GoDaddy, whose services I have been recommending to everybody for well over a decade, has just given me 30 days to move this site to another server at my expense ($100) because they're retiring the old ones and couldn't be bothered to give me enough warning to do it myself.

The good news is that the site has been migrated. the bad news is that any messages posted in the last several days while they were doing the actual migration may have been lost.

Please let me know if you have any issues or detect any other problems with this site.

Here's a followup on the forced migration issue I alluded to earlier:

Two other forums that I paid GoDaddy $100@ to migrate to a new server as a part of a migration they forced me into went down last week. Turned out they migrated the flat files (something anyone with FTP access can do in a few minutes) but not the database. Instead they left the flat files pointing to the database on the old server which was slated to be retired. Of course I had NO WAY of knowing that because everything seemed to be working.

When the first discussion forum went down, it too me two LONG phone calls, explaining the problem thoroughly to two different customer service "reps" A. to get them to figure out what the problem was and B. to get them to fix it (which the first customer service rep apparently considered optional on his part).

When the second discussion forum went down the next day, I went through the whole thing all over again. First a very long conversation with customer service rep who was sure I was mistaken until he spent twenty minutes (with me on hold) checking out what I told him. Then another several minutes while he resubmitted the migration request I had already paid for with instructions to migrate the WHOLE site this time. I asked him to check on three other forums that were part of the same expensive forced migration to make certain the databases for those had been moved. He did - several more minutes on the phone - and said it looked like they had. Still, I'll be checking them often for a while to be sure.

Then I checked back every few hours to see if the forum had been restored. Finally I saw that it had, and breathed a sigh of relief.

THEN I got an e-mail from GoDaddy's service people complaining that I had asked them to do something they weren't really required to do (since the original "migration" was over 14 days old), but they had done it as a "courtesy" JUST THIS ONCE.

Please note that this request was well outside of our 14-day migration review policy and was done as a one-time courtesy rather than a normal migration.
[My italics and bolding]

How do you turn a very happy customer into a "captive audience" who WILL jump ship the next time you jerk him around like this? Force him into nearly a thousand dollars worth of site migrations that don't really give him any advantage over a 14-month period, and then act like it's not your problem when you screw it up?

BTW, when I tell the scammers who spam us with fake sob stories every Christmas that we operate these sites at our own expense, I'm not making this up. We don't ask for donations, and we don't ask for pity because we consider what we do to be a service to our friends and to the friends we make through these pages. We do make a little money when you click on one of our ads and buy something. But we're not exactly paying the mortgage with our sites.

Have a great day, and please ignore anything I've said about GoDaddy's reasonable fees and great customer service in the past.

P.S. If you're a GoDaddy employee, please don't take this personally - most of the folks I've TALKED to have done whatever they could to help. But customer service goes beyond what people do for you while you're on the phone to them.

P.P.S. If this forum goes down in the next few days, it's not because I'm mad at you, it's because GoDaddy screwed up this migration, too.

A third forum that GoDaddy supposedly migrated went down last week. This was months AFTER I had asked one of the techies - while I was online - to check and make certain the other forums' databases were ALL ported properly. So I wouldn't have to make the same phone call and explain to yet ANOTHER techie how their people screwed up and wait on hold forever while he (it's always a "he") checked out my story to make certain I wasn't trying to get some billable service free. Or get a nastygram from the supervisor a week later explaining how their screwup was really my fault and they were only fixing it out of the goodness of their hearts.

This time, I walked the fellow who answered the phone through what the problem probably was and told him that I had asked the LAST person to check out my other forum sites to make certain we didn't have a repeat occurrence. This guy was very helpful and got everything for THAT forum straightened out while I was online and (according to what he told me) checked the other forums' databases AGAIN to make certain they had all been ported properly (for which I paid $100@, by the way).

So far I haven't gotten a nastygram from the service supervisor claiming that their screwup was really my fault and they should have billed me to fix it.

We'll see. . . .