A story illustrating how web design companies don't always make the best web hosting companies.
For historical reasons I have been hosting one web site where the content all came from a professional web design company. It stuck out a bit from all of the other sites on my server as the content was all in Flash.
As I'm moving all my sites to a new server I decided to suggest to the designers that they should find another home for the site. "No problem," they replied, "we'll host it ourselves."
A few days later they send me an email containing details of an FTP account on their new server and asked my to transfer all of the content. I explained that as they had created all of the content, they were probably far better placed than me to know what needed to be moved to where.
A couple of days further on I get another email saying that they can't access the site on my server. It's obviously been a while since they updated the site and in the meantime my old hosting providers have accidently broken passive FTP support on the server and can't work out how to turn it back on. I decide it's easiest if I just transfer all of the files onto the new server for them.
So that's what I do. I then email them saying "I've moved the content over. You might want to check that it all works ok. When you're happy, give me a shout and I'll point the DNS at your new server." I know that there will be some work to do fixing the site as they use Ikonboard and that will need some file paths changed in its configuration.
Far quicker than I expected I get an email back saying "looks good, let's move it" so I change the DNS.
Twelve hours later the DNS changes have propogated and I look at the site on the new server. Sure enough, the Ikonboard configuration is still broken so no-one can post to the forum. I point this out to the designers and get an email back saying they'll look into it. It's now six hours later and it's still broken.
Maybe I should offer to help them fix it. It'll probably take about ten minutes.
