Some time ago, I posted a request for help to enable me to rescue my
wife's hotel website. The hotel's website was allegedly hosted
(according to whois.com) by a company called GlobalCityWeb. But for
weeks I was unable to contact them. They did not answer the telephone
and emails bounced back. The website had been created a couple of
years ago and had never, ever, been updated. Apart from the fact that
the website did not reflect the hotel accurately, I had been asked by
my wife to completely redesign and rewrite the website. That took some
time but it appeared that I had wasted my time.
After asking for help on this forum, one member helped me.
GlobalWebCity had been taken over by PalacePierMedia, another Sussex
hosting company. However we could not track them down, and the same
sorry saga of telephone calls not being answered and emails bouncing.
Graham Street, who had contacted me on this forum, emailed me again
and suggested that I rang him to see whether he could help in any way.
He suggested contacting Nominet to grab our domain name, and we could
then choose another hosting company. Before going through with that, I
had an email response from a query left on PalalcePierMedia's website
which informed me that they had merged with another company and were
now Moocow Media.
I should have been warned by the name but … I uploaded the new website
by FTP to their server, and the website went live. There was a great
flurry of promoting the website, and the hotel could see the number of
hits going through the roof, bookings and conference and wedding
enquiries poured in. My wife was delighted.
And then, then, a week after going live, the website disappeared on a
Friday afternoon. I telephone Moocow to no avail. At 3.20 pm on a
Friday afternoon, they were not answering the phone or responding to
emails. Back to Graham Street, who could not have been more helpful.
He discovered that they had a problem with one of their two servers
and that the second server had not been configured properly to come in
as a back-up. I was livid with Moocow, but the website did not
reappear for forty-eight hours. Restaurant bookings nosedived that
weekend, and no-one could book rooms online and so the hotel was
almost empty. Emails arrived by the sackful asking what had happened,
and I do not like to think how much money the hotel lost.
Once again Graham came to the rescue. He told me that Moocow needed to
make one simple instruction to enable the website to be hosted by
another provider. Graham, as some of you may now, is the name behind
Streets Ahead, and his company offers hosting packages. He offered to
host our website at no cost until the end of July (which was when the
contract with Moocow came to an end), and then host the site from then
on. To cut a long story short, I took up his offer and contacted
Moocow. Not a word of apology did I hear and they then delayed making
the simple change I required for another twenty-four hours.
Unbelievably they refused to make the change (which Graham tells me
takes under a minute) unless we paid an administration charge of £15 +
VAT.
The invoice was emailed to the hotel (where, if I am not mistaken it
remains unpaid) and within the hour Streets Ahead had our website up
and running. To his enormous credit, Graham offered a lot of help and
suggestions to me about the website and nothing has been too much
trouble.
Frightening though the situation was, and forgetting the money the
hotel lost, Streets Ahead are just that - streets ahead. I cannot
recommend them highly enough. Brilliant.
http://www.streets-ahead.com/
Thanks Graham, you really saved our bacon. You can see the finished
product (if a website is ever finished) at www.thehighbeechhotel.co.uk
Martin
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