A long while ago I learned the hard way never to create a folder titled “Forms” within a document library. SharePoint will let you “create” this folder (even though it already exists as hidden for internal purposes), but then will not let you delete it, rename it, and will exhibit other weird behavior.

This week I’ve found another interesting combination. If you create a site and set the URL to “con” the site will be useless. You can set the title to “con” – you just can’t set the URL to that value. I still haven’t figured out why – I haven’t found any mention of this anywhere online.

It’s not related to the template, site permissions, which parent site you’re creating it in, or title. There were no other sites or lists with that name or URL anywhere I’ve tested to cause a conflict. I can use other 3-letter titles, just not that specific one. I’ve tried creating a site with this URL in various locations on the portal as well as another portal entirely. Both portals are running MOSS 2007, one is using AD authentication while the other is using FBA.

On one portal I receive an error that the resource cannot be found when trying to complete the site creation, or attempting to view anything inside the site (including the site settings). When trying to open the mostly-created site in SharePoint Designer I receive an error that “the version of windows sharepoint services running on the server is more recent than the version of sharepoint designer you are using” – only on this one site. I receive just a blank page on the other portal when trying to open the site.

I’m assuming that this is similar to the “Forms” folder issue that I’ve run into before, though I don’t have any hard evidence.

Has anyone else experienced this behavior? Have you found any other “problem” names or URLs?

There aren’t too many. Some are just annoyances, but there are a few that would take the user experience to the next level.

1. A simple one to start: Continue to display the current time when receiving a phone call.
2. The ability to configure battery saving preferred settings (like “turn off GPS, Bluetooth, and Wifi”), then “activate” them just by tapping an app icon. Touch the same app icon to set it back.  I’m tired of having to go in several places to turn items on and off when I’m on the go.
3. Custom ring profiles similar to the Blackberry. I’d like to be able to set rules on how the phone behaves when receiving emails, texts, or calls with various criteria.

If I can have those 3 things, I would be a much happier iPhone owner.

Funny thing is, the number they called was the main number for the house – but not my number. I have my cell and only my cell, and it’s been that way for years now. So I logged into my account and looked up the company’s number and gave them a call. They have no record of anyone trying to call me recently. And why would they? They have no need to call me right now – unless they’re trying to sell me something.

So it looks like someone found my billing information and looked up the phone number for this address. Yeah, that gives me the warm-and-fuzzies. I’ll have to keep an eye on that account.

In other news, it looks like I’ll have to take these guys to small claims court if I’m ever going to see my $500 in rebates for my cell phone purchase from last year. Granted, I was in the wrong when I initially sent in my rebate paperwork – but with the best intentions. I had paid my account well in advance and sent in the paperwork early because I knew that I was going to have to move and didn’t want that interfering with my rebate. But at the time I thought that was allowed.
To make a long story short – I sent in the paperwork. Weeks and weeks later they sent me an email confirmation. When I looked it up, the status said:

Dates of submitted wireless bills do not fall within the date range specified on the rebate form.

You will receive a letter or postcard describing this problem. The letter or postcard may have instructions on how to correct this error.

I waited for a letter or postcard, but did not receive one. I wasn’t sure if I would ever get it because I had moved. So I emailed them asking what actions I need to take. They told me they couldn’t help me because I provided the wrong bill. I complained and explained the situation. They said (essentially) “oh, ok. Just follow these steps and we’ll take care of it.” I followed the instructions and gave them more than enough information. No email confirmation. I sent an email asking for a status. “Sorry. We can’t help you. You’re not allowed to resubmit your bill. Essentially you get one shot, and since you provided the wrong bill your rebate request is null and void.”

So there goes the money that was going to pay for my flight to Spain.

On top of that, I’m not happy with Best Buy – but again this is actually my fault. When I bought my TV I was supposed to get some “reward zone” gift card things for all of the points that I earned for spending so much cash. I waited and waited for them to arrive – because I had lots of things I was going to spend them on

After I moved I found the envelope with them in it. $95 worth. Woohoo! But they had expired 9 days before I found them. I called up the Reward Zone number and asked if they could reissue them. “Sorry, we can’t help you.” They apparently have a “no reissue” policy. So there goes $95.

Also – from the move – my awesome Klipsch PC speakers died. The subwoofer keeps blowing fuses immediately when powering it on. I didn’t notice until about a month after moving because it took me that long to get settled in enough and get off my lazy butt to set them up. My roommate was cool enough to call Klipsch and talk to them. They told him that I’d have to find my receipt and bring it to Best Buy and they could send it in for repair under the 1 yr warranty. Only thing is, it took me another month to find the receipt – and guess how far out of warranty it was? Just over a month. And (even though they have the EXACT make and model IN STOCK) they aren’t able to help me any further with replacing or repairing them.

Wow. Best Buy REALLY goes out of their way to help their customers, eh?

So let’s just tally this. I’m out $500 from my cell phone rebates, $95 from the Reward Zone cash, $160 for my speakers (that I have yet to replace and not sure that I will), and not to mention the $300+ that I spent to send all of Jason’s stuff out to AZ.

That’s over $1k in losses in about 2 months. Ouch.

Then there was the downtime and sheer unusability a couple of weeks back. I was able to FINALLY get a full backup of my site 7 days after they started moving it. 7 DAYS?!?

I opened a ticket with them about an hour ago asking to close my account and refund my remaining balance. They apologized that it didn’t work out, asked if there was anything they could do to keep me, and pasted the account termination instructions.

Get this. Here are some snippets from thier Terms of Service:

Service Level Guarantee
Acenet guarantees a 99.9% up time service level. If you are unable to obtain 99.9% access to your website, Acenet will, on an as-requested basis, issue a pro rated credit to you for future services conditional upon your submission of proof that 99.9% up time was not achieved as documented by an industry recognized and reputable third party monitoring service such as that of Alertra.com service. This guarantee shall not apply in the event of Force Majeur (as described below), scheduled maintenance periods, inability to access applications or scripts running on the server or if customer’s account is not in good standing at the time of the outage.

30-Day Money Back Guarantee
If you are not completely satisfied for any reason within the first 30 days of purchasing a hosting or reseller plan, you will be given a full refund of the fees paid in advance upon plan cancellation. The 30-Day Money Back Guarantee is only available to new customers and cannot be invoked by anyone who has ever previously been a customer of Acenet or has been a customer of Acenet for over 30 days. The following services are not covered by the 30-Day Money Back Guarantee and are non-refundable for any reason: additional items and services; domain name registration; dedicated servers; virtual dedicated servers; plan renewals; plan upgrades; plan term extensions; SSL certificates; and overage fees. To invoke the 30-Day Money Back Guarantee, you must cancel your plan exactly as outlined in the “Termination by Customer” section of this agreement within 30 days of purchase. THERE ARE ABSOLUTELY NO REFUNDS OFFERED, PROMISED OR AVAILABLE AFTER 30 DAYS OF PURCHASE.

Refunds
Refunds are only available in accordance with the 30-Day Money Back Guarantee. THERE ARE ABSOLUTELY NO REFUNDS OFFERED, PROMISED, OR AVAILABLE OUTSIDE ACENET’S 30-DAY MONEY BACK GUARANTEE.

Then how do they plan on holding up their 99.9% uptime guarantee? They give you a credit so you’re stuck with their crappy service for longer…

Termination by Customer
All plans automatically renew until terminated. In order to terminate or cancel your plan, you must submit the online account termination form at https://ace-host.net/TerminateAccount.html. Any attempts to cancel by phone, email, live chat, or any other method will be rejected and billing will continue until these instructions have been followed. Please be aware that there are absolutely no refunds available outside the 30-day money back guarantee. Termination requests must be received a minimum of SEVEN (7) days prior to the end of your plan’s term to prevent automatic renewal . If a plan has already been renewed, there are absolutely no refunds available for any reason. Acenet is unable to cancel your account effective for a future date. Once the online account termination form has been submitted, your request will be placed in our service cancellations queue and you will receive a confirmation email within 20 minutes. If you do not receive this email, your request was not received! The confirmation email will contain a Ticket ID, which is your proof of submission and can be used to track the status of your termination request.

Credit Card Chargebacks
Any Customer who initiates a chargeback on their credit card, (removal of Acenet’s debit of your credit card account for Fees) will be subject to (1) an Administrative Fee of $100.00 per chargeback, (2) re-payment of the amount(s) originally charged to the credit card (3) and immediate termination of all Customer’s Plan(s).

Is that even legal??

I think I’m going to have to eat 10 months of hosting fees because of that. I would think twice before signing up with them…

They guarantee 99.9% uptime, but I had 4+ days of downtime, plus dataloss (= more downtime on my part because I had to redo everything) back in the end of November. They moved my site to a new server that was supposed to be “bigger-better-faster”, but not only did they NOT notify me in any way before they started the move, but my site has been down since they moved me.

That was Sunday. It’s been 6 days and my site is still inaccessible.
*does the math*
If I’m generous and say that I’ve only had 10 days’ of downtime over the past 8 weeks… That’s 18% downtime. Not acceptable.

SSH, SFTP, HTTP, email, cPanel. On the rare times that the site is actually accessible, it’s painfully slow. So slow in fact, that I can’t do anything. And then everything stops working again.

They claim that they’re still migrating data to the new server, installing things, and optimizing performance, so “you will experience occasional slowness”. And they have recommended that I clear my browser cache, set my browser to refresh websites on each visit, close my browser and restart my computer.

Gee, thanks guys.
I’m seriously not happy with how they’ve handled everything. I definitely would not consider it professional. It’s so ridiculous that it feels like they’re purposely patronizing me and I’ve just given up on updating my ticket stating that elorg.net is STILL down.

So to make a long story short, I’m switching from ACENET to Site5. I’m still setting things up, and because I still haven’t been able to do a full backup on my old site, everything will be a little stark and bland for the moment. Hopefully I can slip in and at least get my gallery backed up. I can deal with losing the rest. I don’t want to have to re-upload ALL of my photos again and label/comment on them all. That would take way more time than I have the patience for right now.

I was able to backup my databases, so the forum should be salvageable. My main site however, won’t be. Hence why this is now my first post. I installed the new version of WordPress which is apparently incompatible with the template that I had started, as well as the database. But I only had 3 news posts and hadn’t worked out all of the bugs in my template. So that’s no big loss.

More updates to come!