When developing a website it’s important to keep all your users in mind. It was only a few years ago when large companies would display the message, “you must use Internet Explorer to view this website”, thankfully those days are long gone. Most businesses now work hard to give all their users a consistent experience.

One PinchHost customer found that 20% of their visitors are using Internet Explorer 6, he was running the latest version of Internet Explorer, which at the time was version 7. Essentially his CSS was rendering adversely in IE6, the main content was pushed under the sidebar, presenting the page as primarily white space. He had therefore alienated over 20% of his visitors/potential customers. A lot of web designers refuse to make their website compatible with old technologies such as IE6. But the fact is, people are still using ancient browsers. If you’re running an e-commerce website, then you simply can’t afford to ignore these visitors.

There are simply too many browsers spread over multiple operating systems, all with long version histories. As a developer or website owner, you’d be mad to install everything internally for testing. Which is where BrowserShots.org comes in handy. Enter your website address and choose from a range of browsers which have been installed on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and BSD.

Processing usually takes around 30 minutes depending on the number of browsers you select. You’ll then be able to access your screenshots, quickly ascertaining which configurations are displaying abnormally.

The service even allows you to select a preferred screen resolution, allowing you to check your design on an 800×600 resolution (among others), which although seemingly redundant, 800×600 is still used by 4% of users according to W3Schools. The Firefox extension Window Resizer is also useful for testing your site in standard resolutions.

Safari on the iPhone is gaining traction, you can preview your design with iPhoney.

The WHIR is the voice of the web hosting industry. Over the weekend the WHIR turned 9. Happy Birthday!

The WHIR provides online up to date web hosting news, WHIR Blogs, WHIR TV as well as WHIR Magazine. Currently their magazine, published 5 times a year has a total per issue circulation of 25,000. Look out for us in the May 2009 issue! It’ll be circulating at a number of events:

Social Networking Conference
Search Engine Strategies
Affiliate Convention
AJAX World Conference & Expo 2009
SOAWorld Conference and Expo 2009
O’Reilly Velocity 2009
O’Reilly OSCON Open Source Convention

Digital versions of the magazine are available, backdating all the way back to June 2004. If you’re US based then you can subscribe to the hard copy free. If you’re interested in web hosting then don’t let the WHIR pass you by.

I came across a very sneaky condition in a competing host’s terms of service today, the condition refers to their money back guarantee.

“We will deduct flat 6% administrative fee before initiating the refund.”

9 times out of 10, the reason a customer decides to leave within the money back period is because they’ve had a bad experience. Let’s say the host did an awful job and caused you nothing but grief, the fact that they’ll profit is shocking.

If you find yourself in this situation, point out that the 6% ‘administrative fee’ is ridiculous, they’ll almost certainly back down.

Just to make clear, we don’t have a 6% ‘administrative fee’ and our money back guarantee is unconditional. If you decide to leave within 60 days, you’ll receive a full refund.

I don’t usually like pointing the finger, but DreamHost‘s general way of conducting business is gently swaying from jovial to unprofessional. I previously wrote a post, ‘Honest practice‘ talking primarily about how a number of web hosting companies advertise a certain price, when the actual cost is somewhat different. I used DreamHost as an example.

DreamHost doesn’t take itself too seriously, a lot of their marketing and pitching takes advantage of comedy. Which is great. The issue is, when problems occur, customers begin to feel as if they aren’t being taken seriously.

On Monday DreamHost posted a customer’s voicemail message. The clip features a DreamHost customer weeping over a stolen domain name and pleading for help. I listened to the clip for a few seconds before switching off. Liam Eagle at the WHIR deliberated over the post,

“But it would be tough to argue that the purpose of the post is really anything other than to laugh at the expense of the customer leaving the message. In case you don’t feel like downloading it and listening, it’s a two-minute clip of a man who sounds very timid and very upset begging for their help. It seems like the last minute is just the man gently sobbing. That’s just my guess, because after 15 seconds I couldn’t take any more.”

It just shows a complete lack of respect for their customers. Brett assured readers that they sent him a ‘huge bouquet of flowers’. Is this to console him regarding the stolen domain or his personal humiliation? The actions of a company that generated revenue of $13.1 million in 2006.

One commenter stated,

“It’s spectacularly bad form to post this.
And then you say you sent him flowers? Yikes.
I’m a DH customer of many years. And now so embarrassed that I recommended DH to my colleagues and friends.
What were you thinking?”

Another,

“Let me get this straight… Your customer support is horrible, so to “make up for it” you expose your customers to ridicule?”

Liam Eagle concludes,

“I have to imagine most hosting companies would avoid doing something like this. I don’t get the sense that this is a calculated move by DreamHost to appear “irreverent.” So it does add to the genuine feel of that approachability that characterizes the company. However, it might also make them seem a little less like the kind of company you’d want to approach.”

We regret to announce that from today, our 45-day unconditional money back guarantee will be no more. Fortunately we’ll be introducing a brand spanking new 60-day unconditional money back guarantee. Why? Because we’re so darn sure that you’ll love our service. We wanted to make the decision even easier by giving you 15 further reasons to signup.

We’re celebrating with a promotion, enter coupon code 45TO60 at checkout and receive 25% off your initial order at PinchHost. The coupon expires 30th April 2009.

The first month since PinchHost opened its doors to… well… YOU is sadly over. But what a month! A relatively pain free month, which is unquestionably what you’d like to hear from a web host.

Let me start off by saying, all our clients have been amazing! We’d love to share with you some of the comments made. Cindy, (blogging at PouBou since 2003!) wrote a post regarding her move to PinchHost, the quoted text below describes Cindy’s situation, specifically at the moment in time when her previous host unintentionally wiped her content,

“I threw a temporary WordPress blog here that you might’ve seen if you happened to click over here. On it, I mentioned that my last manual backup of my website was from May 2008, hence my panic. (So all the entries about selling our house, moving to North Carolina, the holidays, Catie’s 2nd birthday? GONE.) Then the tech from PinchHost – the same guy who responded to me on Twitter – left me a comment telling me that he had gone through Google’s cache of my archives and found about 100 entries from May 2008 to now, and saved them to a zip file for me to download.”

This also slots nicely into our ‘extra mile’ focus. We’ve really gone the extra mile for customers and non-customers alike. Last week we helped a University student solve a problem (PHP) with their Computing work. We were even contacted by a competing web hosting company regarding country-based (IP) redirection and happily passed on our methods. Clearly, we’re still young and eventually we won’t be able to allocate resources to quite so extraneous requests from non-customers, but take advantage, we’re not planning on stopping anytime soon.

Another user made this comment through Twitter,

“PinchHost has just set up 5 domains for me and is uploading themes now brilliant service.”

We’ve also managed to pickup a page rank 4, three weeks after launch. There shouldn’t be too much emphasise on page rank, but it surpassed of our initial target, equalling that of web hosts online for a number of years. Which is a great moral boost. Wikipedia definition,

“PageRank is a link analysis algorithm used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.”

In terms of support methods, ticket support has been used primarily, due to its prominence on the site. Telephone support has also been great, we haven’t left a call waiting for longer than 10 seconds! We’ll be updating the support section of the site in the near future to better present all of our support methods.

Twitter has been brilliant, we’ve picked up thousands of followers, admittedly not all of which we know intimately. We see Twitter as a great way to increase exposure and communicate with our customers and non-customers alike.

Our affiliate program, although quite hidden has received some attention from external web hosting related websites, no reports of any issues with the affiliate system, it seems to be running smoothly.

In summary, an excellent first month, thanks to all of our customers, affiliate members, followers plus all those who’ve been in contact with us!

We’ve been conducting an experiment over the last 12 hours and have found on average that PinchHost is 6% faster than HostGator and 11% faster than DreamHost. This data is based on bandwidth speed and the data was generated with Derek T Del Conte’s Bandwidth Meter. The software was installed on PinchHost server ‘Raptor’, HostGator server ‘Gator476’ and DreamHost server ‘Mystique’.

We tested the speeds in the West Midlands (UK) plus Pennsylvania (US). Testing each host every hour on the hour (three times) for 12 hours. After averaging (mean method) the data, we found that PinchHost was 6% faster than HostGator and 11% faster than DreamHost.

HostGator speed was tested on on a random server, but they also provide an official speed test installation, which you can find here, this can be compared against us. DreamHost unfortunately doesn’t have an official installation.