And so it ends.

I finally got the following message this morning from tech support, in response to my websites being down for almost two weeks:

Unfortunately as you may already be aware, the server hosting your website suffered a catastrophic failure of it’s storage array. We believe this to be a failure of the RAID card in the server, which caused a cascading failure of the file system. This has resulted in the server being completely down, and we have thus far been unable to recover any data despite repeated attempts. We have also attempted to restore the server from our backups, but thus far have been unsuccessful at recovering in that way as well.

In other words, there’s nothing.  No data, and no backups.  All of my sites are gone.  (Funny how those darned backups never work, isn’t it? Especially if you NEVER MAKE THEM?)

Oh, and there’s also this gem:

At this point in time, our only course of action is to recreate each account on a new server, and allow you to re-upload your website(s) and any other data. We will be sending out new account details over the next 24 hours to each affected client. Given the circumstances, we will also be issuing a credit to each customer good for 3 months of future service. Please accept our most sincere apologies for the inconvenience this has caused, and we appreciate your understanding.

Ah, yes. “Sorry if you didn’t like the shit-and-mayo sandwich we just stuffed down your throat.  In compensation, three free months of more shit-and-mayo sandwiches!”

In case anyone has forgotten, the pooch-screwing webhost in this narrative is Hostivia.com.  Hostivia sucks.  Do not host with Hostivia.  This is not the first time  they’ve been hit by server failures, and responded with silence to desperate customer queries.  I waited one crisis too many to cut bait. More fool me.

I will start the slow work of rebuilding my active websites on another host (Hostgator, if you’re curious).  I’m lucky in the case of lousybookcovers.com, in that it had a tumblr mirror from which I can restore almost everything (I had 200 future posts queued up which I’ll have to compile again, but that’s the least of my troubles).  But a dozen years of blog post, my virtual journal? Gone.  Six-hundredish lengthy movie reviews on coldfusionvideo.com? All gone, except for those which I included in The Golden Age of Crap and which I pulled off to polish for the Charles Band book(s).

This blog will be rolled into the new NathanShumate.com when it comes online. Until then, watch this space.

(Know what the worst part is? Other people would soothe the burn by getting drunk.  I’m Mormon, so I’m facing it cold sober. (I have a Monster Energy Zero Ultra, but it’s small consolation.))

Oh, and if you want to help assuage my pain, buy my books.