I have recommended DiscountASP to all my clients over the last 10 years. Other than all the technical stuff, I told them the support was great, and the support people were Americans. SOMETHING HAS CHANGED. I had a support issue a few months ago. The web site suddenly stopped communicating with the database. I contacted support, and right away they blamed it on the code. The code was written like 5 years ago, worked every day, and was never changed. Support said there was nothing they could do. Researching the problem on the internet I discovered it was a common problem with Access databases, and the solution was simply to refresh the pool and restart IIS. Apparently this can happen when updates are made to the server. This support incident went on for hours before I has to tell support what to do. Today, emails I send from the web site to members of the site suddenly stopped being received. I contact support, they asked me a few questions, and that was the last I heard from them as I sit here waiting to get tonight's newsletter out. I replied to the ticket then sat here for the next few hours with no feedback. Then I replied to the ticket again and ask what was going on. It is an hour later, and still no response. I work with other hosting companies. Some have horrible support. DiscountASP has gone from the top to the bottom.
Since we don't know who you are, it's not possible to look at your support history to see if there was a problem. In general, I can comment that an Access database isn't made for web use, and leaving one up and running for several years without any issues is pretty impressive. Anyone doing something similar should expect to have to do maintenance, app pool restarts, etc. much more often than once every five years. Email not being delivered from a web application can have a lot of causes, so it may take some time to determine whether there is a problem. But if email is seen by a target server as spam (and a newsletter or any bulk email will be flagged by many target servers), there isn't going to be much we can do. Sending bulk email isn't something we generally support or recommend.You are far better off using a third-party service like Constant Contact or MailChimp for newsletters or any kind of mass email. Finally, since I can't look up your support history, I can only make the general statement that support here started off as very, very good in the early days and has somehow manged to improve tremendously over the years. We currently have the best support staff we've ever had. I used to manage the support department, so I have a pretty good idea of their capabilities. The current manager has built a team that is unmatched by any host anywhere. In my humble opinion, of course. I'm not sure what "the support people were Americans" means, but I'm pretty sure I get the insinuation. We are from all over the world, but we all live and work here in Los Angeles. Which is in America, so I guess we are all Americans. More or less. If you want to let me know which account you're referring to I'd be happy to take a look and see if there is anything we can do to help out.
Okay, I spoke to the support staff and I think I know who you are now. As I suspected, your newsletter was having delivery issues due to some of the reasons I mentioned. We have whitelisted your domain on our servers, so anything that doesn't get through from here on out is due to rejection or quarantine by the target (receiving) servers. The Access database issue (Microsoft JET Database Engine error ‘80004005’ Unspecified error) is very common for Access databases, but now that I speak to the support staff, it's very uncommon that they see it anymore. So while someone who saw it a lot 10 years ago would have picked it up right away, some of the new people here have never seen that error, so that may have slowed down your response for that. Sorry about that. You might want to consider upgrading your Access database to MS SQL (or even MySQL). I know Access is free, but it's also badly outdated, and as I mentioned, it was never intended to be used in conjunction with a web application. If you stick with it, I'm afraid you might expect to see more and more problems with it as time goes on. If you decide to upgrade, let us know if you need any help.
If you see this error again, you can simply go to the control panel and recycle the application pool. it should clear up the error but it is likely to happen again.
Let us not forget that websites need maintenance just a like a car would. What may work 10 years ago or 5 years ago may not work today if you do not perform routine maintenance and upgrades to the codes within your web site. True it may be a daunting and frustrating task, but unfortunately those are the facts of life. Often times we see a website get compromised because they never maintain their website and install all the necessary security patches to it. The same goes for databases. When you first designed your database, it is storing a small amount of data. If you do not maintain it, that small amount of data will eventually grow to a large amount of data. Without the routine DB upkeep on it, the DB will eventually hang or cause the application to hang.
