A Bit of a Scare

Welcome to Battlegames. Or, more correctly, welcome back to Battlegames after one of the nastiest scares I’ve had in all my years of running websites!

A few weeks ago – just before I went away to Venice for the first decent holiday I’ve had in years, of course – this site went down and despite my best efforts, I was unable to make repairs to the WordPress configuration problems under the bonnet without help. Help which should have been provided by my web hosts, but which, bafflingly, they seemed unable to provide.

I should point out that my previous web hosts, Stratagem, had been absolutely brilliant until the point last year when they suddenly went dark and all attempts at reaching them disappeared into the void. It appears that the owner had some kind of breakdown and just simply walked away, leaving everything and everyone behind.

After a gap of some weeks, an apparent rescue package was put together by Velocitas, who I gather ran the server farm used by Stratagem. However, it took weeks to migrate my sites across to them, which I forgave because they were, in effect, doing a favour for all Stratagem’s clients just to keep their sites up and running.

But it wasn’t long afterwards, perhaps last autumn, that I started to notice that things were not exactly all well. Critical elements of the client control panel seemed to be missing, most notably those enabling me to manage the various domains and sites I own (and I’m sure this was the case for all their clients too). On top of that, submitting tickets for assistance became hopeless, with response times for urgent requests gradually slipping from hours, to days – and then weeks. Whatever the nature of their usual clients (large, data-hungry businesses?), they clearly are not equipped to deal with ‘small fry’ customers needing hand-holding.

With the world of online business making some seismic shifts in recent months, affected by world events and the unpleasant degradation of many social media platforms, being able to to revive my websites as meaningful hubs for my online presence has become mission-critical. So, as you can imagine, this site suddenly crashing was something of a nightmare.

Repeated attempts to get help from Velocitas fell on deaf ears and I was left with the impression that their tech help consists of just one man who either, if I’m feeling kind, is clearly suffering from overwhelm and has too much pride to ask for help; or, less charitably, is an idiot with a major attitude problem who couldn’t give two figs about the concept of customer care.

In the end, after pointlessly submitting perhaps a dozen tickets and wasting my time making a similar number of phone calls, I finally managed to get hold of a sales guy who, bless him, at least seemed to have a conscience and was embarrassed enough about my treatment to rattle some cages on my behalf. In the end, after receiving yet more useless ‘advice’ from the tech team, I took a series of screenshots proving that the control panel functions they claimed I had access to did not, in fact, exist!

Meanwhile, I’d had enough – the stress was extreme and I have also been suffering from a persistent bronchial infection which I’d picked up, typically, on the last weekend of our holiday. So I took the only sane course and opened an account with a different and highly reputable hosting company (A2 Hosting, who have had stellar reviews in magazines and online).

The only fly in the ointment has been that I needed to get Velocitas to change the nameservers for my web hosting and provide me with the Epp/Auth codes in order to transfer my domain names.

And how helpful do you think they have been in carrying out these tasks?

You got it in one: absobloodylutely useless.

In fact, it was only once I produced those screenshots mentioned above as proof of the failures of their system that I got a somewhat embarrassed acknowledgement that there might have been a problem that was not my responsibility.

Apology?

Don’t be daft!

Hours wasted chasing these idiots to do what they should have done in the first place? I’ll be generous and say a week.

Stress levels achieved dealing with their utter incompetence and couldn’t care less attitude? 110%.

The internet can be a great place when everything is going swimmingly. But when stuff goes wrong…

I guess this also feeds into the debate about why more people aren’t blogging in the ‘traditional’ way rather than just posting on social media. It’s far easier to delegate the maintenance of a site to a giant corporation like Meta or X, or even Bluesky or Substack, than to endure the teething problems that can accompany running a site such as this. No decisions about the look and feel (already dictated by the corporation), and in the context of micro-blogging sites like most social media, not even any decisions about how long a piece should be, because a set character count cuts you off in mid-stream if you go on for too long. Facebook is one of the few places where, if you want to, you can type away to your heart’s content, though you run the risk of the dreaded “TL;DR”*.

Anyway, the fact is that I’ve made the decision to keep this place alive, if for no other reason than the fact that I have complete control over what I post here, and no algorithms are going to determine which of my posts or pages rise to the top of the pile or are simply ignored. The platform gradually builds an archive of posts going back years, which you can access via one of the menus here (either to one side or below, depending on whether you are here on your mobile device or desktop/laptop. Unlike on social media, nothing is lost in the torrent of stuff rushing past every day. Of course, everything online is ultimately ephemeral, but a blog is, perhaps, somewhat less ephemeral than most other places.

And, not least, I’ve been running this site since June 18th 1998. That’s quite an achievement and I won’t turn my back on it now. There have been times when I’ve been far more active than at others, and it’s true that for quite some time, social media tempted me away. I also have my Patreon to consider, but there are now plug-ins that make it possible for me to post patron-only content here as well as on the Patreon site, and I hope to take advantage of that.

But primarily, this is a space for me to simply be me: an aging bloke who has been a wargamer for more than 50 years and who wants to witter on about his hobbies**, life, the universe and everything and invite you to join in the conversation.

That’ll do.

Crisis over. Roll ’em high.

Henry

*Too Long; Didn’t Read.

**I’m going to include my love of video creation, watercolours and voice work in the mix.