Site Hosting Robbers

[Ghome1971]

Great you all agree

Sorry I did have some problems when I moved my site from Netbenefits that why some of you could see my site and some couldn't.

By the way I'm a Gal not a Guy!

Does anyone know how I can get netbenefits to prove I really used the bandwidth they say I used.

[NormanRouxel]

Does anyone know how I can get netbenefits to prove I really used the bandwidth they say I used

If they told you that you used a certain bandwidth then it's up to them to provide evidence of this. Demand to see it and if they won't provide such info, then enquire into suing them.

[Edit]Looking at their help page I see the following

9. What Statistics are Available?
We provide a graphical statistics page showing who looked at what on your site and when. It's there to help you track what your site visitors are looking at, which can be very useful information! It is updated every night. You can find it at:

http://www.your.domain/stats/.

Your statistics are password protected so that nobody else can read them, so you'll need your ftp password to gain entry to the statistics area.

Detailed information on the statistics provided and examples can be found here.

For those who prefer to do their own analysis of the statistics, the raw server log files are also available via ftp from your web site. You'll find those in the "logs" directory. The full path to this directory is:

/home/<user id>/logs/

Log files are archived each month - you'll find a set of files from previous months which have been compressed with gzip for easier downloading. You can unzip them with winzip or similar utilities.

Ask for your archived log files to be sent to you.

[jont]

I am concerned that Actinic does not seem to care much about its users.

I have just been blinded by the generosity from Actinic over a recent issue I raised with them. They went above and beyond the call of duty to look after me .. a user of their product.

[Mike Hughes]

By the way I'm a Gal not a Guy!

Sorry Geraldine. That was me missing the obvious.

Mike

[Jan]

I host my affiliate scheme with Lyle at AllAffiliatePro as well (www.moleendsoftware.co.uk) the main websites are with Pinbrook), haven't had any problems in the last 12 months at all, very good value for money.

Regards,

[AllAffiliatePro]

Glad to help

Hi,
I'm glad we saved you so much money. To think you were paying our annual charge to netbenefit each month in extra bandwidth fees. When I checked their server there aren't using any kind of HTTP header compression which is a total waste of bandwidth.
I'm afraid NetBeneifts figures for yur bandwidth are genuine. Looking closer at your site I can see why. Your images aren't optimized. Even your small graphics are around 40KB. Loading your homepage alone is over 1/4MB. That's huge. It'll also be why it takes so long to refresh your site. I've emailed you some details of ways to optimize your images.


Lyle

[NormanRouxel]

Lyle is right! I just looked at http://stardustkids.co.uk/acatalog/cool_baby.html and most of the images are 75Kb. Saving the first one with moderate compression reduces it from &5Kb to 12Kb, 6 times smaller. As the images make up the bulk of that page the page is 6 times bigger than it need be.

Check you current server logs and see what bandwidth you're now using. If you're getting a similar amount of business to before then you'll be able to see whether your old ISP's charges make sense.

[Ghome1971]

Actinic and Netbenefits Relationship?

I will reduce the size of my images. It's a shame Netbenefits didn't mention this when I asked them why I was using so much bandwidth.

I agree Actinic is always wonderfully helpful. However, I have just received an email saying they use Netbenefits to host their site and Netbenefits is recommended by them because Actinic is easily to set up on their servers. My limited experience it is easy to load up on most servers. I have spend over £1300 on less than 1 years now. My new Host only charges me £150 per years. All the files are compressed and have have been given assistance in reducing my bandwidth. WHY DON'T NETBENEFITS COMPRESS THEIR FILE _ OH MAYBE BECAUSE THEY LIKE RIPPING OFF THEIR CUSTOMERS

Netbenefits is there to exploit all the inexperienced web site developers like me. Actinic is doing their customers a disservice by recommending them. How much do Actinic pay for Netbenefits hosting their site. If I'm paying over £1300 for a fledgling site Actinic must be paying thousands for bandwidth. Perhaps they get a discount for suggesting Netbenifits to their customers?

[chris ashdown]

Would you expect Ford to contact you, if you had brought a new Ford car, and they found you were doing 100,000 to 150,000 miles in the first year from their service records

The tech help is there to solve tech problems using their systems, not to analise what you are doing wrong on your site that is otherwise working OK

I have nothing to do with netbenifits by the way and dont use them myself

[pinbrook]

I agree with Chris, its not Netbenefits problem that you are inexperienced.

They host 1000's of sites, some will go from zero B/w to loads in a week, it is the clients responsibility to keep tabs. You obvoiusly were sufficiently on the ball to notice there was a problem.

The situation you are in is very typical of www/ecommerce etc etc. You don't have the expertise to go it alone, if you do go it alone you are going to make errors and learn from them.

You choose whether to pay for advice, where hopefully the cost of the advise to going to pay for itself, or you learn the hard way.

Sorry to sound blunt, its not a personal dig..

[Ghome1971]

Are Netbenefits Responsible?

Don't forget I only used Netbenefits because Actinic recommended them. I trusted Actinic's recommendation based on Actinics reputation and excellent customer support. Actinic should know new web site designers make mistakes on bandwidth and be careful who they promote.

I understand Netbenefits do not automatically flag up incorrect bandwidth use. However, I specifically asked Netbenefits why I was using so much bandwidth and they did not mention it may be due to my images. They said it was attributed to traffic visiting my site. In addition, my current host says I am using 6GB yet Netbenefits charged me in Jan for 12GB. Netbenefits are not compressing files and this alone is irresponsible and unfair.

I started hosting with Netbenefits at £250 per year giving around 2GB. Due to excessive charges of £40/GB and I had to upgrade to their MOST COMPREHENSIVE £650 per year for Netbenefits. £650 only gives you 5GB of uncompressed bandwidth.

Actinic are recommending them to idiots like me. Why don't they just recommend a company with reasonble charges?

[chris ashdown]

They said it was attributed to traffic visiting my site. In addition, my current host says I am using 6GB yet Netbenefits charged me in Jan for 12GB. Netbenefits are not compressing files and this alone is irresponsible and unfair.

The answer is right it was due to customer traffic downloading your large files

When you have modified your site hopefully you will find your usage going down

I dont know if compressing the files makes much difference you would have to ask the forum.

Actinic are free to reccomend any company who meets their criteria's but at the end of the day you are running a business and are responsible for all the actions of the business, you cannot just blame someone else when things go bottom up,if you dont understand the terms and conditions ask for more details, if you want compression ask if they do it

At the end of the day the Forum is here to help you in all ways with advice and assistance but ISP's do expect you to know what you want and tech support is related to price in most cases

[RuralWeb]

Actinic should know new web site designers make mistakes on bandwidth and be careful who they promote.

Even though I think Netbenefits are a poor host they cannot be held responsible for the technical construction of a website. Your images are HUGE and I can see why you had problems - time spent optimising these will reduce your usage a lot.

This problem would have occured whatever host you had used.

[Mike Hughes]

Maybe I'm the only one who has some sympathy for Geraldine on this. Yes, it looks like she did use the bandwidth because of her website design, but given that she asked the support people why the bandwidth usage was so high it would have been nice if they'd actually taken a look and given her some help.

As to the comment about tech support being related to price. Geraldine was paying top dollar for her hosting and could have reasonably expected to get some decent support for that. I'm pretty sure that the forum members who've posted on this would have taken a look if geraldine had asked them the same question. The lesson to learn here is that smaller outfits will always give a much more personal service than larger ones.

The compression side of things is a bit of a red herring here. Yes, HTML compression saves on some bandwidth usage but it doesn't compress images and as these are the vast majority of the page size here it wouldn't have had much impact.

Mike

[pinbrook]

i think we all have sympathy.....

but the point that I was trying to make was that is wasn't NB's fault as geraldine was implying, the problem has its roots in G's inexperience.

Yes you are correct, if the same question had been asked in this forum, the correct advice would have been more forthcoming.

Both of the above come after the lesson has been learnt and now with the benefit of hindsight.

I sent a long PM to G (after she contacted me earlier this afternoon) to explain what had happened and why, so I hope now that she at least understands the situation and is able to say Yes, I was daft, I didn't know, but now I do.

The up side is, she has now taken steps to rectify the situation.