The GB top 25 tables and some of the other stats pages are almost ready to go again but our web host (webs.com, formerly known as "freewebs" for those who've been around here for a while!) seems to be having all kinds of issues since being taken over by another company during the period when I was computerless. It turns out that the current problems are being documented (somewhat maliciously but also, as far as I can tell, pretty accurately) by the Twitter account @BoycottWebs.

They've always been a bit rubbish but never quite bad enough to make it seem worth the hassle of moving to another provider until now.

The most relevant problem for us is that FTP access to the site no longer works, which effectively means I can't upload anything. Their interface does offer a proprietary upload function (which is much more fiddly than FTP even when it works) but even their own multi-file uploader no longer works. The only option that still works is to use their single file upload function for one file at a time (remembering to delete the files I want to replace first since there's no overwrite option) and that's not sustainable for a site like ours with regularly-updated multi-file tables. 

I first noticed the problem when I tried to set up FTP from my new computer in the US 2 weeks ago, assumed I must be getting something wrong or there was a temporary fault, but when it still wouldn't work a couple of days later (10 Feb), I tweeted Webs support @WebsCares about it. No reply, but I noticed that they were telling other people to email a support address, so on 16 Feb I emailed that address.

Still no reply by yesterday, so I tweeted them again and they finally replied (11 days after my first message) and said it was a known fault, asking me to report details on a web page they'd set up for that purpose to aid their investigations. I did so, adding at the end: "... please let me know when this will be fixed and if it won't be before the end of this week, please let me know how to claim a refund of my subscription because I will have to make arrangements to move to a hosting service that works."

They replied today that it is unlikely to be fixed this week and I should contact their billing team. Full marks for (belated) honesty, I guess, but ... Wow - web hosting is their business and after FTP access has been down for at least 11 days, they don't even think it will be back up before the end of this week. Er?!

So, that's what I'll do. I don't know how long it will take to get a refund of the premium access sub from their billing department and I also need to ensure that I've got (or can recreate) copies of all the files that are currently on the site before it gets wiped and download any that are missing.

Once I'm sure I'm going to get a refund of the remaining webs sub, I am intending to use the web space provider I used to use for my UK company and my plan is to get some tables up there in the next week or two, make sure it works then get all the other files that are on the old site onto there too, then finally get the britishtennis.net domain transferred to the new provider.

I don't know how long all this will take (and I've got a lot of other things on my plate at the moment too, so some delays may be due to me) but all you really need to know is that sometime soon, britishtennis.net might be completely unavailable for a day or two but it shouldn't be anything to worry about.

The forum itself is hosted by a completely different provider (Activeboard) and will remain up unless Activeboard itself goes down, so if you tend to access the forum via the britishtennis.net home page, it's probably worth bookmarking the forum itself too so that you can access it easily even if britishtennis.net is down for a bit.