The sudden death of the Payphone Radio Shoutcast stream took me by surprise, to say the least. cheapshoutcast.com has been a rock solid reliable hosting platform for me for over 5 years. I remember one weekend of downtime, and nothing to speak of since, though to be fair I have paid far less attention to the day-to-day happenings on my radios since working full time again.
But it blew me away with anger to learn that they had suspended my account for non-payment. There should never be any reason for Paypal transactions to be declined, and if that does occur I should at least receive some sort of correspondence. I find no correspondence or warnings whatsoever. In fact, it seems I actually did pay the bill that is said to have been delinquent. It is hard to sort through all the emails now. I just don’t have time.
My immediate instinct was to pick up my toys and head to Ucartz, which has been phenomenally reliable for my other stations after a few quirky correspondences to kick off the relationship years ago. But for now I begrudgingly stick with cheapshoutcast for the Payphone Radio stream. Many outside portals link to it at the unique URLs and I don’t even have time to find all those portals much less figure out how to edit or correct links.
I can and will no longer trust cheapshoutcast, though, which is a bit of a sting for me. Trusting a hosting company is very difficult. You learn to accept that the claims of 99.9% uptime are all a pack of lies. You learn to accept that “lighthing fast customer support” does not and will not ever exist in that realm. These should be obvious concessions for virtually any business in any realm. Their front-facing profile is almost always based on a pack of lies.
If there is an upside all this yesterday led me to rediscover some of my other radio streams, many of which never made it to the “airwaves” of Shoutcast or wherever we call the air now. I have so much there, so much material, and if I say so myself I am, when in my element, a pretty listenable creature. I know it’s not anyone’s idea of mainstream, and commenters typically refer to my stations in quotes. I love your “stations.”
