okay, some time between now and the middle of january (the sooner the better as far as i’m concerned) there will be an interruption of services for a couple of days (maximum) while i swich host service providers. the last straw for me came yesterday when i called drizzle support with a question about hybrid elephant, only to discover that somehow, unbeknownst to me, the hybrid elephant account information was for someone in spokane – liz dreisbach, the leader of the ballard sedentary sousa band. somehow drizzle got the impression that, back in august(!!) when liz changed the contact information for sedentarysousa.com, she was also changing the contact information for hybridelephant.com. so now, according to drizzle, hybridelephant.com now belongs to liz, despite the fact that hybrid elephant has been under my control for the past five years(!!) and they hadn’t even contacted me to find out whether or not this was actually the case!!

of course the control panel access still belongs to me, but if i hadn’t found out about it, liz would have very likely been billed for hybrid elephant in january, which would have been tremendously confusing and embarrassing for both me and her, but that’s not the complete reason why i’m switching host providers. drizzle disabled telnet/SSH access to their servers back in march or some time earlier this year, and recently they decided to disable news services (usenet) as well, which is something that i use fairly regularly. also, in the past year or so their “technical support” personnel have become extremely surly and incompetent. not only that, but in researching host service providers i came across two, at least, that offer more services, and are less than half the cost of drizzle.

i have been a drizzle.com user ever since i switched away from aa.net, almost 10 years ago, and i have owned the hybridelephant domain since 2002. i suppose i’m lucky to have gotten 10 years of reasonable service from them, but it’s time for a change. now, along with everything else, i have to prepare my web sites to be moved, get in touch with my registrar to change the domain host profile on my domains, contact spamcop to change my “real” email address, and probably a whole bunch of other things that i haven’t thought of yet. 8P~