That's okay... I didn't really feel like blogging tonight anyway...

Every fucking time my site goes down, Media Temple has some new excuse as to why it's happening. Then they mark the issue "resolved" even though I know damn well another outage is just around the corner. This has been happening for YEARS, ever since they moved their shared-hosting accounts to a "(gs) Grid Server" architecture. And even though the "Grid Server" has been a massive, catastrophic bucket of FAIL! since day one, they continue to cling to it like some miracle is going to happen any day now, and it's suddenly going to be the stable, reliable hosting platform they promise in their advertising...

RELIABILITY? SERIOUSLY?!? It's this kind of delusional bullcrap that drives me bat-shit insane... even more so than the outages themselves. HELPFUL HINT: GRID SERVER DOES NOT WORK! IT NEVER HAS! Even when it's running, it's still slow as shit... sometimes to the point of being unusable. And lest we forget that Media Temple offers NO BACKUP SERVICE. That option was removed from my control panel when I was moved to the "Grid Server" and has never returned (it was promised for a while, but now this critical service which even the cheapest web hosting companies offer as standard equipment has been forgotten). So on top of being unstable, unreliable, and unresponsive, Media Temple hosting is also unsafe.

It's everything you dream of in a web hosting company!

I am so sick and fucking tired of Media Temple treating every new incident as an individual problem that can be checked off as "fixed" when the Big Picture is that their "Grid Server" hosting sucks ass and will likely NEVER be fixed. On the contrary, things just keep getting worse and worse as the problems become more and more frequent.

I have just over six months of my contract before I can walk away from Media Temple's busted-ass bullshit hosting. I am literally counting the days...

Hopefully I can last this long so I don't end up losing all the money I put into my contract.

I am writing this entry knowing full well that I won't be able to publish it (just as I haven't been able to publish my Bullet Sunday entry from yesterday). It may seem insane, but if I get out of the habit of writing every day I'd probably stop blogging altogether. I'm a creature of habit that way.

All my attempts to fix Blogography have failed. I think something got seriously screwed up when I tried to update an entry during one of my web hosting company's many, many service failures. Now the entry is "stuck" somehow, and nothing works. My only option is to delete my blog, do a fresh installation of the software, and then import all my templates, entries and comments back into the system.

It's a little scary to realize I could end up losing seven years of my online life if things go terribly wrong.

In other news, Frank Frazetta, one of my favorite artists has died. Though many people may not recognize his name, it's certain they have been exposed to his work. As one of the gods of fantasy illustration, Frazetta has churned out countless works of originality and stunning beauty for everything from posters to book covers. I first became aware of his work from the covers he created for several Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, including the "John Carter of Mars" books...

Thanks to Mr. Frazetta for helping to fuel my imagination for so many years. Though lost to us now, his work will endure.

UPDATE! Thanks to kind suggestions from one of my readers, things are up and running again! Thanks, ManBearPig... whoever (or whatever) you may be!