This is a tale of what happens when you fail to heed your own advice.
It is so easy to get overwhelmed with email. I have now learned that it is too easy to get complacent when there is no email. I should have known better. I can’t recall the last time I had a day with no email. But somehow I failed to connect the absence of email with the possibility of a problem.
I have been using Dreamhost to host my various websites for years, with only minor hiccups. I let myself get complacent. I assumed that since I had received an email letting me know that my domain name would auto-renew there was no need for me to double check that the renewal had gone through. Therein lies my mistake.
Fortunately, a friend pointed out that my site was down. He also alerted me to the fact the the URL indicated that my domain had expired on January 18th. I immediately manually renewed my domain name. And then I waited. And waited.
I submitted a ticket to Dreamhost about the auto-renewal failure and the fact that my site was still down and no email was coming through. I sent myself a test email and it just went into the ether. No error message. Nothing.
The following morning my site still wasn’t up and my test email still had not come through. I checked my ticket and it still hadn’t been addressed. I went to http://gethuman.com to see if I could find a phone number so I could call Dreamhost and get a status update. There was a number, but there were also several comments indicating that the number led directly to voicemail.
After digging a little further, I discovered that Dreamhost has a Twitter account. I tweeted my issue and my issue was resolved in a snap.
The moral of the story: Don’t be afraid to be the squeaky wheel. If a company won’t let you contact them directly, try to get a number that you can call. If that doesn’t work. Try contacting them via a social media account. That will hold them publicly accountable.