Slim Pickins is the band my other half sings in. I developed a HTML version of their site a couple of years ago. Last year, using Template Toolkit, I developed a Perl version. I didn't want it running from my servers at home, so looked for a cheap hosting solution. Freedom 2 Surf seemed a good choice, although they don't allow Perl to access MySQL due to "performance issues", but can use PHP.
Anyhow, the Slim Pickins site just needed Perl and TT installed. The first came as standard, and the latter was kindly installed by one of their operatives. The site was up and running and happily chunting along.
However, something happened at the beginning of February. Unfortunately I don't check the site very often as it should be just doing it's job. However, several fans had discovered that from the beginning of Feb the site was reporting errors. I only found out about it when one fan asked me about it at the bands regular end of month gig. The following morning I checked and discovered that there was a problem accessing TT. Either the servers had been changed or TT had been moved. I sent an email to support asking them what happened.
Two months latter I have still not received a reply.
This weekend I tried to install Template Toolkit locally on the server, only to discover that they have a 10kb limit on ASCII files!!!! There are several files inside TT that are well over that. I've had to send another email requesting that they give me a damn good explanation as to why I haven't received any response in the last 2 months and why they've put a such a block on uploading ASCII files.
A friend of mine has kindly set up a DB, webserver and disk space on his remote box, so hopefully I'll have a fully working site again by the weekend.
This will be the last time I'll be using Freedom 2 Surf. Anyone who takes more than a weekend to respond is not really customer focused. Any more than a month and you have to wonder how many redundacies have they just had.
