A plea for a rent reduction

After speaking to several business owners and "experts" (aka consultants), last week I approached our landlord and asked for a temporary rent reduction. In my request, I spilled my guts on how the business was doing (we report sales numbers to them anyway), how rent is now the biggest expense, and how I think a temporary rent reduction could help us through this tough spot.

I haven't received a meaningful response. I did, however, receive a letter from the management company saying that the CAM charges have been adjusted for 2009 and our rent has increased $100 per month. So thats pretty much another day of business in a month that has no room for any extra days.

Update 1/9/09: It has been a month since my request, and no answer from the landlord.

Update 1/27/09. The landlord has agreed to a temporary, very short term rent reduction. Every little bit helps. We are now making plans for an exit sometime this spring.

Broken Record: GoDaddy cant keep my website online

I spent 32 minutes on the phone with GoDaddy today, at the end of which the man said they need to "escalate" the issue so my website can once again come back online. I was then told this escalation could take up to 72 hours. It has been down since 10pm. I now have my website monitoring alerts email GoDaddy support directly. They run every 2 minutes.

This is what Ive been staring at:

GoDaddy web hosting down again

Not that you can see this post now, but were my website up...

Got an alert that my website was down at 10:42pm. I immediately called GoDaddy, got a clueless support rep who hmmmed and hawed for a few minutes before putting me on hold to some crappy 1920s jazz music (the same freaking song every time) and which point he finally came back and said he needed to escalate it.

So it is 12:10am and Im going to bed. Sites are still not back online.

Update: It came back online at 3:40am. Total downtime: 5 hours.

UPDATE: It is 11:30AM, 8 hours after the server became responsive. I JUST got this email from GoDaddy:

Dear Sir/Madam,

Thank you for contacting Hosting Support.

We have been unable to recreate the issue described in this escalation. Your site is being served without issue at this time. If you are continuing to experience issues with your site, please reply to the message with the specific URL(s) where we can reproduce the issue.

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thank you,
Moe F.
Hosting Support

I give up on you people.