Gordon Woolf's Blog

Telstra forces a customer to switch

Nick Renton is an author of more than 60 books on taxation, investment, financial planning, public relations, corporate governance, meeting procedure and use of English. He is also a skilled copyeditor. By profession he is an actuary and is often called upon as an arbitrator. He is Member of the Order of Australia (entitled to 'AM' after his name) and was the first president of the Australian Shareholders' Association.

He also has an extensive web site which provides information of all his specialist areas. It is a source referenced by many other sites throughout the world.

However, Nick Renton AM has been forced to move the whole site because the hosts decided they did not want to provide web space for their broadband and dialup customers any more. So, with a couple of months notice, he was told the site will be gone. No, they had no way they could point the old address to a new one.

It serves as a lesson for anyone who has a web site that is not reached by their own domain name. Now, Nick Renton has moved the whole lot to http://nickrenton.com, and while we know the new hosting company, and know they have been around for many years, it cannot be a problem again: the site can be moved to a new host at a few hours' notice with no one who uses the site being aware of any change.

But now comes the surprise: the hosting company that was being used by Nick Renton was not a newcomer from the continuing dotcom revolution. It was Telstra, the first and largest telecommunications company in Australia, which has the lions' share of the Internet business in this country.

So, if you need information such as a guide to all the Latin phrases you are likely to come across, at http://nickrenton.com/310.htm then make a note that it is all now at http://nickrenton.com

Paying for less than no hosting

Why would a business pay out good money for a web domain address and then have nothing at the other end? I came across a hotel the other day where the link just produces the generic "unable to find a server of that name" response and decided that as it is one where we intended to go to eat, I'd check a little further. Yes, the domain is registered, and to a company which obviously owns the hotel. However, this was not just a temporrary glitch. Yet the web site of the hotel is included in all their advertisements, in local newspapers, in regional tourist magazines and even on some general web sites of where to eat. So I asked. I was told by the manager that their designer was working on a new site and that their web site would be back in "a month or so". When I suggested that they were paying for the name anyway and that most registrars or site hosts would charge no extra to put up a "site under construction" page with, at least, their address and phone numbers, I got a blank stare and a kind of grunt which I took to mean "we'll find out about that". Most of the clients I host are in touch if their site is offline for even a few minutes. How can I find ones like this who don't mind if it is off line for months? As I write this another month has gone by and the site is still offline, and still being advertised.