Author: Roberta

I cancelled my Bluehost account. It took them over a week to respond to my support ticket regarding my email issues. Here’s what they finally told me:

All emails were processed by mailman but then rejected by our server because you exceeded your emails per hour for the domain robertajazz.com.

Another thing to note is that as mentioned on the mailman page of your cpanel it is not meant for lists larger than 100 emails. You may be able to get it to work for your list of 179 recipients but it is likely that you will have delays and possible problems with your lists of 400+. You may want to look into your own mailing list program that could throttle emails better for your list and give you more control over this queue and other options that you will not have with our mailing list software.

Does this make any sense? They are saying that the mailman lists have a limit of 100 people, but if you try to send a mailing to more than 50 people the remaining 50 emails will DISAPPEAR. You have no way of knowing who the emails went to! So REALLY, their Mailman setup limits you not to even 100 users but only to 50 users! Hey, Bluehost, Why would I need a mailing list program like Mailman if I were only sending to 50 (or 100) people!?

Personally I think the Mailman people should demand that the hosting companies that license their very excellent product (I believe it’s freeware) don’t abuse their good name by putting
absurdly low limits on how many emails can be sent at once and then suggesting to customers that they use their own mail client instead. The idea that the Mailman’s software does not give enough “options” is a load of crap. I am using the Mailman software on my new web host (more on that in a minute) and it’s working great. And is Bluehost seriously suggesting that it makes sense for me to have to send out a mailing list email manually to 50 people every hour (THEIR per-domain limit)? What exactly is the point of their even offering Mailman, except of course as a marketing ploy?

To their credit, when I demanded a refund of the unused portion of my hosting (six months) they agreed.

The latest motivation for me to continue my fruitless search for a decent web host is Bluehost’s Mailman implementation. I just sent them a detailed help ticket about the fact that my mailings are not being delivered. I can’t wait to see how long it takes for them to send yet another of their inane replies indicating that they barely read the message. We’ll see.

I just found another company – more expensive but they seem very personalized and competent. They also promised me that their mail servers are whitelisted with AOL. (Part of the problem with BluieHost may be blacklisted servers. The other part of the problem is that if you send too many emails (more than a few hundred in one day as you easily might with their mailing lists) they start discarding mail instead of either delivering it or throttling it. (They throttle it too so who knows when your mail is delivered if at all.)

I will go for the monthly plan this time. If it goes well I will recommend them to you.

What a fantastic trip this has been, one of my favorite European tours. Besides getting to play my own trio music, I was fortunate to play with an incredible diversity of great players. Thank you to: Kim Clarke, Urszula Dudziak, Camille Gainer, Jane Getter, Roland Heinz, Masa Kamaguchi, Klaus Kugel, Billy Mintz, Mark Tokar, Michael Urbaniak, Mika Urbaniak, Petras Vysniauskas, Yuri Yaremchuk.

Also had a blast working at the BORG in Innsbruck with some extremely talented young musicians, and meeting some wonderful people throughout Tyrolia as Billy and I went to several schools in an attempt to answer that elusive question: What is Jazz?

Acknowledgements would not be complete without thanking Maurice and Ania for their hospitality and amazing Paella last night! Also thanks for the term “aesthetic fascism” which I plan to start using immediately.

Below: backstage after playing with Urszula Dudziak in Warsaw. Left to right: Roberta, Jane Getter, Ula, Camille Gainer, Kim Clarke.

Below: “Five Spot” takes a bow after a set of improvised music in Lviv, Ukraine. Left to right: Roberta, Mark Tokar, Yuriy Yaremchuk, Petras Vysniauskas, Klaus Kugel. (Thanks to Sergey Muralov for this photo.)

It’s been an exhilarating and exhausting week. Last Sunday I arrived in Warsaw with fellow New Yorkers Jane Getter (guitar), Kim Clarke (bass) and Camille Gainer (drums) to play a show with Urszula Dudjiak. Great musicians and Urszula is phenomenal. A nice surprise was that the great violinist Michael Urbaniak also sat in, as well as their daughter vocalist Mika Urbaniak who is also a great talent.

Wednesday AM I flew to Madrid where I played two nights at Bogui Jazz for the Madrid Jazz Festival with Masa Kamaguchi on bass and Billy Mintz on drums. It was a blast. So great to play with Masa again. Of course it’s always great to play with Billy but I get to play with him all the time. I am so spoiled!

Last night we played Jazz Cava in Terrassa. It’s a beautiful space and the music was very well received.

Sunday Billy and I fly to Innsbruck, Austria for three a three-day workshop at a local school there and a gig with another great guitarist, Roland Heinz. Then I fly to Lviv, Ukraine to play with Klaus Kugel (dr), Petras Vysniauskas (ss), Yuri Yaremchuk (ts, cl, bcl), Mark Tokar (b) there and then in Sanok, Poland.

From there back to Barcelona for a date at Jamboree with Masa and Billy, then a couple of days in Berlin to unwind, and home again to NY for our Dec. 19 hit at the Kitano.

Recently a musical colleague of mine called me for a gig. We have known each other for years but haven’t played together much. She mentioned that she had had trouble tracking me down, because she didn’t have my number, and she was spelling my name incorrectly so she couldn’t find my web site.

In the “keywords” metadata section of my web page, I have my named mispelled because it used to be that this would allow people to find me even if they spelled it wrong. So the keywords read: “Roberta Piket, Roberta Picket, Roberta Pickett”. (The first one is correct.)

My parents had an analogous analog setup back when I was a little girl. They had our name listed in the phonebook twice, once spelled correctly (Piket) and once spelled with a ‘c’ (Picket).

Here’s the problem. Apparently Google changed their search algorithm so the keywords are useless.

A tactic some web masters use to draw traffic to their site is to put the keywords they want Google to find in the text of the web site, but to use the same color for the font as for the text, so the text is not visible to humans, only to the web crawling software. But Google is on to that trick as well.

So, here is my pathetic attempt to help people who don’t know that my last name is spelled ‘Piket’ to find me:

Click here for the jazz pianist/composer Roberta Pickett Click here for the jazz pianist/composer Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett
Click here for the jazz pianist/composer Roberta Picket Click here for the jazz pianist/composer Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket

You have NO IDEA how much it hurt me to type that. Here is my atonement:

Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett
Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket

If you found this post because you were googling my name with an incorrect spelling, then here is the web site you want: robertajazz.com

Using my new web hosting now, after my disastrous experiences with LunarPages.com. The server has been reliable, but the tech support leaves much to be desired.

Case 1: I want to be able to check my spam box, which is where BlueHost’s Spam Assasin is supposed to put your spam. I was told by two of Bluehost.com’s �experts� via chat (you can’t talk to anyone and the responses take five minutes each time you type a reply) that I could do this. It didn’t work. I finally discovered after searching the (self)help pages that it is disabled by default and you have to make a special request to have it enabled. You’d think they could clue their tech support people in on this so they don’t waste customers’ time looking for non-existent spam folders.

To add insult to injury, the help page states that you should email them to get the spam box enabled. So I did. Ten minutes later I got an email saying,”You can no longer create a new ticket through email, only through our Help Center.”

These people must think I have time to burn.

Case 2: I set up a mailing list through CPanel. (One nice thing – Lunarpages.com only gave you one mailing list. Bluehost.com seems to give you several.) It didn’t seem to be working so the chat support person told me to open a trouble ticket. That was on a Sunday night. Supposedly they have a 24-hour response time. Assuming they read my ticket Monday morning, I should have hear something by Tuesday morning. In fact that was the the due date/time their system “stamped” on the ticket. By Tuesday evening I had figured out the problem myself and I replied to the ticket complaining about the delay and informing them I’d fixed the problem. I checked back the next day and they had closed the ticket as resolved, which is fine, but an apology for the delay would have been nice.

Well, at least I’m up and running and none of my databases have been deleted, which is more than I was able to say for LunarPages.com.

Okay, what do I expect for $7 a month? I would pay more for better service, but my research seems to indicate that more money doesn’t get you better service, just more bandwidth or a dedicated server. I don’t need those things. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.

I have already expressed my horror at LunarPages’ awful tech support and the fact that they deleted my blog files and did not care. Here’s the latest addition of insult to injury:

While I was in the process of transferring my files from LunarPages’ servers, I opened a support ticket asking if I could access my files through ftp even if my dns servers no longer pointed to LunarPages. After one full week, I received a form reply that told me everything about ftp except the answer to my question. I replied to this effect and received an apology from a supervisor and the info I had requested.

Today I received an email indicating that, at my request, they have agreed to give me a prorated refund on the remainder of my current year of service at my request. I thought it only fair to give you the full story, although I have no way of knowing if they would have issued the refund if I hadn’t been blogging the whole thing on a non-LP server. Maybe they would have just deleted my files as they did when the blog was hosted on their server.

In any event the issue is now resolved.

While I was able to save my blog and install it on the new server because I had backed up my files (note to everyone: BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP!), to this day Lunarpages.com has not reinstated my blog files on their server which they deleted. (Two business days after my panicked message to them that they had deleted files from my account, they sent one brief message (in a slew of harrassing emails about my cpu usage) in which they casually mentioned they would try to find the files. They never did.

If anyone wants to see the nightmarish dealings I have had with Lunarpages tech support I have uploaded a pdf of the entire email exchange for your reading horror. Click here and it will open in a new window.

I never got around to discussing the other reason I decided, after about 5 years with them, that the service and tech support level at Lunarpages.com has gotten so intolerable that I can no longer use them as my hosting company.

I called Lunarpages tech support a couple of weeks ago because I could not get their server-side installation of SpamAssasin to filter a single piece of spam. It’s really simple for the end user (me) to configure Spam Assasin. There are only a few choices. Nevertheless I respectfully asked the tech to confirm I had set it up correctly and in about ten seconds it was clear I had. So I asked him why not a single piece of email coming into my account was being tagged as spam. Did he set up a filter and run a trace on a test email? Did he check the server logs? Did he verify in any way that the problem was not on Lunarpages’ side? No. He merely replied, “Spam has gotten really smart lately.”

Yes, that’s right. Spam is SO SMART that world-renowned spam software used by all major web hosts including you guys is unable to filter a single piece of spam!

He also suggested I purchase some spam filtering software for my computer, which is a reasonable thing for me to do but not a replacement for LunarPages configuring the features they advertise so that they actually work.

Of course as soon as I changed to my new hosting company and configured Spam Assasin on their server, it worked perfectly and my spam problem is now manageable for the first time in over a year.

Two days ago I updated my wordpress installation. It went very smoothly. Thanks WordPress! You are great. NOT so great is my web hosting company, Lunar Pages. I’m still getting apparently automated emails from them that I need to delete my old WP installation. And no help is available. So I’m cleaning out some old files in the WP directory and testing it to make sure I didn’t delete anything critical.

Fortunately (or not) the people at Lunar Pages are too stupid and lazy to find this post. (Plus I backed up my site in case they exhibit even greater incompetence or actual maliciousness and delete my files. (For more insight from people who’ve had even worse experiences with them than I have, please visit this web site.)

Isn’t this an interesting post? 🙂