Skip to content

{ Monthly Archives } November 2006

Talk to Phil

I had a call a couple of days ago from Phil in customer service at Netfirms. Apparently, someone noticed that not only did I move my wine club’s website off Netfirms after only 2 months of a 12-month contract, but I documented the entire debacle on this blog in language that was not at all complimentary to Netfirms. Phil called, he said, to give me someone human to rant at about this; to give him a ton of credit, not only was he very calm and professional about the entire thing, but he didn’t try to make excuses as to why their performance sucks. He even expressed some frustration over the permalinks issue (which was a functionality issue, and not my main reason for leaving), saying that it had been fixed about a year ago, but now is no longer working.

I explained that I was really looking for some sort of refund, since I believe that they misrepresented themselves in terms of their server performance and stability, especially around MySQL and WordPress. He thought that probably wasn’t possible since we were past the 30-day refund period (which I hadn’t even known existed, or I would have exercised it), but promised to have a chat with the billing department. I asked for the name of the VP of customer service (it’s Sandra Yick, based at their Toronto headquarters) and said that I’d be writing her to help resolve this.

Whether invoking the threat of escalating to the VP, or whether Phil just did a great job of acting as my advocate, he called me back later the same day and said that they were providing a refund for 10 months of the contract. Today, a credit came through for an amount that is apparently 10 months worth of hosting less two domain registrations (one for the year extension on my existing domain when I transferred to them, and one “free” domain that they encouraged me to register when I first joined, without explaining that I’d be stuck paying for it if I left even though I didn’t really want it in the first place). It’s about 65% of the amount that I paid, but considering the lower cost of hosting at either 8i or GoDaddy for a year, it’s enough to cover my hosting elsewhere. This doesn’t pay me back for all my own time and frustration that went into this, of course, but paying for the alternative hosting provider that I was forced to switch to is probably the best that I could hope for under the circumstances. Thanks, Phil, for being so helpful with all this — you were a star.

So if you’re a Netfirms customer and you’re unhappy with things, I have three words for you: talk to Phil.

2006 11 17 netfirms Comments (0)

Mozart’s Requiem

Saturday night, Pat and I headed uptown to hear Mozart’s Requiem sung by All The King’s Voices at Our Lady of Perpetual Help church. For $15, definitely the best concert deal in town, and the choir was very good. They were fronted by four (I assume paid) soloists – Kimberley Briggs (soprano), Carolynne Godin (alto), Martin Houtman (tenor) and Daniel Godin (bass) — and the Talisker Players chamber orchestra.

I especially liked how the program contained all the lyrics in Latin, presumably in case we wanted to sing along. ;)

2006 11 14 culture Comments (0)

Don’t eat meat, except for these healthy kabobs

I just saw this unfortunate juxtaposition of headlines in my newsreader, both published in the G&M health news within a few hours of each other:

Unfortunate headline juxtaposition

Isn’t an editor supposed to check for things like this?

2006 11 14 health Comments (3)

Testing out 8i

I finally moved my wine club’s site and blog off Netfirms (which sucks) and onto 8i Networks, where I’ve paid for only one month in order to figure out whether they are going to work for us. There were a few minor hiccups in the setup, such as me somehow not receiving the welcome email that told me how to login and set things up, but everything seems to be working now.

In their favour, the performance is hugely better. I can now consider setting up the entire site on WordPress, which allows me to update it from anywhere, since the MySQL performance has been fine so far.

Email is a bit problematic.

  • I still don’t have their SMTP server working, and am using Sympatico’s SMTP for sending mail from Outlook, which is fine from home but won’t work if I’m travelling with my laptop.
  • I’ve turned spam filtering on, but it doesn’t seem to be working. In fact, this is a global setting (turn on SpamAssassin) for all accounts, rather than allowing each user to set their own parameters. Considering the amount of spam that goes to the public email address for this site, that’s unacceptable.
  • The webmail client provides a choice of SquirrelMail and Horde, neither of which I really like.
  • The webmail uses port 2095, which could be blocked by some firewalls or proxy servers. I have complete control over my network, but there’s no promising that this is going to work in every internet cafe that I visit when I’m travelling.
  • It doesn’t seem like it’s possible to forward a copy of all email to another account, either from the admin side or the user webmail side.

On the plus side in email, it is possible to configure an email box with any amount of space (presumably up to my disk limitations, which are pretty substantial). This is better than GoDaddy’s solution, which is a maximum of 25MB with a domain email account; why can’t these guys all provide a couple of GB like Yahoo does for their paid hosted accounts?

Anyway, I’ll be testing it out over the next 3 weeks or so, but I won’t take the WordPress version of the site live until I know that I’m staying on 8i.

2006 11 11 blogging
technology Comments (0)

The last "Netfirms sucks" post

Oh, did I mention that Netfirms still sucks? The entire site for my wine club was down for at least an hour today, on the day that we announced the ticket sales for our next event (which are sold through the website). I also couldn’t get onto email or even the hosting control panel. That’s it for me and Netfirms; next, I get my stuff off there, and start writing letters to try and get some of our money back, since we’ve so clearly been ripped off through their lack of ability to deliver a stable hosting environment.

I’ve already started the domain registrar transfer back to DomainsAtCost, where I previously had it registered (although not hosted); this way, I can choose either a Canadian host like 8i or a U.S. one like GoDaddy in the next step once the domain transfer is done. I know that if I pick a Canadian host, it would be cheaper to let them be my domain registrar as well, but I fell into that trap with Netfirms and now it’s taking me longer to get moved off them, so I’ll keep them separate for now.

I did get a response to my email to 8i, and it was not that encouraging:

At the present time, we do not have any websites running wordpress on our servers that I can refer you to.  I would like to mention the fact that Apache is compiled with AllowOverride on all our servers. As far as testing the response time of our MySQL servers, you can take a look at couple of the following sites that are running phpBB. phpBB uses PHP and MySQL for its database.

[ list of websites omitted]

If you decide to signup with 8i Networks, your hosting account will be placed on one of our newer servers with fewer than 10 accounts. Obviously with time, the number of accounts will grow, but rest assured we will not fill our servers to the brim. Quality is our number one priority, not quantity.

I’d really like to buy Canadian, and I’ve read some good reviews here, but the fact that they don’t have anyone (that they know of) running WordPress on their servers is a bit disconcerting. However, I suppose I can try them out for a month on a month-by-month plan, and ditch them for GoDaddy if they’re not up to snuff.

2006 11 09 netfirms
rant Comments (2)

On the hunt for booze

I love The (Ontario) Beer Hunter. This little mashup of Google maps with data from LCBO, The Beer Store and other hooch-selling outlets finds me via my IP address, then shows me on the map what places are still open. It’s only 3:10pm, so I’m not really worried about everything being closed, but this is the quickest way to find the closest place to pop out and buy a bottle of wine on foot. Somehow, the wine supply has dwindled down to an unopened case of some really special wines that I’m not going to crack open this year, leaving us wine-less for dinner. I usually do my shopping at the LCBO, by the case and with the car, but feel like heading out for a stroll after all my conference calls finish today to pick up a nice red to go with the lamb shanks that are simmering in the crock pot.

For those of you who don’t live in countries with draconian liquor laws, note that in the province of Ontario in Canada, you can only buy liquor and most wine at the government-owned LCBO stores, and can only buy wine and beer either from the LCBO or from outlets owned by the producers (note that The Beer Store is actually owned by the breweries). Hence the value of The Beer Hunter in tracking down what highly-regulated retails locations are in your neighbourhood, and what their hours are.

2006 11 09 food & wine Comments (0)

Later the same day, Netfirms still sucks

Netfirms sucksNetfirms sucks, did I mention that? Several hours since my last post, I now can’t get access to my email via my Outlook client, either inbound or outbound. Problems with the SMTP server are rampant, and often I give up and just use my DSL provider’s SMTP server, but this is a first for the POP server crapping out, too.

Although I was able to access my webmail at a few times during the day, there has been no email arriving all day, which is more than a little suspicious; I’ve just sent email to that account and the webmail reports no new email, so I imagine that they’ve somehow buggered up inbound email altogether. Hopefully any email that is delayed will eventually show up, rather than being sent to that big bit bucket in the sky.

I’ve sent a message off to 8i Networks based on the great reviews that I read about them, and I’m waiting to hear back. In particular, I want to see a WordPress site that’s hosted on their servers so that I can check the response time, and I want to be sure that they support AllowOverride on .htaccess, which will allow me to use pretty URLs in WordPress, a final step to getting the entire site (not just the blog) switched over to WordPress. If I don’t hear from them, then it will be south of the border to GoDaddy for me, where this blog is hosted with many fewer problems.

2006 11 06 netfirms
rant
technology Comments (0)

And now for something completely different… oh, wait, Netfirms still sucks

Netfirms SucksIt’s been a few days since I last posted about how Netfirms sucks, not because they stopped sucking, but because there wasn’t anything new to report. Today, they rise to new heights of suckage: I haven’t been able to get into my webmail for some time now this morning.

I’m quite sure that calling their technical support will have the same result as last time: they walk me through the process to recreate the error, put me on hold for 10 minutes, then come back and ask me to try again. Since their servers act fairly erratically, chances are that sometime in that 10 minutes (when you can be sure that I’ll still be trying to do whatever it is that isn’t working), I’ll be able to connect at least briefly, and then they can close the issue. They refuse to deal with the bigger issue of the servers being either grossly undersized or incompetently managed, and experiencing frequent outages.

I’m still not getting on the first page of Google results when I search for “netfirms sucks”, I’m way down on page 3, but I’ll keep trying.

2006 11 06 netfirms
rant
technology Comments (0)

Sushi for non-sushi-eaters

If you have the time and patience, you can make sushi out of candy. Why, I’m not sure, although April Fool’s Day was mentioned.

Via Boing Boing.

2006 11 05 food & wine Comments (0)

Musical themes

Ever notice that the opening notes of the music on the TED talks videos are nearly identical to those of the Battlestar Galactica theme? Coincidence? I think not… :)

Do yourself a favour, watch both.

2006 11 05 off topic Comments (0)