I should have known this would not go well. During the Summer, Aplus.net proudly announced that its Shared Hosting was being moved to Hostopia so that it could focus on its more lucrative dedicated hosting clients. I had been with Aplus for several months and was very happy with their performance and service, so I was trying to keep an open mind.

Well, this past week was my turn for “platform upgrade” which means I was now moving from the Aplus servers to the “upgraded” Hostopia servers.  I received an email which stated the following:

Upgrade Period:

12:00 am EDT, Friday, October 23, 2009 through 10:00 pm EDT, Friday, October 30, 2009

· During the upgrade period listed above FTP and SSH will be restricted. Changes should not be made to your site (text and images) beginning October 23, 2009. This helps ensure your site is upgraded reliably, without error. Please make all necessary changes prior to October 23, 2009. NOTE: If you require a necessary website update during the upgrade period, please email support at support@cs.aplus.net. These should be kept to a bare minimum as changes you make to your site content during the upgrade could be overwritten if you do not protect them properly.

· Databases are not affected by the upgrade period and access to your live website and email accounts will function normally during the upgrade.

· On Friday, October 30, 2009, at 10 pm EDT, the upgrade will be complete and you will be able to access your control panel as usual to make necessary changes to your site content.

Translation:  a week of HELL!

My blog was in a lock-down for this period.  And, the articles that I published during the lock-down were lost!  My emails were bouncing all over the place.  Always great to hear from an irrate client that I am not responding to their email requests … especially when I never received their emails!

I thought everything was resolved over the weekend, but today my blog disappeared.  And no one at Aplus/Hostopia was reachable by phone, by live chat or even by Twitter!  When I finally reached a real person and opened a trouble ticket, I was told it could take 48-hours to resolve!  My blog re-appeared a few hours later but all the permissions were incorrect and the database would not save new articles.

Needless to say … I AM NOT HAPPY. I feel like I lost a week because of this disaster!  Aplus is dumping their loyal customers on to Hostopia who obviously is not up-to-speed.