I WILL make it!

Thursday, April 14, 2005

Home Again Today

As I post this, I should be on my lunch hour at work. Sadly ;) I am not. I slept so badly that I am barely functional, so I called in sick. I swear every time I rolled over (which is often for me!) I woke up. I tried to take a nap earlier, and I may have been about 5 minutes away from sleep when the phone rang.

Turns out it was the tech support from eMax. I'm not sure if I've mentioned them before, other than under the links on the right. I have to say what an amazing company. I purchased 2 domains yesterday and upgraded my hosting package to $8.95, which includes 1 gig of storage, 60 gigs bandwidth, unlimited add on and sub domains, unlimited emails (POP3 and web), unlimited autoresponders and so much more. I decided to get one big package (60 gigs is WAY more than I need for a long time) and that way I'd just buy domains as I went. Oh, and their domains are $8.95, not a bad price. Of course, being a strict follower (unwilling) of Murphy's Law, something had to go wrong.

Now, even though the templates aren't finished with their tweaks yet (getting there though!) I decided to do all of this buying and upgrading so I could see them live (only so much that FrontPage can show you) and test the links and such, since I was having a tough time with the CSS. And here the problems start. I went into the CPanel and followed the instructions to add on the domains. I thought it went well. Then I tried to configure the publish feature. Un-uh, no go. So after playing around for a while, I decided to check my travel accessories site settings. Oops, couldn't publish that either.

Thankfully, eMax has 24/7 support through online tickets, and if necessary, they will call you. So, off I went to open a support ticket. In less than 10 minutes, I had a response. The shortest response time I saw (and I was taking a while, as I was watching Revelations and then Law and Order at the same time) was 2 minutes. It went back and forth until after midnight, and then my support guy went home, and (good idea) no one else got involved, as at this point, we'd already exchanged about 15 emails. This morning when I unwillingly got up, I faithfully trotted downstairs to my puter, and saw it should be fixed. Nope, it wasn't. So, it went back and forth again for a while, until (when I was taking my nap of course) I got a phone call. It was Chris, my amazing tech support guy (dealt with him when I had another problem, totally my fault too) to tell me he was sure this time and could I try it with him on the line.

What a patient guy. Because though the issues were on their end (I had made one tiny mistake on one domain, but it shouldn't have caused this much havoc) he had gone to the trouble to install FP on his computer and play around with publishing so he could walk me through my configs. And even though I still made a few more stupid mistakes (which he kindly fixed on their end) he was polite, friendly and not at all condenscending about my ignorance. All of this to say, go sign up with eMax! Their customer service is unmatched. I've worked in customer service for 11 years and I've never done this much work for one customer. And personally, I haven't found as good prices as them, which is of paramount importance when you're cheap and almost out of a job. (Yes, I know it was my choice!)

As for the domains, when they are a bit more user friendly, I will publish them here. Or maybe only one, I'm not sure how public I want to go. One of them has no affiliate marketing competitors that I've found, and I'd like to keep it that way. I'll probably figure out a way to password protect it so only people I trust can see it, or only send it out via email. Funny, when I started this, I was pretty adamant I would be completely open about what I was doing. Now I realize that while I would NEVER steal someone's stuff, I know other people will. Not suggesting my loyal readers of course - but now that I'm in a few directories, you don't know who will show up.

Anyway, since I'm stuck being awake for a while now, I should go do some work. One last little happy dance for you - I've got tomorrow's breakfast (Tim Horton's extra large mocha and apple fritter) in USD of course with Adsense today. In 4 clicks. I'm a much happy camper. If only every day could be like this!!!

Tara :)

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home