This site is hosted by Media Temple. I’ve used them for more than a decade, and they’ve been generally good. They used to have a trouble ticket support system which worked with a web browser and email. It wasn’t a real time service, and it sometimes took them 24 hours to respond, but I found it effective.
They’ve dropped that service. The only way to get support now is through web chat or telephone. Today I spent an hour and 45 minutes waiting for a tech on the web chat service. Not only was that way too long, every 10 or 15 minutes they logged me out, and I had to log back in again and refresh the page to get to the chat window. I have looked in the chat window history, and that chat is nowhere to be seen, maybe because I never did contact an agent.
The problem I am trying to solve is to verify my SSL certificates. Media Temple used to verify them automatically, but that requires that they act as the DNS provider, and sometime last year they were having troubles with their DNS and suggested that I use a different DNS, which I did. In the absence of doing that, I’m attempting to use email verification. That works by sending emails to specific, preset, unchangeable email addresses. But none of those email addresses are currently valid.
I created a couple of email accounts with the right addresses in one domain. I sent a test message. That worked. I tried to resend the verification email, and got this:
But a few hours later, the verification emails arrived. I followed the link and approved them.
Success? Looks that way. But I’m dreading the next time I have to interact with Media Temple’s chat support.
I have another domain that I used to use for testing. I needed to verify the SSL cert for that, too. I set up a chat session with Media Temple, waited 20 minutes, and an agent never appeared. I gave up.
I went to Network Solutions and pointed the DNS to Media Temple’s DNS servers. But 24 hours later, I was still getting “under construction” messages from Network Solutions. I contacted Network Solutions via chat. Their chat service was quite responsive. The DNS changes don’t seem to be propagating right, although they’re working in a few places. They are blaming Media Temple.
Here’s what whatsmydns says:
I guess I’ll have to wait a while and see what happens.
I waited for a few hours, and there was no change. I went back to Network Solutions, set the DNS records to point to them, added an email account, tested it, and all appeared to be well. After 18 hours, the DNS propagation map looked like this:
That’s a lot better than it looked when Media Temple was the authoritative DNS server.
Leave a Reply