Fascinating: Plaquemines Parish, a small parish in deep southern Louisiana, hosts their government website using Globat, and it appears that all the people interested in checking in on the parish and its residents have put the website over its daily bandwidth allotment. (Here’s a screenshot of what the home page looks like right now, and here’s a Google cache of the page before it hit its bandwidth limit.) I figured that I’d do my good deed for the day and call the hosting company to see if they’d be willing to suspend the bandwidth limits for the time being, so I called the only number I could find on their website, (877) 2-GLOBAT. I got a sales guy who said the exact following: “If a customer goes over their bandwidth, we shut ‘em down, no matter who they are.” I asked whether he’d either put me in touch with someone in the corporate structure who’d be willing to consider helping the parish out — after all, the people in the parish whose job it is to deal with this might be otherwise indisposed (and probably without phone service!), and he said no. He was uninterested in giving me his name, and abruptly ended the conversation.

I guess it’s rare that I’m this stunned at the total lack of empathy some people can have.

Update: whether it was this post, Sara’s webhostingtalk.com post, or just plain second thoughts, the Plaquemines Parish website is back up.