![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
The first domino...
...fell on Friday. I begin to suspect that the end result will be a complete revamp of our hosted Web presence.
BigFolio.com is a company that hosts Web sites for professional photographers. They were recommended to me by someone who, it turned out, was Not a Reliable Witness on any front, let alone when recommending services that might have paid him for the favor. And I, flush with dreams of making a decent living at this thing that I really enjoyed and which got me out into the woods on a regular basis, was perfectly situated for the sales pitch.
Sure, $500 for setup fees to use their pre-existing site templates (optimized for hard-coded to 640x480 screens!) seemed a bit excessive, and the $55/month hosting fees were steep, but I'd only have to sell one or two images a month, and I'd be money ahead, right? And it's not like the fees would tax the budget particularly anyway. We could afford it.
The issues started as soon as they cashed the check, though. Email hosting was included, but it turned out that administration of email accounts was not--the only way to change a freakin' password was to submit a help ticket to their support team, and hope they got to it in some kind of reasonable timeframe. Call me crazy, but that process is none of timely, secure, nor scalable. I found it unacceptable, but I'd already paid the five hundred bucks, and committed (if I remember correctly) to at least a year of hosting, maybe two. That's a huge sunk cost to overcome, so I was in a mood to be accommodating.
But not too accommodating. I complained, and though they never seemed to understand why I had a problem with a) telling them what I wanted my email passwords to be and b) waiting for them to get around to changing them, they did eventually cave and give me an account on their administrative site. Of course, they also asked me not to touch anything except my own email accounts, so obviously "security" to them was just a word between "sectarian" and "sedition" in the dictionary. But hey, the security (or lack thereof) of other folks' sites is of no concern to me, so I grudgingly accepted the workaround and dutifully continued to shell out my monthly 55 bucks. (Hey, it's a tax deduction!)
Fast forward six or seven years. During that time, M. and I discussed the value/cost proposition several times, with both of us realizing that $55 a month was a hell of a lot to be paying to support a business Web site that had not yet facilitated a single sale. But neither of us had time to work up a site of our own, or even to figure out how to use the tools on our personal hosting provider to add the business site to that account, so we continued to do nothing.
This fall, however, BigFolio.com went through a migration to a different hosting service, and the email accounts had to go with. They sent me a notification about it, but I didn't have time to do anything about it until last Friday, when I tried to set up my email client to access the new servers. Turned out the help site didn't have all the necessary information, so I sent BigFolio support a note asking them to set up the accounts for my access and point me at the admin page where I could manage them. They did the former and sent me temporary passwords, but apparently ignored the request for the admin pointer. I reiterated that request, and was told that they don't do that, that I have to submit a request to change email passwords through their support ticket system. I pointed out yet again that this was unacceptable, and reminded them that we'd worked out a solution previously.
This time, however, they were unwilling to give me even that much, and suggested that I sign up for Google Apps in order to get my email functionality. I didn't point out that, if I didn't want to give them my email passwords, what would make them think I'd be willing to give them to freaking Google? I did, however, tell them I wasn't interested in Google Apps, and could they please cancel my account. They said, "what do yo mean cancel your account? Do you mean cancel your email?" I said, no, cancel my entire hosting account. "But whyyyyy?" they asked. (Not literally, but they did ask for clarification on why I was canceling.) I reiterated my position that direct customer control of the customer's accounts was basic functionality granted by nearly every hosting provider in existence, and that any hosting provider that did not grant such access was unprofessional and unacceptable and please cancel my account. Finally, they handed me off to the person who cancels accounts, and aside from a particularly fatuous final response from them saying they were sorry to see me go and that I was welcome back any time*, we were done.
Or so I thought.
The vast majority of the exchange described above happened on my iPhone as we were driving to the airport for our vacation. Yesterday, when I finally got home, I decided to check gmimages.com to see if they had, as promised, taken it down, or if they'd maybe left it up briefly and I could wait until this weekend to transfer it over to the new placeholder.
Turns out they'd taken the site down, but they had replaced it with some other photographer's site! The fsilly hell?
So this morning, I hit our other hosting provider (Dotster.com, in case you're interested), who also happens to be our domain registrar, and started the process of setting up a placeholder page over there, and updating the DNS servers associated with the domain to point at the placeholder. (Unfortunately, I hit an error while doing that, and until and unless Dotster gets around to responding to the ticket I opened to resolve that, I'm stuck with BigFolio's DNS entries.)
I also sent BigFolio some more email, explaining that that domain was mine and they had no authorization to put anything up there except my content, and please remove the unauthorized content immediately.
Their response was, and I quote it in its entirety, punctuation and all: "sorry, but this just means you need to point your name servers away from our server. this is done at your domain company. the quickest way to take care of it would probably be to park the domain until you have another site setup to use"
I said, again quoting in entirety: "I am aware that I need to move the name servers. I have that in process. I am objecting to the fact that, in the interim, you are currently publishing content under my name. This is not acceptable. Stop it."
That finally did the trick; http://www.gmimages.com now returns a "server not found" error. Never thought I'd be happy to see an error when people try to load my Web site, but there you go.
And if Dotster ever responds to my request about updating the DNS servers, maybe I'll be able to get that placeholder up, and then it's just a question of waiting until this summer, when I should have time to actually put together a site for myself (or work with someone who knows what they're doing). But since it's been six and a half hours since I made that request, and all I've seen from Dotster is the automated "we got your request" email, maybe I'll be looking to move the personal site and domain registration as well (we're not real happy with the lack of support for the tools that Dotster provides, either). At least BigFolio responds quickly to support requests. Their responses might be useless, but at least you know right away what a waste of time they are.
So, if you're considering BigFolio as a hosting site for your photography business, save yourself a lot of hassle and annoyance and find somebody else.
*The first of which I doubt, because in the entire time I was their customer, I never saw any evidence that they even knew I was there, except when I first got there and we went round and round about account admin access, and this final flurry when they demonstrated that they still had no clue how to do the job they were contracting with their customers to do. Apparently, none of their other customers (or not enough of them) had any idea how BigFolio was supposed to be doing their job either. And the second of which showed a complete disregard for the reasons I was giving for leaving.
ETA: Looks like the folks at Dotster read my blog. They just sent me a response, it was informative and correct, and it solved my problem.
BigFolio.com is a company that hosts Web sites for professional photographers. They were recommended to me by someone who, it turned out, was Not a Reliable Witness on any front, let alone when recommending services that might have paid him for the favor. And I, flush with dreams of making a decent living at this thing that I really enjoyed and which got me out into the woods on a regular basis, was perfectly situated for the sales pitch.
Sure, $500 for setup fees to use their pre-existing site templates (
The issues started as soon as they cashed the check, though. Email hosting was included, but it turned out that administration of email accounts was not--the only way to change a freakin' password was to submit a help ticket to their support team, and hope they got to it in some kind of reasonable timeframe. Call me crazy, but that process is none of timely, secure, nor scalable. I found it unacceptable, but I'd already paid the five hundred bucks, and committed (if I remember correctly) to at least a year of hosting, maybe two. That's a huge sunk cost to overcome, so I was in a mood to be accommodating.
But not too accommodating. I complained, and though they never seemed to understand why I had a problem with a) telling them what I wanted my email passwords to be and b) waiting for them to get around to changing them, they did eventually cave and give me an account on their administrative site. Of course, they also asked me not to touch anything except my own email accounts, so obviously "security" to them was just a word between "sectarian" and "sedition" in the dictionary. But hey, the security (or lack thereof) of other folks' sites is of no concern to me, so I grudgingly accepted the workaround and dutifully continued to shell out my monthly 55 bucks. (Hey, it's a tax deduction!)
Fast forward six or seven years. During that time, M. and I discussed the value/cost proposition several times, with both of us realizing that $55 a month was a hell of a lot to be paying to support a business Web site that had not yet facilitated a single sale. But neither of us had time to work up a site of our own, or even to figure out how to use the tools on our personal hosting provider to add the business site to that account, so we continued to do nothing.
This fall, however, BigFolio.com went through a migration to a different hosting service, and the email accounts had to go with. They sent me a notification about it, but I didn't have time to do anything about it until last Friday, when I tried to set up my email client to access the new servers. Turned out the help site didn't have all the necessary information, so I sent BigFolio support a note asking them to set up the accounts for my access and point me at the admin page where I could manage them. They did the former and sent me temporary passwords, but apparently ignored the request for the admin pointer. I reiterated that request, and was told that they don't do that, that I have to submit a request to change email passwords through their support ticket system. I pointed out yet again that this was unacceptable, and reminded them that we'd worked out a solution previously.
This time, however, they were unwilling to give me even that much, and suggested that I sign up for Google Apps in order to get my email functionality. I didn't point out that, if I didn't want to give them my email passwords, what would make them think I'd be willing to give them to freaking Google? I did, however, tell them I wasn't interested in Google Apps, and could they please cancel my account. They said, "what do yo mean cancel your account? Do you mean cancel your email?" I said, no, cancel my entire hosting account. "But whyyyyy?" they asked. (Not literally, but they did ask for clarification on why I was canceling.) I reiterated my position that direct customer control of the customer's accounts was basic functionality granted by nearly every hosting provider in existence, and that any hosting provider that did not grant such access was unprofessional and unacceptable and please cancel my account. Finally, they handed me off to the person who cancels accounts, and aside from a particularly fatuous final response from them saying they were sorry to see me go and that I was welcome back any time*, we were done.
Or so I thought.
The vast majority of the exchange described above happened on my iPhone as we were driving to the airport for our vacation. Yesterday, when I finally got home, I decided to check gmimages.com to see if they had, as promised, taken it down, or if they'd maybe left it up briefly and I could wait until this weekend to transfer it over to the new placeholder.
Turns out they'd taken the site down, but they had replaced it with some other photographer's site! The fsilly hell?
So this morning, I hit our other hosting provider (Dotster.com, in case you're interested), who also happens to be our domain registrar, and started the process of setting up a placeholder page over there, and updating the DNS servers associated with the domain to point at the placeholder. (Unfortunately, I hit an error while doing that, and until and unless Dotster gets around to responding to the ticket I opened to resolve that, I'm stuck with BigFolio's DNS entries.)
I also sent BigFolio some more email, explaining that that domain was mine and they had no authorization to put anything up there except my content, and please remove the unauthorized content immediately.
Their response was, and I quote it in its entirety, punctuation and all: "sorry, but this just means you need to point your name servers away from our server. this is done at your domain company. the quickest way to take care of it would probably be to park the domain until you have another site setup to use"
I said, again quoting in entirety: "I am aware that I need to move the name servers. I have that in process. I am objecting to the fact that, in the interim, you are currently publishing content under my name. This is not acceptable. Stop it."
That finally did the trick; http://www.gmimages.com now returns a "server not found" error. Never thought I'd be happy to see an error when people try to load my Web site, but there you go.
And if Dotster ever responds to my request about updating the DNS servers, maybe I'll be able to get that placeholder up, and then it's just a question of waiting until this summer, when I should have time to actually put together a site for myself (or work with someone who knows what they're doing). But since it's been six and a half hours since I made that request, and all I've seen from Dotster is the automated "we got your request" email, maybe I'll be looking to move the personal site and domain registration as well (we're not real happy with the lack of support for the tools that Dotster provides, either). At least BigFolio responds quickly to support requests. Their responses might be useless, but at least you know right away what a waste of time they are.
So, if you're considering BigFolio as a hosting site for your photography business, save yourself a lot of hassle and annoyance and find somebody else.
*The first of which I doubt, because in the entire time I was their customer, I never saw any evidence that they even knew I was there, except when I first got there and we went round and round about account admin access, and this final flurry when they demonstrated that they still had no clue how to do the job they were contracting with their customers to do. Apparently, none of their other customers (or not enough of them) had any idea how BigFolio was supposed to be doing their job either. And the second of which showed a complete disregard for the reasons I was giving for leaving.
ETA: Looks like the folks at Dotster read my blog. They just sent me a response, it was informative and correct, and it solved my problem.