When the hospital’s free wifi (beggars can’t be choosers) was blocking FTP, I pinged my WSP for help. A day later (Drop Dead While Waiting), I get this useless “help”. Argh!
*** begin quote ***
From: support @ 1and1
Sent: Monday, June 04, 2007 12:54 AM
To: reinkefj
Subject: C75194506 – 1&1 Internet Support
Dear Ferdinand Reinke, (Customer ID: 9113251)
Thank you for contacting us.
Unfortunately, FTP is universally using only port 21. We have no alternaltive ports for FTP. You can use the Secure FTP or Secure Shell to upload the files however, this is not supported in your current package. SSH (@port 22) is only available in 1&1 Business Linux and higher packages.
If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.
—
Sincerely,
Neil Parilla
Technical Support
1&1 Internet
*** end quote ***
Why bother? I didn’t ask for alternative ports. I ASKED for an alternative PERIOD.
I find their service highly available (I can’t ever remember being “out of service”) and “cheap” (I pay about $250/year and “collected” all my web sites in one place with gobs of space and bandwidth left over).
But they could do a better job answering questions faster and should really have an non-FTP alternative to updating a web site. What happens if this core protocol has a major problem (unlikely, but someone always wins the lotto!) and they have to take down FTP.
Seems like an SPF (Single Point of Failure) to me?
Argh!
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Note: Updating my Alumni News webpage until I got home to my great cable ISP. :-) When everything always works PERFECTLY! :-)
# # # # #
Reinke Faces Life 
What gives?!
You could have used Microsoft Frontpage but you’ll still be trapped at port 21.
The tech guy is correct.
Try to read this book so that you’ll have a better understanding what the technical support is trying to say.
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