mattybrown

I am in the same position as you. I am trying out Host Presto. Support seems rapid but varies in quality. There seems to be no documentation for specifically for re-sellers in our position, so everything needs to be done via support which is time consuming and frustrating. All seems rather clunky to me at the moment and I am having to get my head round new ways of doing things, but I will persevere for now. They are hugely cheaper than my previous so perhaps I have to accept the compromise. On the plus side, the hosting seems speedy.

Not only that, many have discovered the backups they were paying for didn't work. Agree with this. Hearts snapshot tool rarely seems to work first time. Usually have to contact them to restore a site from a backup.

I am a reseller for Heart Internet and they charge over £1000 per year for backing up 250 sites (30-day rolling backups)! Also, it seems that some days, snapshots are not available for a particular day. In the past few days, Heart Internet has had major problems - even their own website has been down and thousands of websites are still unavailable, which means the snapshot backups are unavailable too. It seems a belts and braces option is Backup Buddy with the backup saved somewhere other than the Heart Internet server.

I have about 250 clients, all individuals or very small businesses with WordPress websites. Most are technically clueless. How does anyone else handle backups? Hosting snapshots? Backup Buddy? And what do you say in your contracts re your liability for backups? Just interested because it is an ongoing worry for me!

It takes me ages to write a quote and at the end, the scope of work is watertight. In my quotes, I make it very clear that if something crops up during development that is out of scope, then I will be happy to give them a further estimate for the extra work needed. Works for me.

No matter how recommended, cheap, reliable and fast a host claims to be, you need to read the small print and delve futher to find out if the hosting is suitable for your website's subject matter/traffic. For example, if you plan to stream video, shared hosting packages are rarely suitable unless there are few sharers on the server. Video will take up CPU resources (10-20% or more) and if you are sharing the CPU with many other websites, you will run into reliability/delivery problems. Many hosts offer 'unlimited' bandwidth, but when you read the small print, they often have a 'resonable use' clause which means that there is a limit of 25GB per month or something similar. Some hosts will shut down your site until the next month if you over run these limits. You may also find that other sharers on the shared server will hog bandwidth which means that your site will be slower than normal. Interestingly, it is often the smaller hosting companies that offer the most cheapest and most reliable hosting because they do not oversell space on their shared servers - meaning that there are plenty of rescources for your site. If you don't do your research, these limitations often only come to light when you have a problem. So no matter how cheap, and how well recommended, you need to satisfy yourself that it will do the job for you.

A support fee is fairly standard in the IT industry - but a question often asked by clients is 'what am I paying for?'. Good question because just like any other insurance, it seems a waste of money if you don't use it but great value if you do. I sell complete website packages which at the outset includes design plus hosting (I am a hosting reseller) and support for 12 months. I do not separate anything out - those are my terms and that's that. If someone quibbles, they can go elsewhere. If they want to keep their site online after 12 months, they have to pay the support/hosting renewal fee. My sites are generally small, static, brochure type sites developed in WordPress and ranging from £500 to £1K. I don't use many plugins, but any WP or plugin update is unlikely to ruin everything, and even if it does, because of my work processes that I have built up over the years and the simple nature of the sites I build, I reckon I would be able to re-create the entire site in a morning (hasn't happened yet). I make it clear in my contract that the support fee covers all technical/content editing support and I also make clear that WP and plugin updates may result in some minor changes to layout or functionality. I also have a 'catch all' clause that says if the software used to develop the website ever becomes 'obselete', then extra development costs would apply if the website has to be re-developed using another techology. The yearly renewal fee depends on the size and type of site but ranges from £90 to £150 per year. It's a business model that works well for me. I have over 200 happy clients (individuals and small businesses) but that's not to say it would work for everyone. Depends on your niche, your clients and the size and complexity of the sites you build.

Quick update - Heart themselves have suggested I apply for ssh access which will enable the me to upload the large video file. Things are looking up!

No you are right. Tried it but heart won't budge! And thanks for the tip. Will look into that although I still think the simplest option now is to try to persuade the client to split the video into two episodes and perhaps have a full download option in Dropbox.

It's one of the big problems with Wordpress. Wordpress sites are needy and have to be looked after. Since I have set up the site for my client, I see it as my resposibilty to make sure that it runs correctly and to 'fix' any updates incompatibilities. However, I charge each client a yearly support fee which they must subscribe to - its a bit like insurance. Sometimes they will use it, sometimes they will not, but overall this insurance system usually pays for my time taken to correct update errors across all my clients.

Yep, Winrar no good - no significant compression of a 900 mb video flv file and certainly nowhere near Heart's ftp upload limit of 500mb. Have written a begging letter to heart but splitting the video into two episodes and Drobox are the most realsitic options.

Thanks. Dropbox may be the only option - or splitting into episodes as you suggest. But Heart have suggested WinRar so I will give it a go.

Heart Internet have a ftp upload limit of 500mb per file, but the file I want to upload to my web space is a video file - 900mb. Heart have suggested dividing the file up into smaller chunks that can be uploade via ftp and then reassembling the other side. They have suggested WinRar. Sounds very complicated to me! Does anyone have any experience of doing this? What is the basic procedure? Any tips or advice welcome.

I have now solved this problem.

Please look at this worpress site: http://www.lucygough.com/ The header displays correctly in ie8, ff and safari, but is incorrect in ie7. Please see attached screen grab. In ie 7 the 'Lucy Gough' graphic is missing the bottom half. Please can anyone advise on how to fix this. Thank you

Please look at this webpage and click on any a artist's name to see an example of their work: When you click on a name, a flash code appears momentarily in the iframe box appears before the image loads. It only happens in firefox though. Can anyone suggest a fix for this? Thanks

Brilliant thank you. The javasscript fix worked perfectly perfectly. I will investigate the Ajax solution next.

Why is it putting the /dev bit at the start? Any idea what I can do to get it to generate the correct URL?

But it is on the server: For some reason that I can't work out, it adds /dev to the start of the URL. Anyone know what I am doing wrong?

Please look at this page: The birdcage in the iframe should change to a different image but doesnt. Can anyone spot what I am doing wrong? Thanks

Panic over - I have just fixed it myself by putting the javascript code in a table. I have no idea why this worked, but it did.

My webpage has three columns - a right and left colum div (floated) and a central content div. The main content area has a heading and then a comment box and form. The comment box and form are supposed to sit underneath the feedback heading and line, but for some reason it displays in line with the bottom of the content of the longest column. Please see: http://www.richarddykes.com/feedback-test.html The the guestbook is added to the html page by a line of javascipt which links to the form database. Can anyone see what's wrong with my css that might be causing this problem? Have attached a jpg to show what it looks like on my computer (FF3 and IE8) Many thanks.

My client has a simple html site. He wants me to insert an image gallery which he can update himself. I need an off the shelf solution but there seems to be a huge range available. He has average computer skills, so the backend needs to be easy for him to manage. Does anyone have any suggestsions/advice? Thanks

I've bought Artisteer and found it very useful: a) because I needed to produce templates quickly but didn't have the knowlede to enable me to create them from scratch, or the time to learn b ) because they were a useful teaching tool for me - I could see the logic of how the themes were put together and it helped me to learn how to do it myself - I am now creating my own themes. Artisteer is still useful because I sometimes use the assets that come with software in my websites. So if you need a quick fix for producing themes with the added bonus that it helps you learn how to produce your own and it comes with some useful assets, go for it! -

My client is an artist who wants an image gallery to display his work. He wants to be able to update the images in the gallery himself. I do not have any knowledge of php so need a ready made solution. I have considered using Wordpress for the site and a Next Gen gallery. Any other suggestions on how I could manage this for him? Thanks in advance.