Website Hosting, it ain’t pretty

And it isn’t easy either. First, when I uploaded our company’s new website to a UNIX server at our ISP, I found that their ‘log’ files don’t record “referrers”, so I had no idea how people were getting to our site. That sucks! I can’t believe they haven’t fixed that since I was last using that server in 97. Doesn’t anyone complain?

This week we moved to a new host, primarily to streamline our email. This host has referrers and live stats, so you can always check in to see how the site is performing (instead of batch process once a day). But this host doesn’t support form tools that send mail. They offer up a couple weak solutions that don’t really tell you everything you need. For example they list an ASP script, but is actually just a call script to another ASP script that you apparently have to buy. Or maybe its already installed on the server–I couldn’t tell.

I could have avoided all this if I was using FrontPage, which the host supports, but I’ve moved on to Dreamweaver. And if I use FrontPage to create just the form pages, it doesn’t work. FrontPage wants to take over the whole site.

Solution? Letting our technology consultant write an ASP script for me. It’s not often I get this stumped by technology.