Tag: website disasters

Thanks to Purehost and with a little help from me (I can’t shrug off all guilt onto Purehost…much as I’d like to) my father’s website was totally crippled during the short time people come to his website to make their Xmas orders.

Now my dad is also a little to blame,too.He should have alerted that me something was wrong when he noticed that the order rate dried up(sometime around Dec 3rd) the same time I launched the new paypal integrated shop,along with a new site and blog design. But it was not until yesterday the 14th with Christmas less than 2 weeks away that he let me in on this fact.

Despite my best efforts not to serve up 404’s due to the new design and site restructure(I’d used the url redirect tool Purehost offers, for each and every url that was being retired)-searches from Google were serving up blank pages.Not even 404 messages. Just blank white screens.Because I had directory browsing turned on-the browser went to the directory but couldn’t find the file. Of course it couldn’t. I had moved it. But I had used the URI redirect tool! I had taken every measure I thought I had at my disposal to protect my dad’s site from losing visitors.

Continue reading Another Purehost Disaster

Want to hear the sad history of my dad’s Website?

We all make mistakes and the biggest one was the choice of Purehost.
Oh wait-my dad never actually chose Purehost.
That’s right-he was automatically switched to them when his Dell- provided- with -computer- purchase- free site was bought by Purehost. All customers unlucky enough to have a Dell hosted Website found themselves being told that their once free site would now cost 200 bucks a year. It was like it or eff off and get your own host.

My dad paid up. And he stayed and stayed. His site made no money yet he paid money he couldn’t afford for it. My dad isn’t the type to throw good money away after bad but in this case he has. For YEARS. I think since 1998 if you can believe it.

Maybe it was the fearful “early days” of the web that froze my dad into this very bad situation. Whatever it was I was too busy working in retail after getting a useless education in fine art to know about or care. Jump 12 years ahead
Continue reading Overpriced Hosts

” Anyone can write a book. Anyone can publish a book. It takes a genius to sell a book “
-Alfred Knopf

Today I read an email from my dad about a discussion I opened on how happy he was with his site. I was never 100% satisfied with it.
My dad is a print man. He didn’t like the font I picked or the punctuation mistakes.I just knew it was still slightly confused and had too much repeat content. I also knew that as an online shopping experience it didn’t cut it. But I didn’t feel I had the right to change the content of the site.Sure, I took new photos and connected a lot of them to LightBox. I made the site look more up to date. I changed it from static HTML pages to PHP…but lack of bells and whistles weren’t the problem. The site’s goal is to sell books. We don’t make it easy to sell books from the Web site. Game Over.

This is entirely due to the fact that on his host it wasn’t possible to have a mySQL database connection until a few weeks ago. This cut us out from using ZenCart or PHPShop or Cubecart. So we made due with the host’s store building program (Shopsite Starter) that only allows you to have 15 products for sale in the store at any time. Talk about limiting!
My dad has more than 50 titles for sale. I tried to convince him to upgrade to the second level of Shopsite which cost the same as what one month of hosting costs-doubling his costs. He balked. I don’t blame him. For what he pays he could have (mt) Media Temple’s awesome service. But switching an entire site is a big job as everyone knows. I am seriously going to suggest it, however.
Hosting has advanced and the days of hosts being able to charge business prices while providing totally crap service are pretty much gone.
Until we can sell every single title from the same shopping cart service, the site will remain confusing and confused. I mean, it is hard enough these days to sell books. Harder even still to sell obscure niche literature. Which is why we have to provide the clearest, easiest shopping experience to my dad’s customers.

Have any advice? Is it better to offer only 15 books for sale (but then what to do with the 40 other books on the site, just not even show them at all?). Should I chuck Shopsite and Mercantec and only use Paypal? I’d love to steer clear of Paypal for the time being.

Should I make the jump to (mt)?

I can’t believe it. A month ago my hosting nemesis, Purehost, performed a server upgrade. I sort of read their email about it but did not grasp what they were babbling about when they mentioned this upgrade would improve site performance.

Curious, I checked my dad’s site that I designed and web master for,and saw his old index.html page up. Not good. I guess they somehow put it back. So I took it down. The site ran slow as molasses and you couldn’t login to the blog. Checked the file permissions. They all had wierd capitalized ST’s in them.

WTF?

I uploaded new copies of the same files and the login problem was fixed. But I was logged out if I clicked on any part of the blog functions.Weird. I decided to remove all the session_save_paths I had to put in to make any script with session_start(); work .That did the trick. I removed it from the CMS as well. And now the site is chugging along fast as ever.

Great success!

This makes me wonder if now we can have better stuff for the site.Stuff that works! What a concept.I hope my days of purehost-bashing may be over…we shall see.