Foreign Perspectives

I thought that I’d run with powweb as our main hosting platform in America on the basis that Brooke uses it and she always seems to know what she’s doing computer-wise.

Not a good move as it turned out.

Uploading the databases and HTML was very easy and much faster than expected. But nothing worked… it took them a day to find out that they’d not installed the PHP software for me.

Then things seemed to work. In fact, everything worked fine ’til I tried some pages that use encoded characters (for the French e-acute etc.) and none of them worked. That was two days ago and they’ve still not worked out how to fix the problem so I’m now in the process of cancelling the account with them.

Why the different experience? Well, Brooke has been with them for years and up to April 2006 they were one of the best places around so any teething troubles that she may have had were sorted out under the old regime. In 2006 they were taken over by Endurance and from then on the support had rapidly become worse. That’s not reflected (yet) in most of the review sites as they generally take account of all reviews so, of course, most of them predate the 2006 takeover.

Anyway, I’m off to try another place over there now.