The Vizaweb Debacle

Light at the End of the Tunnel?

2006-11-10T10:49:00.000-05:00

It would appear that, after nearly 48 hours of darkness, Vizaweb is back online. I highly recommend getting backups and downloading them as fast you can. Who knows how long they'll be around after this?

Digg and Calls

2006-11-10T09:18:00.000-05:00

It looks like things are starting to pick up steam at Digg both here and here. For those who are just coming over to this blog, you can read a basic summary of what has happened with Vizaweb here.

In other news, since Rick says he's from Cottage Grove, MN on his Myspace profile, and since he said it was a small town, I took it upon myself to call up all of the Muellers in Cottage Grove this morning. I had hoped to track down some new contact info for him, but it seems that none of the other Muellers knew who Rick was. Any other ideas, folks?

Sooner or Later

2006-11-10T06:16:00.000-05:00

Well, I was up feeding the baby when I wrote the last two posts, but now I just can't sleep thinking about this situation. It looks very bad. Some folks are gathering over on an old blog post here to comment on the matter. What they've been able to piece together so far is that most of us are just screwed until if/when Vizaweb goes live again.

Interestingly enough, in the batch of comments on that blog entry, someone found Rick Mueller's MySpace profile. (Rick is the owner of Vizaweb.) According to Myspace, he logged in yesterday, so he's been online. He's most certainly aware of what's going on. Now let's get some answers out of him.

We Are Not Alone

2006-11-10T05:12:00.000-05:00

If anyone happens to stumble in here from anywhere other than Digg, please head over to the article about this issue at Digg.com. If you don't already have an account, register for one and click the "digg it" button next to the story. This will help move it to the front page of that site, which will result in some attention being paid to the issue.

In the meantime, it looks like commenters around the web have figured out that Vizaweb did their hosting at The Planet and are hoping to get some help from them. It looks like several people are convinced that Vizaweb has cut and run, intending to leave us and our data behind for good. Let's hope it's not that easy.

So it Begins

2006-11-10T04:40:00.000-05:00

On Wednesday, November 8th, 2006, Vizaweb.com and all of the sites hosted by Vizaweb went offline. As we approach 48 hours of downtime, none of us (their customers) know why. Vizaweb support is unavailable by phone, fax and email (obviously). I have attempted several phone calls over this downtime period and I've either received a busy signal, or no answer. This is completely unacceptable.

While some of us have fairly recent backups of our data, most of us still have data we want. If the problem is not that we don't have our data, it's that our email addresses hosted with Vizaweb are now down, meaning our email is bouncing back to the sender. At this point I don't think it's even possible to just have my domain name point somewhere else, because Vizaweb isn't available for a transfer.

I don't know why this is happening, but I intend to maintain this blog and keep trying to get in touch with them until something happens. I'm not doing this for personal gain, outside of the fact that I want my data back and I want my domain moved. I understand, now, that it was foolish of me to stay with Vizaweb and not have a more recent backup of my data, but the fact is that I did and I don't. Frankly, I just don't think it's unreasonable to expect that your webhost isn't going to disappear overnight.