Richy's Random Ramblings

aka: Good tips for newbie website owners

Ok, this is more of a “Work/Techy” entry than a personal entry, but it’s more of a rant/”get off my nerves” sort of post and I try and keep my “letting off steam” style posts in the Personal section.

Recently at work, we’ve launched a new web hosting solution for our customers that offers them the minimal acceptable technical support possible (if the server is down, we’ll kick it: that’s about it(!)), but with oodles and oodles of bandwidth available for an extremely low price (gambling on our calculations of bandwidth vs techie time). So far, it’s been quite successful and reasonably popular, with no major difficulties so far, but the low bandwidth cost/price ratio has attracted a certain “type” of customer (i.e. we’ve had more than 2 enquiries about it).

The type of customer who sees “Hmm, unlimited email addresses and bandwidth at dirt cheap prices: I’ll buy it and set up a Hotmail clone”. Is it wrong not to have the heart to tell them that setting up a proper web mail client is a lot harder than they think? First, find an appropriate script – yeah, there’s plenty of free ones out there which will let you read your email online, fewer that support “on the fly creation” and fewer still that support all the “whizz bang features” you don’t realise Hotmail has (such as the continual “Mailbox space” updating, Messenger integration, quite good spell checker, multi folder support, reasonable interface etc etc).