The Fall and Rise of a Weblog: The Result

Two weeks ago I told you the Prologue to The Fall and Rise of a Weblog. Last week I shared The Situation regarding The Fall and Rise of a Weblog. Today, you will be able to read The Result of The Situation.
Some of you may wonder why I am so terse in my words and not more garrulous, especially if you have been on my site before. The answer is simple: the facts are more powerful than any words I could possibly conjure.
I will admit that I was naive. What I am about to say will sound even more naive. I thought BlueFur.com and I were friends, partners. I thought they would look out for me and my best interests. Maybe it was because I was using their Managed Blog Service. Maybe it was because of our long association and that I had paid every bill on time and in full. I thought they would look out for me as well as themselves to the utmost of their ability. “The best result will come where everyone in the group [is] doing what’s best for himself and the group”, Russell Crowe, A Beautiful Mind. I thought this was the case with our business arrangement. You can speculate and look to The Situation (and the bullet points in that post) for possible answers to these assumptions. I have no opinion.
I have read in many business text books and magazines that a business should anticipate the needs of their clients before they ever present themselves. That building a good reputation and strong customer loyalty are the keys to success and how such practices are not just good business but great business. I do not know why this random, wholly unrelated thought from business school just occurred to me out of the blue. As I said previously, I have no opinion on The Situation. I am neutral.
When I look back on this experience with BlueFur.com, I wonder why:

• I was not told a suspension was imminent and that I should backup my entire site on my hard drive immediately. Mr. Y said he had been monitoring Film-Book dot Com. Why couldn’t he have simply sent me an email and given me a heads up?

• my /public_html folder was empty of content in the zip link they provided?

• I was later told they had all of Film-Book dot Com on their server, not a backup or a partial copy.

• I was not allowed FTP access (via IP) to copy the site files myself during the suspension.

• BlueFur.com could not burn all of my site files onto a blank DVD and mail them to me.

• BlueFur.com could not have transferred my site files to my new cPanel themselves.

• certain questions were never answered, responded to or acknowledged.

• I was told Film-Book dot Com would be restored to the way it was before suspension and then a major portion of it never was.

• when I asked about the restoration of this portion of Film-Book dot Com (670 images), my subsequent, numerous emails were ignored by both Blurfur.com Support and Ms. X.

I leave it to you, the reader of this post, to draw your own conclusions and formulate your own answers. I have no opinion and I am unable, at this time, to formulate my own answers. As you can see in The Situation, I did all that I could think of, even going so far as to emailing John Chow. He’s always been helpful when it comes to weblog questions. Everything was fruitless. In the end, paying for the BlueFur Xdev dedicated server was the only viable solution to bring Film-Book dot Com back to life.

Next week the fourth part of this series will be published.

In the mean time – a few questions for discussion:

• Did you envision this being The Result of The Situation?
• What result did you foresee?
  

Please feel free to share your thoughts below.

The remaining posts in The Fall and Rise of a Weblog series: What was Lost and What was Learned.

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