Do you know why there are no images on this blog? Do you? I don’t and that’s after TWO hours on a support chat with my website’s hosting company. Actually, there are some images on the blog but not on the home page or once you click on a post.
Let me start from the beginning.
A few days back I received an email from my hosting company informing me that a new cloud hosting service was available. I read the email which was short, to the point, and had nice graphics, on my phone. I was tempted but then decided not to be. Yet, I couldn’t bring myself to delete it. I wanted to see the email on my laptop.
Fast forward to early this morning. Because I’m a sucker for cute graphics, I decided to look into this new service. The company, whose hosting and customer service have been great since I joined, promised that the migration to cloud hosting would be seamless. Getting an invoice showing the amount to be paid, after crediting the amount already paid for my current service happened so quickly, I was once again impressed. Surely, I could trust this company to migrate my simple site to cloud. Plus the cost was the same. Anyway, other cute graphics on the company’s site told me that I could go back to “normal” hosting if I wanted to.
Within minutes of upgrading, I received an email informing me that my account had migrated. Wow, impressive.
Now, here’s where the real story begins. Within minutes of receiving the “successful migration” email, I couldn’t access my blog’s dashboard or my site.
I started a support chat, which began by having to wait 30 minutes before getting a representative. Within a couple of minutes, he told me that he was able to access my dashboard without any issues. I, on the other hand, had no access whatsoever.
I tried Chrome, Safari and told him so. He then asked me to try Mozilla. I started to panic. Was he telling me that their new cloud service only worked on Mozilla? Too bad, I don’t have it on my computer and wasn’t going to install it in the middle of a chat to solve a problem that wasn’t supposed to be happening in the first place.
He then asked me to restart my laptop. I told him that if I did, I would lose him. His answer, “Yes.”
Clearly, he needed me to take the reins. I then tried to access the dashboard on my iPad, my desktop, and my son’s desktop. Nothing.
I asked him if besides being able to access the blog’s dashboard, he was able to access the site on a browser. He said that he was able to without any issues, “From my side website is working fine…”
I decided to turn off/on iPad, and then I was in! I informed the representative who wrote back, “Great!”
But, wait, I realized that the photos were not showing up and after letting him know, he wrote “Yes, images are not showing on your website.”
Me: So what’s the problem?
Rep: Can you please hold while I review your account? I will get back to you in 2 to 3 minutes?
9 minutes later….
Rep: Sorry for hold time. I am checking with our tech specialist.
Me: Before when you said that you were having no problem accessing site, were you getting the photos at that time?
Rep: No.
15 minutes later…
Me: Hello
2 minutes later…
Rep: Sorry. I am still waiting for specialist’s reply.
Me: But is specialist already looking at the site?
2 minutes later…
Rep: Yes. But my chat was disconnected with our specialist. So I have opened another chat.
Me: You also have to wait 30 minutes like I did at the beginning?
2 minutes later…
Rep: No. We can contact our specialists very quickly.
13 minutes later…
Rep: Thank you for holding.
Me: Is there a fix?
Rep: Still checking with specialist.
Me: Does he/she have any idea what the problem is?
2 minutes later….
Rep: It looks like you just need to update the image permalinks. It could be pulling from the wrong location because the file paths have changed since moving to the new server. Please update the image permalinks once again from your end.
Me: But, I have no idea how to do this. The migration was supposed to be smooth. Can the specialist do this on his/her end?
3 minutes later…
Rep: No. You would need to do it from your end through the website coding.
Me: I don’t know how to code. So, you’ll need to walk me through this.
4 minutes later…
Me: Hello
Rep: Sorry. You would need to contact your developer to resolve the issue….We do not support for coding issue…Please try to update the image permalinks once again from your end.
Me: I upgraded to this cloud hosting because it was supposed to be a seamless process. I waited 30 minutes to get you on the chat, and now 1 hour without resolution. I don’t know how to update image permalinks and I have 379 posts on this site. Since you cannot help me, please change my hosting back to what I had before. If you cannot help me, please pass me to someone who can help me. Thank you.
Rep: I would suggest you to login your WordPress dashboard and update all the images once again.
Me: I don’t know how to do this and I’m not going to do this for 379 posts!!!!!
4 minutes later…
Rep: Please try to optimizing the image. Images seems to be broken.
Me: If my images are broken, the migration to cloud service broke them on your end. The images were working fine before the migration.
Me: [after receiving a hosting help URL] I’m not referring after waiting 30 mins to chat with you and after being on this chat for 1 hour and 39 minutes. Please put someone on this chat who can help me.
4 minutes later….
He asked me to install a plug-in which I did but which didn’t solve my problem and I informed him.
Rep: I am sorry but you would need to reupload the images to the dashboard.
Me: For 379 posts, right?
Rep: Yes…
Me: I want to change my hosting back to the one I had before cloud hosting. Can you do this or not?
After one minute…
Me: Forget it. I’m tired and frustrated. Good-bye.
However, even though the chat had taken a total of two and a half hours (30 minutes waiting and 2 hours of actual non-productive “talk”), I wasn’t too tired and frustrated to go back to the company’s website and try to find a way to switch back to my previous hosting service. They had said it would be easy. It was not and I did not.
But, I wasn’t going to let them defeat me. I decided to send in a support ticket. This is what I got.
Service Unavailable: Our e-mail support and ticketing system is currently unavailable. We are working to restore this as soon as possible. Other methods are available to contact us.
That’s when I decided that, although I’m mentally exhausted and emotionally depleted, I would write this post. I had a really good post planned for today, but the way I’m feeling there was no way I could have written anything else.
At this point, I don’t know if the image I’m including in this post will show up or not. I’m thinking that if images uploaded before the migration are broken, maybe new ones will not be. I will only know once I click on the “Publish” button.
I don’t know how long it will take to solve this problem. Although, I did receive a confirmation email for my support ticket which apparently did go through despite the “Service Unavailable” message I received. I must allow 24 hours to receive a reply.
But I must not allow myself to write the words that I really wish I could write and that I’ve had on the tip of my tongue fingertips since this fiasco began. Seamless my…..
Note: Hosting company was never able to solve problem. It took a week to get photos back on the site after contacting and paying my WordPress developer.
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