Sillybean

FatCow: no love for WordPress

I had such plans for today. I was going to run lots of errands, call a multitude of people who had birthdays last week and wish them well, get the grocery shopping done, etc., etc.

Instead, a five-minute WordPress upgrade ended up eating my day. Thanks OH SO FRACKING MUCH, FatCow.

Back in the day, FatCow was a nice little host, one who offered lots of cool things with a not-scary user interface and a reasonable price. Alas, they’ve been slipping farther and farther behind the competition, and today they frayed the last thread of my patience. It seems that during their last round of major upgrades, they essentially broke mod_rewrite for PHP. Not only did they not publicize this fact, or change their documentation to reflect it, but they’ve since ignored pleas from their unhappy WordPress users (and those of every other PHP-based blog/CMS, no doubt) to fix the problem, saying simply that they allow mod_rewrite but don’t support its use.

The result? A site that was developed using clean URLs in WordPress suddenly stops working, for no apparent reason, and the unfortunate webkeeper spends several hours banging her head against the wall until it occurs to her to search the WordPress forum for “FatCow” and see if anything untoward has happened.

And now I get to contact the site’s owner and suggest that it’s time to change hosts, even though there’s six months left on the contract. What joy is mine.

Screw you, FatCow.