… with doors that open outwards is that when there is a heavy snowfall you can’t open the door. And so with the …gulp…18 cms that fell through the night I ended up having to use the front door in order to visit the beichstuhl this morning.

Then it was to shin up onto the roof and shovel the snow off the solar panels again (and in fact I did that a couple of times throughout the day).

But the temperature was against me again. Last night it dropped to minus 9.1 and this morning it was minus 6 outside. In the verandah it was minus 5.4 and in the house it was minus 4.8. You can’t work in these conditions so I came up here, put the fire on and read a book for a while. By about 1100 it had warmed up sufficiently for me to continue putting the plasterboard on the false wall but I could only keep it up for a while before my hands froze on the metal tools.

What is interesting is that before I insulated the floor in here, a temperature of minus 9 outside caused the temperature in my room to drop to 2.8 degrees. After doing the floor a similar temperature outside would lead to about 6.8 degrees in here. With starting to tongue-and-groove the downstairs ceiling it was 9.4 degrees in here this morning. So the sooner I can do the entire ceiling the better. And, of course, if all of the insulation is keeping the heat inside the attic then it will also keep the external heat out and thats encouraging for when I start to heat up the inside of the house.

Doing the stats tonight I noticed that the total snow that fell today was 28 cms and that’s a record for a single day. I’m properly snowed in now and I can’t see me going anywhere for a while.

In other news I’ve been sent a … errr …. document (or copy thereof) about this webhosting thing that I told you about yesterday. The document is dated 4-6 December 2009, which is some seven weeks after I received an e-mail from the same webhost saying “We are yet again moving servers. This time for the last time as we are getting out of the hosting business …..The move will take place in November (2009)”. And so OUSA is somehow being asked to go into some kind of partnership with a company to provide a service that the company abandoned a couple of weeks previously. And, of course, money is to change hands in this respect.

Now leaving aside the self-expressed lack of technical capability to deal satisfactorily with the issues that arise and which I described yesterday, just what the hell is going on?
1) If the company is still conducting its business of webhosting, why is its manager telling me that it isn’t?
2) And if it is to restart its webhostiong business after having ceased (very unlikely as the last communication that I had with this company – in January 2010 – was to the effect that the cession was definitive), do the successors to the previous business know about this?
3) And what were the terms of the cession to trade which resulted in existing customers being passed over to the successor company? Will the webhost be hit with some kind of legal complication that could see each individual OUSA website being hit with a demand for more money under a service agreement with the successor company in respect of a “restraint of trade following cessation”? In other words, a sale of goodwill?
4) And given the self-expressed lack of technical competence and my own experience with this company, how will all of these OUSA webmasters react if all of THEIR files, e-mails and contacts lists were to disappear into cyberpsace?
5) And if the web host gives assurances that this won’t ever happen again, and I remind them that I received the same promise TWICE – a promise that was filled with empty air – how much weight will the webmasters attach to it?
6) And if the webhost does manage to fulfil its promises to provide an uninterrupted service, what reasons could the webhost advance that it couldn’t do it for me over the last couple of years and thoroughly messed up my service through a mixture of incompetence and petty vindictiveness?

And I note from the document that I have in my possession that the amount to be charged is “the current commercial rate and will be renegotiated annually when the 12 month contract expires”. I wonder if anyone would like to hazard a guess about what is likely to happen at the end of the 12 months, and how many websites and associated files are still going to be intact next January?

I smell one big, enormous rat in all of this. There’s something clearly not kosher about the events surrounding this company over the last couple of months. Kicking all its existing clients off, telling them that it’s closing down while at the same time negotiating a completely new deal with a whole new raft of clients.

Yes, sign the contract at your peril.

You have been warned.

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