A friend recommended me to Easyspace (a web hosting company based in Glasgow, Scotland – part of the iomart group). Their prices looked good, they were UK based, and I could handle almost everything online…

My VPS has been running silky smooth ever since. It’s never been blindingly fast in terms of network speed… but I don’t need a huge pipe onto the net yet.

Problems started as work slowed towards the end of the 2009 and funds dried up. I didn’t even notice, but the December invoice didn’t get paid. I had no notice or warning. Because of the holidays, I left my accounting until the new year.

While I was off, I received an email (twice, on 29th December) stating that someone from Easyspace had tried to call me (I received no such call), but they needed me to call back to sort out a problem with payment. This email stated that my services “have lapsed”.

I checked that my server was still operational: it was. I checked my Easyspace Control Panel for recent, failed transactions requiring my attention: none. My assumption: their mistake.

As I came to do my accounts for December (a little later than normal), I noticed that no payment was taken at the beginning of December for Easyspace. Was I wrong to assume that this could have been an internal error? If you were a hosting company and a customer had failed to pay for your services, when would you contact them to sort it out?

While I was in my Easyspace Control Panel, I noticed that there was an invoice outstanding: dated 02/02/10… ”This must be the one they’re talking about,” I thought. I paid this invoice there and then online (even assigning it a special code of their choosing so they could flag it up on their accounts more easily).

I had acknowledgement of this payment and my service seemingly continued. My server showed up in my account; all was well.

Skip to today. For various reasons I don’t know from when my server went down, but it has now been down all day.

After two very calm and collected phone calls to Easyspace to sort this problem out, even paying the payments they had failed to take (December + January), and waiting very patiently (for now 11 hours from initial contact!) I am royally cheesed off.

So to recap: they didn’t warn me that my payments weren’t processed, the “warning” they did give was late and uninformative (it was an automated email after all), and even though I had attempted to comply to their wishes they still took my server offline (again without warning) and have so far yet to restore it, although all accounts are settled.

And to top it all, their automated telephone queuing service is rubbish. It simply rings and puts you straight into the queue; no “Thank you for calling Easyspace” to let you know you’ve called the correct number, just music until you hear the standard rotation message of “thank you for waiting”.

Therefore, I am now looking to move my web hosting needs to another provider. So if you have any suggestions, I would be welcome to hear them! Stick your referral links in the comments.

While this may be painful for me, this experience has taught me a few lessons:

1. If in doubt, speak to a person – despite how difficult they make it
2. Always have a backup server ready to take over
3. Don’t trust other organisations to do things the ideal way (no matter how easy it should be for them to implement)

Yet, despite all of this I am thankful for a couple of things:

1. At least this server wasn’t running anything too mission critical
2. Other important services (esp. email) are hosted elsewhere, e.g. Google
3. I don’t have to stay with Easyspace
4. I can go to bed without worrying or stressing because I’m so laid-back it’s not ruffling my feathers all that much, in the grand scheme of things

Rant over, Simon out.

I’ve just been on the phone with a potential client. From our brief chat it’s clear that they have experienced problems with “web” people before now. This has affected their view of our services at FlipStorm, even though they know nothing about us.

I’ve just started using the google.load() service to fetch my favourite javascript frameworks and was wondering if anyone else is doing this?

Dear Tanya,

Google Friend Connect was officially announced last week. It has since come to light that this is no ordinary social network. In fact in the truest sense of the term, it isn’t a social network at all!

Friend Connect is a social tool. It seems the lovely people at the big G have been working their socks off finding a way to help us all connect a lot more easily. This fantastic tool is still only in preview, but from the fairly sketchy detail proffered by Google, it seems that even now it has a very wide appeal.

In order to place a perspective on what Friend Connect allows you to do, imagine: you are the only software developer on the planet. You, and you alone, have developed each and every web site in the world and you had to build each site from scratch.

So that means no code sharing. No data sharing. This means for every user who visits a web site that requires authentication they will have to register and verify their details. Then they will have to maintain them. This is the kind of data duplication that would make a data analyst’s butt clench.

By now you would have won plenty of awards… at the very least you would be long overdue some much-needed shut-eye.

The solution would seem obvious: extract the common data structures (in this case the individual member’s details) into a central pool that each site can get access to. That is what Friend Connect does!

You can close your mouth now.

As well as being a social connector, it is also a social enabler. What I mean is that a site that is not a social network (DamnILoveChocoDip.net for example) and never intends to be can still benefit from the viral nature of social networking. The social aspect of visiting a web site and sharing your experience is made even easier.

Yes as the modern social surfer you no longer have to re-register the same details you saved with the previous web site into this one. Simply log in with the same credentials et voila you’re in. Your data isn’t copied or duplicated. You keep the one central piece up to date and Friend Connect does the rest (as they say).

Beautiful! Adding to this is the entire social aspect. In theory (because I haven’t had a chance to test it yet) you can see who of your friends are registered with this site. They will see when you do things on the site (that you explicitly allow).

So all of a sudden, for the majority of web sites we visit, we can now see who else is there. It’s like all of the other patrons visiting this virtual shop/bar/resource centre become visible.

You could actually “bump” into someone who you know from another web site. As you seem to share a passion for at least two things, you might pluck up the courage to strike up a conversation, perhaps opening with an oft-hounded ‘chat-up line’.

It would be the equivalent of walking around the town, bumping into that cute girl in two different shops, suggesting you go for coffee, then quickly cut to 3 years later and you’re story is being told in some horrible romantic comedy starring Tom Hanks.

There are some questions on security and integration, all of which I’m sure will be answered in time. If you’re a programmer like me, I’m sure you will see the benefits though. I’m drooling over some of the possibilities. Least of all not having to build a registration engine every time I build a site. A close second is the speed with which people will discover a new web site.

Also in this orgy of social debauchery is OpenSocial. Now application developers have an opportunity for their applications to make it onto millions of web sites, not just the few major and accessible social networks.

The issue at the moment is that not all networks are supported, and indeed not all will want to jump on the bandwagon. But when things become this easy for users, where do you think the majority will go?

So then the key lessons from all of this are… build a site that can make use of this centralised platform! If you’re building an application, build it for OpenSocial as the chances are it will lead the way in terms of mass integration.

Is this a sign that Facebook may slip into Microsoft’s online “I just don’t get it” pit? I wonder why that could happen.

Dear Dorothy,

Small-ish software houses (like the one I work for) suffer terribly when we get a big project. You see when a company is started, the guy running the show (my boss and MD of the company) usually knows how to manage everything himself. He has all fingers in all pies.

However, this poses a problem when you then have to start sharing knowledge and resources, creating stable, trackable communications, testing and reporting. Even worse when the client gets all “hands-y” and is all over you like last Sunday’s gravy accident.

The key factor above all else is cost. For a small business it’s just not an option to go out and spend thousands on just-what-we-need bug tracking, centralised communication system with permissions-based remote access, project management software. Even if you can piece these bits together from really handy ‘freebies’, it’s still at a cost of time – installing, configuring, and getting all these separate and disparate parts to work together.

So how does a small business manage? Muddle through with emails, recorded phone calls, and endless reams of jotter pad scribbled on and gently growing in the bin?

NO! Use Basecamp you dummy. That’s what we’ve done. Adapting it to our needs has been particularly easy. Ok, so it’s not the most efficient method, but it’s still better than the alternative. Actually for a small team it works really well. And the client has access too, which is a real bonus.

If you need somewhere to collaborate, please save yourself… use Basecamp!