Jenerally Speaking

I’m about to tell you a true story. It a long nerdy story about my web hosting history, but some of my fellow webmasters might be interested in hearing it. It actually has to do with an issue I am dealing with right now, which explains why I have decided to tell the story to you today.

Well, five years ago, my family decided to sign up for an internet account. (Who’s in my family? Click here for a little background on the people in my house.)

Initially, we signed up for AOL, but soon discovered that there were no local dial-up numbers for AOL. We live in the Poconos (Pennsylvania) in a large resort area…we have some great ski lodges, restaurants, hotels, etc., but back then we didn’t have too many other types of businesses in our hometown.

Luckily, by the end of the month (this was November 1997) a brand new Internet Service Provider came to our area and we signed up. What a trip it was to explore the internet!
Anyway, a few months into my internet voyage (remind me to tell you all about my days playing Yahoo trivia…that’s a whole other story, indeed!), I decided to design my first web site.

I started off with Geocities as my web host…this was before they merged with Yahoo.
After the Yahoo merge, their customer service suffered and I quickly began to search for a new web host for my site.

(As a side note, one good thing that did come from my time with Geocities is that I won a $1,000 award for the best new site within a particular Geocities category. This award was for Namely-Yours…which at that time was called “What’s in a Name?”)

My next move was to a company called True Hosting.
Big mistake…although not entirely my fault. It sounded so good on paper, but the man running the company lived to scam people. He was an outright liar and a fraud.
To this day, I cannot say or type the name of that hosting company without getting a knot in my stomach.
The crux of the problem was that you basically signed up for their hosting services and they continued to bill you and made it nearly impossible for you to cancel. I finally had to hook up a fax machine and spend hours trying to fax my cancellation form to the owner of True Hosting.

Eventually, I found a wonderful hosting company…FutureQuest. They are professional, knowledgeable, and I would recommend their company without hesitation. I stayed with them for over a year, but eventually had to leave due to the fact that I needed more space and it was costing me a little than I wanted to spend on a web site.

As luck would have it, there was a new hosting company called Hosting Matters. The company was founded by a young lady, Annette, who was also cheated and harassed by the man who ran True Hosting. Annette, after experiencing tremendous and indescribably frustration with the True Hosting, decided to open her own hosting company. Their prices were slightly better than FutureQuest and their service was as wonderful and professional as I had come to expect from a hosting company.