Bone In The Throat

This is one clearly destined for the annals of “how to really piss off your customer”

I’ve got someone for whom I put together a web site.

What I built is much nicer than the site they’d built using their web hosts “Web Design” package.

Honestly, the “web designer” used by their hosting site was barely functional. While it did produce a web site; Well you know the old saying about Shakespeare? The one  about 10,000 monkeys with typewriters and 1,000 years???

Lets just say what the web designer output was less than pretty. 

That my friend could make the site look decent at all is a tribute to a lot of patience and time spent on their part.

Had my friend NOT spent all that time and energy his website would have looked like a rabid, syphilitic, palsied, drunken howler monkey, on acid had cobbled together some HTML. Or the great technologist Hillary Clinton, whichever floats your boat.

But that’s not the worst of it.

See, my friend was paying for this… Where things turned due South was when we tried to upload the site I built, to his host.

Turns out that even though he “Upgraded” the web hosting service wouldn’t allow FTP access. Additionally, they provided no way at all to simply upload HTML files. He asked again, and again he upgraded his service giving them MORE money and still FTP was denied.

FTP is one of the basic underpinnings of the internet. Virtually every operating system has the ability to FTP built right in. You have to specifically block this ability. In most modern Operating Systems, FTP access is blocked by default by the manufacturer, but during installation there is usually some question about enabling it, and a couple of other things. Many average consumers answer “No” or they skip the question. This leaves the service? protocol? (I honestly forget which FTP is classified as,) turned off and thus doesn’t leave a security hole open. If the consumer find they need FTP later, they can enable it. Often, if the customer has purchased an FTP front-end package, (Something that pretties up the service) during installation of the package, FTP is enabled.

Then I tried talking to his hosting site, and WOW! What an unmitigated cluster fuck!

I could log into the site as my friend, but when I tried making changes, I was sent to another site, and another site.

I’m not just talking about different webpages here, I’m talking about entirely different web sites all of which you have to log onto independently.

I started out logging into something called OptimalWebhosting.com. But that wasn’t the real host, they were called Wild West something something.com

But they weren’t the actual web builder people, and the web builder people weren’t the security people, and at one point godaddy.com popped up performing some function.

As we tried dealing with these people it became clear that there was no single entity in absolute control of his domain name.

Since there were so many people with fingers in the pie, nailing someone down for answers, getting something fixed, or getting anyone to take responsibility for anything, proved impossible.

My friend said he was completely tired of dealing with these people.

I said, “I think I can help.”

Famous last words!

I contacted my hosting service HostGator.com.

I’ve been very happy with them and their service over the past 3 years. In that time I’ve always been able to get ahold of someone that knew a lot more about some of this stuff than I do. I’ve always closed a chat, or hung up the phone thinking, “Dang! It’s really nice to talk to folks who are on the ball and have a ‘can do’ attitude.”

So I called them, I asked if my friend’s domain could be transferred to HostGator, how much, and how long?

The answer was, “Yes we can transfer the domain, it’ll cost $20 and once we have control of the domain name it usually takes only a few hours.”

I said, “Great! Clicked on the little transfer button, entered the domain name, and told my friend to authorize the transfer when he got an email about it.”

That was almost thirty days ago.

We went down the rabbit hole of politics, greed, stupidity, and really shitty corporate policy. 

Optimalwebhosting, A.K.A. Wild West Hosting, dragged its feet at every possible turn.

They refused to answer HostGator, they allowed transfer tokens to expire requiring that those tokens be recreated twice! They annoyed my friend and whined because he was leaving them, but wouldn’t expedite his leaving and wouldn’t correct the issue that was causing him to leave. 

They finally figured out that they wanted yet MORE money to provide FTP services that would allow him to upload a website. They also wanted to charge him by the web page!

So lets take a look at this business model shall we? 

14.95 Yearly domain registration.

75.00 Yearly hosting service using their web builder (rabid, syphilitic, palsied, drunken howler monkey, on acid, HTML code.)

25.00 to upgrade site to have more web pages. (YET MORE, rabid, syphilitic, palsied, drunken howler monkey, on acid, HTML code.)

Grand total… 114.95 to STILL have no ability to upload a custom site, and have crappy support spread across who knows how many different  companies.

Uh NO! This is not value for the money… this is death by a thousand cuts. This kind of billing structure makes you look like you’re running your business on retired or defective equipment that you’ve cobbled together out of dumpsters in Silicon Valley. 

As of today, it looks like the transfer may finally be nearing completion of ‘the domain transfer from hell’. I’m not holding my breath, I suspect that Wild West Hosting has something else up its collective sleeve. They’ve gotta have at least one more monkey wrench to toss into the works, it’s their nature.

Bottom line,

If you see Optimal Web Hosting, or Wild West Hosting offering really cheap domains and webhosting… 

RUN AWAY!