Tuesday 21 June 2016

1and1 Hosting problems

On the 14th of June 1and1 decided to make it only possible to use SFTP rather than FTP to upload files, this is a more secure protocol which is all very well but settings need to be changed - yet they didn't think any need to warn in advance.
It took several emails to support to establish why uploads were getting scrambled or not getting through at all.
The new settings worked for 24 hours then stopped again!
After several more emails they said there was an issue with FTP altogether and this was not resolved until today 21st June!

If that wasn't enough it transpires that the Weather Display software doesn't have the latest required SFTP options and won't work with it.
After a bit of hunting round I found a stand alone FTP program, which will bridge to the newer SFTP protocol - https://www.bitvise.com/ssh-client

For now this is working quite well but will need manually restarting alongside Weather Display if it ever stops.
Hopefully eventually the developer will update the inbuilt SFTP add-on.

1and1 were truly hopeless through all this with a range of goofy responses, and what seemed like deliberate mis-understanding of the problem I described in great detail - presumably so they could tick a box and move on.
It seemed to take 2 or 3 days before they believed it wasn't me that had made a mistake with the settings.
Unfortunately I only paid a year's hosting in May or I'd be switching ASAP.
As it is I'll probably change anyway as I can get a better deal for similar cost from others.
You would think it might be worth sticking with a big company because if anything went wrong they'd be onto it in hours - this shows different with 7 days of almost no proper service, and the most unhelpful support imaginable.

Monday 6 June 2016

Webcam surprise

This owl has been around a lot for months, but this never happened before!
By chance the saved still caught it very close to the house.