Congrats on the hit count, 6878265. Keep up the good work.

Listen, my dear 6878265, may I recommend Textdrive? Swift responses from humans every time.

Hey Franklin—so you don't have any problems with them? I'm having tons of problems with my host. I don't know if you have any experience with Movable Type—if you don't, this is going to be a whole lot of blah blah—but I can't rebuild my archives without the server timing out. Can't delete the bajillions of comment/trackback spam I get, either. I was paying next to nothing for my hosting service, so I recently upped the ante for more bandwidth, but to no avail.

So Textdrive won't run off with my credit card?

I use ICDSoft. $60/year initially (which they lowered to $40 after the first year) for 500 MB storage and 7 GB/month transfer. They do tech support through Sure Support, who guarantee at least an initial response to support queries within an hour.

I haven't really had all that many problems in my year and a half with them. Logging in to my support account only shows six tickets covering three separate issues, and the longest any single ticket was open was around 4 and a half hours (which was for a problem that was ultimately the fault of an MT plugin).

As far as the spam issue is concerned, they do seem to have a throttle set on my MT-Blacklist script that causes it to time out on rebuild. It deletes the spam from my database, but I have to go into MT to actually rebuild my archives (which I've never had a problem with). You have many more entries to rebuild and probably a much greater spam-load than I, however, and I'd probably be having more issues if I'd been on the receiving end of cable news love.

Dan, that's exactly the problem I have. I can't actually delete the spam from the archives because I have to rebuild them to do so, but I can't rebuild them. I think my problems are more likely related to some MT glitch than to CNN's blog show. But it's all Greek to me.

> I think my problems are more likely related to some MT glitch...

I'd be willing to wager that it's your host throttling your scripts rather than a problem with MT itself. I assume that you have no problem rebuilding single entries, as you can post and update posts. If this problem (it's the same '500 server error' or whatever that you get in MT-Blacklist, right?) only occurs on complete rebuilds of all of your individual archives, I'd guess it's because rebuilding 700+ entries (or whatever) taxes their system at a level above what they deem to be appropriate. But, yeah, this is all just a semi-educated guess.

MT Blacklist script? Could someone break that down for me? I get spammed out the wazoo, which is why I don't allow trackbacks on the site--at least it looks like I know what I'm doing, spam wise.

Or not.

Sarah -- see here. If you run Movable Type, you need MT-Blacklist.

Re ICDSoft: they were my old host, and not bad. As mentioned, their tech support was very good, and their rates were pretty low (although I signed up long ago and got locked into a fairly meager hosting plan by current standards). But their hosting facility is in Hong Kong, so it's not the speediest webhost for North American users.

I'm currently using Hostdime, which is dirt cheap and seems to be okay. Haven't had to call tech support about hosting yet, but I got someone on the phone when I needed help transferring a domain. Sounded like it could have been their VP, though -- it wasn't a dedicated customer service person. So I don't know if that's the most reliable situation to be in.

> Re ICDSoft: they were my old host, and not bad. As mentioned, their tech support was very good, and their rates were pretty low (although I signed up long ago and got locked into a fairly meager hosting plan by current standards). But their hosting facility is in Hong Kong, so it's not the speediest webhost for North American users.

When I first signed up in Nov. '03 it was something like 300MB/5GB, but I was automatically upgraded when they boosted their offering to the current 500MB/7GB in April. And it looks like they now have a US facility in addition to the one in Hong Kong.

But I'm sure I couldn't get in touch with their VP if I tried.

When are the "Dear 6878265" t-shirts going to be available?

You know what's funny? When I posted this, I also wrote a quick objection to the hosting company. Since then I've received three e-mails—Dear Kriston, Dear Kriston Capps, and (sigh, fucking sigh) Dear Ms. Capps—asking me to fill out a survey about the abysmal service I've been provided. Since now my conversation with them is solely about how I don't get no respect—I mean, they have yet to actually answer my first question—I think I'm just going to mess with them until I switch hosts.

Dear Ms. 6878265:

Textdrive just became the home of A List Apart. If they run off with our credit cards, no less than Jeffrey Zeldman will kick all of their asses.

You're talking to someone who coded his own CMS rather than use Moveable Type, so I can't answer your MT questions. However, you might go look at the Textpattern forums - TXP has so many MT refugees that MT2TXP instructions have become bountiful. I definitely don't hear the endless running streams of bitching about TXP that I do about MT.

Time to go brace for Lovely Rita, Hurricane.