Site Hosting Robbers

[SusanF]

i Yes, I was daft, I didn't know, but now I do.

Jo I think you are being quite unfair to Geraldine here. She didn't have all the knowledge required, that's true, but very few people setting out to use Actinic on their own without professional help do. We all have to learn through our mistakes and that's not being daft. Actinic is marketed as being an e-commerce product that anyone can use. I'm not sure that's actually true. For a business person with no in-depth IT knowledge it must be a rel uphill struggle - and these are the very people who will happily follow Actinic's recommendations on hosting or anything else. It's just a shame Geraldine waited so long before coming onto the forum here where you're one of the main providers of excellent and unbiased help for all.

[pinbrook]

I'm quite happy to take back the comment about being daft, it was one of those tongue in cheek comments that didn't translate to print. I didn't intend to upset anyone.

[RuralWeb]

Actinic is marketed as being an e-commerce product that anyone can use. I'm not sure that's actually true

.

I think this is particularly true in the area of adding images. I am sure that it is possible to design a very simple upgrade/plugin/add on that will take a raw image and resize and compress ( optimise ) to fit into a product template eg 150 pixels wide and 10K. Dreamweaver has a photo album plugin which does a very similar job when batch processing multiple images.

The idea would be that you put all your images into a folder and then add them to products as normal but selecting the size you wanted the image displayed, Actinic would take care of all the donkey work. It partly already does it, you can have resized images in the search results at a selectable size.

I find that most people only think about images when they have made the jump into e-commerce and then have major problems, something like this would make it simpler rather than having to learn Elements etc.

[NormanRouxel]

Geraldine's not alone in getting caught out regarding image sizes.

I had a quick search and I see that I've noticed other sites with over-large images at least 19 times.

And those were probably pages I was looking at for some completely different reason and just happened to pick up on slow load times.

Such errors were especially noticeable a year or so ago, before I got broadband as it's a lot easy to spot slow loading pages via dial-up. I'll bet I'm missing lots of similar problem pages nowadays.

[jont]

It's just a shame Geraldine waited so long before coming onto the forum here where you're one of the main providers of excellent and unbiased help for all.

I am still amazed at the lack of promotion the forum gets on the Actinic site.. as far as I can see there is just the 1 text link in the support section. You would imagine greater advertising / awareness of the forum would cut down on a huge amount of telephone support calls for basic questions from newbies.

As with any new venture you need to research what you are doing and with whom you are doing it with. The issue with e-commerce and web design in general is the complexity and unfriendliness of it all to most users and it may as well be an alien language.

Actinic recommended a host and they in turn did their duty - they hosted the Actinic software with no issues. Job well done. Unless in contravention of the ISP or Actinic's terms of use (hosting pornography etc) it is the users rights to do what they want with the hosting package and software. If that is displaying 30mb images per page then that is the users right.

The host should have taken more of a helping line in identifying what was causing the high bandwidths - even if it was a simple text book list of areas to look into. That would have at least pointed Geraldine in the right area to do more investigation, reading on the subject, searching forums, web advice etc etc. They did fail her miserably.

As Mike says - it is often the smaller people who will go the extra mile to assist - they generally have more to lose if you bin them off. Better than that is the advice from a wide range of experts in all fields on this and countless other forums that is given out free of charge and without recognition. Dissemination of information - the true role of the internet.

[leehack]

Can't blame the hosts for the failings in the website. True they could have been a bit more proactive and helpful, however this doesn't mean they didn't provide the service which was paid for. Proactive and helpful companies are few and far between, they have only fallen into the same bracket of most in the country.

Anyone who has been remotely in touch with websites over the past few years of growth knows that page loading times have always been a bone of contention and that images can take a long time to download.

If my virus software runs out today and i dont renew it and get hit by a virus in 2 weeks time that kills my system, should i knock McAfee for not letting me know a bad virus was round the corner?

The point of this forum is a point of contact for help and advice. Had G been in here earlier she would have undoubtedly saved some money and learnt some stuff (like i have). I have done some daft things and learnt from them and thats all that counts. We are all human and we have all made many daft mistakes, Jo wasn't being vindictive or disrespectful and G. was daft - lets not take the forum down the "political correctness" road folks.

How many times does a new poster come into the forum about a problem on their website and fails to post the URL as though everyone is telepathic. Most regulars will look at this and say under their breath "FFS not another one, post your URL please". This is a daft mistake but many of us have made the same daft mistake. Daftness is not a crime, it means you didn't know something but have probably learnt it now.

[Jan]

Daftness is not a crime

Phew :-)

Regards,

[pinbrook]

it is often the smaller people who will go the extra mile to assist - they generally have more to lose if you bin them off

Whilst it is true that a smaller operator may have more to lose when they lose a client, the other thing to consider is the personal touch that smaller operators offer.

This is the best selling point the small operator has, thus the best weapon when in competition with the big guys.

Jan, LOL

[jont]

the other thing to consider is the personal touch that smaller operators offer. This is the best selling point the small operator has, thus the best weapon when in competition with the big guys.

Yep - it is the intimate / personal knowledge a smaller operator can gain about the client that makes all the difference for me .... liken it to buying a bespoke suit from Saville Row compared to buying off-the-shelf from Asda. Economies of scale do not always translate into a better level and quality of service.

In the RW I always try and buy from the smaller, local companies (especialy for business) as whilst I know it may cost a little bit extra I know from experience if something stops it will be resolved much more efficiently and quickly ... what price do you pay to keep your business running?

Despite the best efforts of the big guys to blow us smaller operators out of the water there has been and always will be a need and room for the smaller specialists to operate. The number of registered forum users is testament to that.

[B_Online]

“I had spent over £1000 in less than 6 months in hosting a small site”

For this amount of money I would have at least expected a far more professional customer service response and at least an EXPLAINED diagnostic report or some kind of information on where my site could be improved as regards to my bandwidth…

“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”

Answer would be No you wouldn’t expect them to contact anyone, but you would expect them to clarify what the problem was when a paying customer asked…

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

if I asked Ford what was wrong with my car I would be very annoyed if they said “its because you use it” I want to know what the problem was and how I could fix it, most car companies give free quotes etc and I’m sure any car company would give a detailed report for a sum of over £1000. If I had a car that was costing me far too much, I would not expect to have to go to a forum to find out what was going wrong with my car. Whilst I am more than capable of driving the car, I would not be expected to repair the anti-fluffle shuffle valve! It’s a RIP-OFF. (Anti-Fluffle Shuffle, that’s a real part of a car, right???...I hope so because that’s cost me in the past£££)

Lets not beat around the bush here NetBeneifts are not going out of their way, they are not travelling around the world and running up and down ladders carrying bricks for this information, this is their business and to give out no advice is bad customer service at a minimum, to over charge in addition is outright dishonesty, I use Techno Webs and I have on many occasions had more support than I had paid for and I would recommend them as a great alternative as they are pro-active and also contribute in these forums free of charge.

An image control script added to Actinic sounds like a good idea, a very useful option I’m sure. Many forum members have stated in the past, “you get what you PAY for” well that’s not always true, especially in this case!

[RuralWeb]

expected a far more professional customer service response

This is the exact reason i moved 7 sites from them, the customer support is useless and their charges are very high.

[jont]

if I asked Ford what was wrong with my car I would be very annoyed if they said “its because you use it” I want to know what the problem was and how I could fix it

Always difficult to draw comparisons between "regular" products and services provided by an ISP.

It is like renting storage space (bandwidth) for your products in a secure lockup. You buy the space but quickly fill it up. You buy another space - and that fills up.

Does the space supplier have to tell you if you stacked them in a certain way or used different shaped boxes you would get more into the space? Certainly not. The space is working. It is not faulty.

You either pay for more space or look into alternative options - other suppliers, different storage solutions or seek the advice of a storage specialist on how to maximise what you have and what you are doing.

[B_Online]

Hi Jont, I think the problem here is Ghome1971 is being well over charged, whether its inline with Netbenefits terms and conditions or not, that’s plain to see she is paying too much!!!… but also she has ASKED Netbenefits what the problem is, but yet instead of being given the fault she is charge more each time, and how could they NOT have a clue what the problem is?... this is the RIP-OFF, if they can’t give a correct diagnosis of what the problem is, then in my opinion they shouldn’t be charging extra for it, why would you pay more to a company for something that they don’t even know what they are charging you for, of course they do know, and are either deliberately withholding this information or have dimly-lit ‘numb nuts’ working on customer support, either way I would not recommend or send my business there. There can’t be any denying that Ghome1971 has paid far too much and received no help from those who took her money? £1300 for a year’s hosting and still had no idea it was the optimisation of her images. This is the modern equivalent of the ‘highway robber’ hiding not behind a mask but the internet.

I use the car service example as this was brought up by Chris Ashdown.

[NormanRouxel]

An image control script added to Actinic sounds like a good idea, a very useful option I’m sure.

Or even a much simpler warning when an image dimensions and file size seem inappropriate.

It also would also be easy to accumulate the total page size and warn if that seems overlarge. Indeed this could be a useful reminder for sites that forget to turn on Compact HTML/CGI.

[Jan]

I am writing a little tool at the moment to help with catalog developement, the first version will consist mainly of reports on catalog sections and products, along with a spell checker and probably a text find and replace option, I will add a report to this that lists images that are over a certain size -

1) what image size would you suggest having as the default warning level?
2) are there any ohter diagnostics reports of this sort that might be useful

Regards,