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Our Website Hosting Conversion
Background For several years we have
had both a personal and web hosting account with Earthlink. At the time,
their web hosting was excellent and included a somewhat powerful
E-store software package. However, the software has become
very outdated and they dictate a credit card processing company which has very high processing and
monthly rates. Earthlink charges are no longer competitive and their web
hosting support has deteriorated from excellent domestic personnel to very poor
off-shore support. The last straw was when they started loosing our
personal email (have documentation). For the past two years I stayed with
them because of the huge effort to switch web hosting vendors.
In the end, I decided to go with GoDaddy and it appears to be a
good decision. I am saving over $50 per month and the support has been
excellent. Stages of the conversion
11/11/09. We begin the conversion process. The RV Safety
Systems web pages will probably not be a huge project, as I have
been building the website in Front Page over the years. Our
personal pages are another matter. We have several pages that
cover my consulting business, as well as our family information.
Part of the problem is that I built several of my project pages many
years ago with some very outdated software. You can visit the
various pages by going here.
11/29/09. We have made the move of the basic website. The RV Safety
System web pages went very smoothly. The personal pages turned out to be
easier than I suspected. I was able to load the actual web pages from
Earthlink into FrontPage and only had to do some minor updating. Some of
my personal project pages still look very outdated, but they convey my work.
The PayPal decision:
In addition,
we have made the decision to use PayPal to build our e-store. That
decision was not an easy one. However, several factors influenced that
decision. First is the terrible effort (and cost) to be certified PCI
compliant for credit card processing, (not required with the PayPal account
since no credit card information will be maintained our our site). I have spent days working with the
certification company and then each survey creates another panic. Part of
the issue is that we use satellite internet service since we are often on the road, and
the certification company sees many open ports on that service and fails us. In truth
there is no problem, it is just the way that Hughes does business. In any
case, with PayPal, all of the processing is done on their site and no customer
records are retained on our site. In addition, they make it possible for
us to accept all major credit card.
The other major issue is cost
of credit card processing. I have looked at many services and most have a
very complex billing and monthly fee schedule. Those fees favor large
companies, and really penalize small companies like ours. When you add up
all the monthly and processing fees, I often end up paying well over 4% on some
months. PayPal has a very simple fee structure that does not penalize
small companies. I am starting to test the process of building an
e-store with PayPal. That will probably be a slow process, as I can only
devote small chucks of time for the process. I am going to test the
process on the handheld extinguisher page
(here).
11/30/09. I was able to make the long awaited
call to Earthlink to cancel my accounts. I never wish a
company ill will, but this, clearly, is a company that has lost site
of the customer. Everything about the company has degraded to
well below even the most basic service expectation. I am
writing this in Feb. 2010 and I still get agitated when I think how
I was treated in the last year of our subscription. I was also
able to cancel my credit card processing account. As noted
above, my E-store software on Earthlink dictated this specific
company. They were a leading company and their service was
acceptable. However, they catered to large companies and their
fees schedule was very complex and costly for a small company.
2/27/10. I had hoped to get the E-Store
operational by late February. I will miss that deadline.
We have had to spend our limited resources on several other
projects. As noted elsewhere on this site, we hope that you
will contact us by phone or email with your orders until we can
finish our work on the this final phase of the webhosting conversion
project. 4/16/10. We have finally finished our
e-store. Again, thanks for your understanding.
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