Nearly 3 months ago I made mention of a fallout between myself and the theatre group with which I’ve been associated with for about 9 years. Part of this was my decision to no longer look after their website – something I’d put a lot of work into but had very little feedback or general help with.

I gave the committee a list of the skills required to run the site and, to my surprise, it was handed over to a new committee member within days. I don’t know her background but events have now unfolded which has possibly damaged the site forever.

Last week it was reported to the sites host, Memset, that a phishing site was present on the BMTG site. It was residing in one of the sub-directories of a third-party application. I believe this application must have had a security flaw which allowed someone to deposit a fake banking site in place. Memset immediately disabled the hosting account and the website went down. The new website manager was informed and, unfortunately, responded by suggesting that it was maybe something I did.

I took a sharp intake of breath, I have to admit, when I read this. This site is also hosted by Memset and so the suggestion (probably not intended) that I created a phishing site could have had a serious repercussion on me. Thankfully it hasn’t. But I don’t think she understood what the problem was.

The upside of all of this is that Memset have now informed them that they will NOT re-enable the account unless they move to an expensive server host account (at the moment it’s on a shared server, and they’re concerned that future issues could impact other users). Bear in mind that the society is a non-profit making charity and their current hosting is provided for free – basically, they wouldn’t be able to afford such a move.

I’m guessing that the current website manager not understanding the issue is why Memset are rightly worried about future occurrences. Oh dear. If asked, I could do what I can to resolve the issue, but I suspect I won’t be.

Long-standing members appear to be leaving the Society in their droves and one such ex-member (who’s been involved far longer than myself) believes that this may be the death-knell. No website, performing on a stage in a school-hall, no publicity, poorly produced and expensive show programmes… it’s not looking good. The ex-Chairman has recently been caught wondering aloud why so many people are leaving. Maybe they should ask?

Now that I’ve finally moved “home” away from Streamline and to Memset, I can talk about my experience.

And I would say that Streamline are the shoddiest bunch of merchants I’ve come across. My site crawled, especially when using MySQL, and they denied there were any issues.

Recently my site was down for 4 days – across a weekend, unfortunately, when they appear to do nothing. I asked repeatedly for details of what had caused the problems but they ignored my requests. I also highlighted my site speed issues but they said it wasn’t them, but my website code.

Somehow they have an uptime guarantee. I didn’t try and claim against it because most of my problems were speed related rather than being out-and-out down. Besides, a lot of the down-time didn’t appear on their Service Status so I suspect they’ll say that doesn’t count.

But they say you get what you pay for. Streamline is half the cost of Memset. But you don’t get half the quality. Not even a tenth. If you’re considering Streamline ¹ because they’re cheap… save up and go elsewhere.

1. and, no, I won’t link to them – I don’t even want to give them the oxygen of publicity [↩]

Finally, I’m transferring hosts.

Memset have already set up my new hosting, but I just need to transfer the domain name over.

Once that’s done I’ll be setting up this blog again. And, yes, I do mean set it up, not copy it. I’ll be re-installing from scratch¹ but then putting in my theme, re-adding my plugins and, then, copying over the relevant databases.

What also this means, of course, is that this site is going to “go down” for a period of time. How long depends on when the transfer occurs and how long it takes me to restore and test this site.

Fingers crossed it will come back quicker² and better than ever.

In the meantime I’ll be maintaining blogging silence and comments are currently turned off.

See you on the other side.

1. due to “security restrictions” with the current host various configuration changes can’t be made and I suspect my WordPress installation has suffered as a result [↩]
2. btw, has anybody noticed the site is already quicker? I’ve transferred the Copy+ databases already over to the new host and I think that’s helped things a little [↩]