And eNom did not want to help her reset them. Two more days were lost.

We were trying to move the SSL certificate, but since the domain names were not resolving, that wasn’t working either. She also had bought a new SSL certificate (she did not like the way the old one displayed), and she bought a business verified one. Then she could not verify the business entity, because she is a sole proprietor with a DBA that is unregistered (this is legal in many places). So she had to ask for a refund and buy another one. We went the “quick” way, ordering it through our hosting supplier. But then we could not verify the Whois info, because she had Private Registration turned on. Her domain name, at eNom, could not be changed, and she was unable to access support from eNom, because they kept telling her she was not a reseller. We tried several tactics, a few workarounds, all of which deadended.

Our hosting support finally helped us get the domain settings correctly changed – turned out they needed an odd format to them to stick. They also allowed her to screenshot her account info for verification of her registration info to get around the Private Registration issue. That took another day to figure out. Another weekend intruded.

The domains resolved, the SSL working, there were still two errors in the billing software that operated alongside the automation software we were installing. One stopped hosting accounts from being created, the other caused a template error on the frontend of the site.

The billing manager support people solved one of the errors, which was replaced by another. They claimed they were not responsible for the template error – turns out they WERE, since she had purchased the template from them!

So we are now a week and a half into a process that should have taken only a few hours, and we still have two unresolved issues. Even with moving hosting, we should have been able to do all of this in about three days. We are both beyond exhausted, and tired of just “one more thing” cropping up as soon as the current hurdle is overcome.