Web Design Forum: a.g.r.c - Viewing Profile - Web Design Forum

The "Looking to hire" area of this web site is now completely inactive.

Clearly Bens master plan to create a fee paying system here to list jobs has back fired.

That, coupled with the shameless advertising for Heart Internet has given me good reason to leave.

Clearly the master administrator for this site couldn't give a monkeys about the community who has enabled him to make some money from.

On that note, see you all later.

Ben, you're a wanka.

From one struggling web designer to another.

Wanted to come in here and document my fairly long term service with Web Design Forum partner Heart Internet.

Having joined up with this forum around 2 years ago and enjoying the cool and relaxed fairly mature community. We all have our moments. It was a nice and clean interface and friendly experience. Members professional, and well rounded.

From memory there were always a few adverts but the prominent affiliation with Heart Internet clearly on display in the header area of the forum.

Turning freelance in 2009, I wanted to get off to a fresh foot and better serve potential UK based customers I had. Prior to this Hostgator in America were my host with very good entry level prices, reseller features but suffering when being routed all the way round the internet. Sites became slow as server side knowledge and traffic grew at different sites. However tech support was always great, accessible via ticketing, live chat AND telephone. Sometimes it's just comforting to know someone is there on the end of the phone if you have no internet access.

So ultimately I signed up to Heart Internet after thinking eXtend control panel (Hearts propriety admin area resellers / single site hosters and possibly managed dedicated server customer receive) eXtend looks very much like cPanel / WHM and without really paying too much attention one can easily assume it's not. Living in a white label World designers may simply think eXtend is white label cPanel. Anyway this fact was discovered after signing up and hosting a few sites.

As the months went on a number of issues came up, being at the computer for the most part it was never a problem submitting support tickets. Support staff are always quick to respond and competent when it comes to solving problems. Kudos and win for how effecient they are with this, however it is no different to the likes of HostGator.

Step back to about 6 months ago a site which experienced 6.5GB of bandwidth usage in a day or so was closed down. The person using this account (a member from here needed some free space to practice) was running a script that was generating traffic through a number of means for him. Heart Internet didn't like this traffic, even if it was legitimate or not and decided to kill the site.

I went through the usual routine of creating a ticket and waiting for a response and was advised that the site in question was putting a demand on the server and was closed, they also advised after my questioning again that 7.5GB was the monthly limit. Apparently the term "unlimited" is subject to fair use, and apparently 7.5gb is deemed reasonable. What if we are video producers and sign up to the site on that basis? Pretty poor on that front.

A number of issues had cropped up throughout the 2 years of service but the main experience was site downtime and slow access. When sites are up you'll think a response time of 25ms is reasonable, but catch them on a slow minute and it will jump up to 300ms.

With the issues in place, and the one site being shut down naturally I want to protect my paying customers so decided to move on. First step was to create a back up of sites and ask Heart to close the account. Unfortunately eXtend is not WHM and you simply can't backup all sites within a few clicks. You have to navigate the horde of different accounts and wait for each site backup to be generated. No file dumps on completion, no mail notifications. Just wait, and wait, and wait... Pretty lame on that front.

When I gave notice Heart had offered a 3 month donation in order to try and keep my custom. I took that, quite happily at £46.99 a month including VAT it was about time a hiatus was given. That's £552.00 per year and £1104.00 over 2 years. Pretty expensive for a host especially when you can get that from some companies for around £200.00.

After the 3 months hiatus I went on to raise the close account ticket again.

All that out the way, Was ready to make the switch after pointing some name servers. Oh and not to mention manually importing all the sql files and files downloaded from eXtend. What an awkward process.

My payment date each month was the 9th by Direct Debit (which is required by Heart Internet), this close account request was given on the 6th or 7th and after it was submitted going on the form of about 5 other hosting companies I had used in the passed there was nothing else required. Maybe a deactivation link, but no more verbal.

The date passed but then I notice charges from my bank, apparently Heart never closed the account and they still have Direct Debit. This part was infuriating as I never expected this to come off and consequently Heart and their unruly demands set me out of even more dosh! Still having a reasonable head on I tried to call Heart Internet as the bank would only refund one charge, and because the request took me over drawn there was 2 bank charges in place. Hopefully Heart would help up a valued customer for 2 years? No, billing or technical support cannot be queried via telephone, only SALES! Talk about not giving a ****.

So back to tickets it was and the issue was raised with no results along the way. I drew a line and said, okie please can you cancel my account what else do you need to do. Bare in mind a few days had passed before I noticed they were still taking money for an account not even being used. Heart ask you to fill out a document making sur e you dot the i's and cross the t's for cancellations. Having looked through a handful of previous tickets that had the word "cancellation" or "close" and "account" in it, I was unable to find a link or download to this document. Which speaks volumes.

Ultimately I changed my bank account to stop Heart getting this money but it was a truely awful experience. In the final month when Heart failed to get their money they stopped access to the account, and the only way I was able to get backups was through a WordPress plugin which is super sharp. "Open Source will save us all" I think was the last thing said to Heart. They had no reason to block access to eXtend as yet, and no notifications were given. So yeah that's my fault, should have prepared a day or so earlier but thank goodness for WordPress.

Bit of a messy post, and hope it reads okie but felt important others should consider this if looking at a host.

*Edit

They also still hold the IPS tag for a couple of my domains, wish me luck on that one.

Hey,

I'm setting session data via a $_GET submission that takes an id and assigns a session variable then displays a success or fail message (this item already in cart) after.

This works fine however each item can only be stored once. So when the code detects a duplicate it displays a message saying (item in cart as mentioned above).

Here's my code.

if(!in_array($_GET['id'], $_SESSION['cart-items']))
{
	$_SESSION['items'][] = $_GET['id'];
	$flash['cart'] = '<p><strong>'.$px_name.'</strong> has now been added to your enquiry basket.</p>';
}
if(in_array($_GET['id'], $_SESSION['cart-items']))
{
	$flash['cart'] = '<p><strong>'.$px_name.'</strong> is already in your cart.</p>';		
}

Both parts fire now upon setting the session and the later being the one that is outputted.

What's a suitable way to overcome this issue?

Any help appreciated. Thanks

There was a good response previously in regards to the note below minus some squabbles, let's hope you guys can put that aside .

So a short summary has been created of the skill-sets we have and how to move things forward from here.

Any names mentioned below could you please be more specific in what you can offer a team project. For instance, since we had a shortage of developers i've put myself forward to cover that side of the project specifically with PHP and CodeIgniter skills.
Neverminder has replied with specifics now also.

Once we have the teams allocated we will branch off and have a Skype session discussing possible projects to build.

Neji:
HTML, CSS?

Porkchops:
Designer, Photoshop

MikeChipshop:
HTML, CSS?, PHP, CodeIgniter?

a.g.r.c:
PHP, CodeIgniter, (x)HTML, CSS

Neverminder:
Javascript, PHP, HTML, CSS

Adamoverload:
PHP? MVC?

Ash Scott:
(??)

Romeo Onisim:
(x)HTML, CSS, JavaScripts (jQuery)

Web Designer Team Project Message said:

Wondering if anyone fancies doing a project together, not sure what the topic or theme would be. I guess that would be determined once we have a pool of talented people on board.

We would need to be reasonably well organised with each member taking up a role within the project. Too many cooks spoiled the broth as it were.

Maybe if there was a pool of around 10 people we could break off into 2 teams and come up with separate projects and work together in marketing them both.

Just some ideas. Here's a typical outline of people required for this "weekend project".

1 project Manager
The dude who makes sure development is still moving, touching base with milestones and landmarks. Giving direction as each milestone has been hit.

2 Designers
A mix of Photoshop, XHTML and CSS. Possibly a dabbling of JavaScript / jQuery

2 Developers
PHP knowledge for this one however other server side devs welcome preferable to have knowledge in a CMS or MVC Framework.

Those are the essentials in my eyes for now but anyone who feels they want to get on board and can add skills not mentioned please do jump on the caboose!

We could set aside maybe 5 - 6 hours at the weekend to work on individual tasks set by the project Manager and maybe 30 minutes - 1 hour bi weekly for team chat.

A workflow could be established by using Github or something that meets our team needs.

A wiki for shared documentation and a staging server for development work.

Off the bat it's typical to hear a freelancer say "yeh i'll jump in and do it all" not sure that's the idea of this. I think it would be a good practice for us to hone some specialist skills and force some team efforts.

Wondering if anyone fancies doing a project together, not sure what the topic or theme would be. I guess that would be determined once we have a pool of talented people on board.

We would need to be reasonably well organised with each member taking up a role within the project. Too many cooks spoiled the broth as it were.

Maybe if there was a pool of around 10 people we could break off into 2 teams and come up with separate projects and work together in marketing them both.

Just some ideas. Here's a typical outline of people required for this "weekend project".

1 project Manager
The dude who makes sure development is still moving, touching base with milestones and landmarks. Giving direction as each milestone has been hit.

2 Designers
A mix of Photoshop, XHTML and CSS. Possibly a dabbling of JavaScript / jQuery

2 Developers
PHP knowledge for this one however other server side devs welcome preferable to have knowledge in a CMS or MVC Framework.

Those are the essentials in my eyes for now but anyone who feels they want to get on board and can add skills not mentioned please do jump on the caboose!

We could set aside maybe 5 - 6 hours at the weekend to work on individual tasks set by the project Manager and maybe 30 minutes - 1 hour bi weekly for team chat.

A workflow could be established by using Github or something that meets our team needs.

A wiki for shared documentation and a staging server for development work.

Off the bat it's typical to hear a freelancer say "yeh i'll jump in and do it all" not sure that's the idea of this. I think it would be a good practice for us to hone some specialist skills and force some team efforts.