The hidden blessing of technical difficulties

Last updated on: September 4, 2011 at 7:33 pm by John Halstead

The hidden blessing of technical difficulties 2011-09-04T19:33:04-05:00 John Halstead

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Well, my website AmericanNeopaganism.com is frozen by the hosting service for a violation of the terms of service. Interestingly, the hosting service, in this case Webs.com, just freezes the account and doesn’t tell the owner why. You have to them email them and wait for 3-5 days for a response. Today is day 3, and no response yet. But I have looked at the customer service discussion board and it looks like it has taken some people weeks to get their site unfrozen, and they never find out the reason why it was frozen in the first place. It looks like, in some case, someone reported a violation to the hosting service. But you would think that, if there were an issue, then Webs.com would just contact the owner and give the owner (i.e., the customer) a chance to correct whatever the perceived problem is. It is a terrible way to run a business … and by the way, they just lost mine.

I have no idea what the issue is in my case. I’ve had the site up for around 2 years and never had a problem in the past. But in the last week my website was mentioned both on the Pantheon blog at Patheos and on the TOTEG yahoo discussion group. I suspect someone followed the link and then took issue with something. It may be because of all of the documents I have available there, some of which may be copyrighted (all of which I found already on the Internet). But again, if that is the issue, then why not contact me and ask me to remove it? In fact, a few months ago, Aidan Kelly contacted me and asked me to remove some of the non-copyrighted material from the site, since he was going to be publishing it; and I accommodated him.

Anyway, what is the point of this, other than a gripe-fest? Well, first of all, it forced me to find a new hosting service. I hated … hated Webs.com, even before they froze my website. They had all kinds of technical glitches and no customer support. So I found a new hosting service (GoDaddy), which is much more user-friendly (although more expensive). I may have to transfer my domain to AmericanNeopaganism.org for the time being, but that’s okay since my site is more of a .org than a .com anyway.

Second, moving my website has forced me to really go through the content and get rid of a lot of superfluous material. My website had become a kind of dumping ground for every neat little thing I came across. Now I am trying to strip it down to just the material I really care about. That way visitors will be less likely to get lost in the jumble. It’s like spring cleaning on the Internet. And it feels just about as good too.

UPDATE

As it turns out, it was not issues of copyright but nudity that got my sight frozen. With all the nudity on my site (naked goddesses and such), I was a little surprised that the hosting agent took issue with two images I had recently posted on an unlinked page containing the images from my recently created personal Tarot deck. One of the images was a borderline pornographic painting by Luis Royo. Another was a violent painting of a scene from hell by Bouguereau. The former case did not surprise me, but the latter one did.

I have decided that moving my website is too much work. Since I have started blogging, I have become less invested in the website anyway. I just could not justify the effort or the added expense. In fact, I may not renew the site when the annual subscription is up. So for now, my site remains at americanneopaganism*.com*. I think when the subscription is up I may start a new site on Jungian Neopaganism.

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