I have a customer I designed a 100-page site for a couple of years ago. A couple weeks ago, they asked me to do something for them that required another 10 MB of space. Rather than simply increasing the space, their hosting company (reseller) changed companies and gave me until the DNS changed to post the site. Despite my suggestion to the customer that they increase the space, and setup a test server before changing the DNS, the hosting company made the changes later that day. I was given (forwarded from the customer) the FTP IP address, username, and pword, but no info regarding the type of server and what needed to be modified in the FormMail.pl script to work (or even if I could use a Perl script). There was no cgi-bin when I first logged on.
I sent emails all week long asking the hosting company what needed to be modified in the script (forwarding the messages to the customer) and finally got a message from the customer threatening to end our business relationship unless the problem was fixed immediately. The hosting company was "CC"ed and finally got the script working with the addition of this second line with the second IP address:
(I have changed the info slightly)
#@referers = ('company.com','67.110.103.71');
@referers = ('www.company.com','company.com','258.99.22.50');
I got a nasty email from the hosting company saying that it was my job to know how to "fix" the script and I would like to know for certain (before I get into a pissing contest with them in forwarded messages to the customer) whether they are right, and I should have known. They want to bill either me, or the customer for their time in adding the second line.
1. What is the addition of this second line? It is not even similar to the ip that resolves when I ping www.company.com.
2. Should I have known this line was necessary and what the ip would have to be?
3. Is there a "standard practice" where the webmaster should be informed in these cases of any additional, necessary information?
Again, thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
AnotherDesigner
Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]!
OK, so it's your job to know how to fix the script... maybe. It might be nice if you had a few days to get familiar with the new hosting setup... You know, maybe work some time into your schedule to get oriented on the new server, and find out whether it's say, Apache on *nix versus Microsoft IIS on Win2K - I've heard that might make a bit of a difference...
But it's the hosting company's job to *serve* their customers, and to treat employees and contractors of their customers with respect - as agents of their customers. Unanswered inquiries and nasty e-mail replies are right out. They could have at least pointed you to their FAQ pages.
From what you said about the client threatening you and the host being nasty, I'd dump them both! But that's just me. :)
Sounds like you have some skills. If that's true, you don't have to work for people that make you miserable. Look around here a bit and see what other webmasters do for a living, and for fun, try searching the site for "she thought my skills were equivalent to 'flipping burgers' [google.com]".
Good luck with them both,
Jim
Sounds like everyone is frustrated with everyone else. Your client probably harrased them as much as he did you. The host probably spent a little time looking at it to figure out where the problem was. But if you didn't *ask* the hosting company to edit the script, I don't think you shouldn't pay for it. In fact I'd be angry if someone touched my scripts without my permission. If I were in your shoes I'd say the host is in the right about it not being their responsibility to fix the script, but they'd lose major points with me for the way they handled it.
