Improve communication quality!

[matgalla]

Originally Posted by striddy

HG sells hosting services. They are not here to "teach" you how to do anything hosting related.

When you purchase a car you don't get lessons on either how to drive it nor how to dismantle or service the engine.

What is the purpose of HG's instructions if not to teach how to use their service?

When you buy a car, the manufacturer provides an instruction manual. They do not assume the reader is a mechanic.

HG's instructions could, and should, be written much more clearly. I suspect their own support staff, who have to deal with all the queries, woud appreciate that more than anyone!

Mat

[striddy]

Originally Posted by matgalla

HG's instructions could, and should, be written much more clearly. I suspect their own support staff, who have to deal with all the queries, woud appreciate that more than anyone!

This forum currently has "Threads: 48,353, Posts: 163,440". Surely almost every conceivable hosting related question and answer must be posted here.

And if not, try using google.

[regentronique]

Matgalla,

for the sake of all forum users here, whould you be kind enough to take the time to give a precise example of badly writen instructions from Hostgator staff?

I would also appreciate, as a french high technology teacher myself, that you recommand the proper way to write it for your example.

Something that i know as a fact is that any instructions should be writen to the level of understanding of the estimated audience, as guided by andragogy because we are supposed to be adults here. And if the level of understanding is quite different, the instructions should tend to the lowest comprehension group.

So it would be quite instructive and constructive to see what have caused you to react this way...

Thank you!

[PrimeInc]

A few weeks ago my reseller account, all it's domains, access to HostGator.com, and your phone lines all went down. At first I had thought you'd closed doors and I had began checking on my last backup status.

What I would like to see is an RSS feed for the server I am on, and my server only. I would like to be able to subscribe to the RSS in Outlook, Thunderbird on my Mac, and MyYaHoo for other places. The only thing on the RSS feed would be things that impact me, on my HostGator server. Each server having it's own feed. On a normal day there should be nothing posted to this RSS.

The RSS feeds should be located on a server not at ThePlanet. It should be in a different data center so that when problems like those of a few weeks ago happen you can still communicate with us. A simple $4/mo hosting plan should suffice for this. I had no idea you had a Twitter page until after the outage. I have subscribed to it via RSS, but it's seems hard to follow to me.

The only e-mails I ever get are the blank ones from billing every few months . I never see any anouncements of planned or unplanned outages.

[matgalla]

for the sake of all forum users here, whould you be kind enough to take the time to give a precise example of badly writen instructions from Hostgator staff?

Hi Regentronique,

First of all, my apologies for interrupting your thread. Initially, I just saw the heading and thought this is where to place my complaint. Only later did I realise that the comments added should relate to your particular problem.

Anyway, thank you for taking an interest im my problems. You are obviously one of the good teachers! (See my response to Brad Hargrove's comment on my blog post "Hostgator Under Threat?" at http://matgallaugher.com
Incidentally, the teacher I quote there is Michel Thomas, another French Canadian I believe)

Now, I have maybe been a bit too harsh on Hostgator. Since writing my diatribe, I have had the opportunity to look at a lot more of their site. It is obvious that they do go to a great deal of trouble to help their customers. At this stage, much of it is quite beyond me, and I accept that (though I suspect much of it could be clarified!).

However, my problem related to their Getting Started Wizard and I really do think this is where particular care should be taken to cater for people at my level.

Again, to be fair to HG, when I first tried to follow this, I was extremely tired. On re-reading it with a fresher mind, I have been able to grasp much that had earlier bamboozled me. Nevertheless, there is room for improvement ...

For example, look at their Introduction Page: I have no idea what is meant by Permissions, and there is no attempt to explain this.

Then there is a warning: "If you placed them in / for example, no one will be able to view them." Clearly something has been left out. A bit careless, and still not corrected after some weeks!

That's just one page, and I could go on. However, my main suggestion would be to have a drop-down menu on each page, clearly explaining any new terms if they are not fully explained on the page itself.

That alone, would be a great help.

Cheers,

Mat

[regentronique]

Originally Posted by matgalla

...
...

However, my problem related to their Getting Started Wizard and I really do think this is where particular care should be taken to cater for people at my level.

Again, to be fair to HG, when I first tried to follow this, I was extremely tired. On re-reading it with a fresher mind, I have been able to grasp much that had earlier bamboozled me. Nevertheless, there is room for improvement ...

For example, look at their Introduction Page: I have no idea what is meant by Permissions, and there is no attempt to explain this.

Then there is a warning: "If you placed them in / for example, no one will be able to view them." Clearly something has been left out. A bit careless, and still not corrected after some weeks!

...
...

matgalla,

thank you for taking the time to explain a bit more your "reaction" to the HostGator Instructions...

I tried to find the "Getting Started Wizard", the only thing i founded close to that was the "General Info & Getting Started Page" from "HostGator Knowledgebase". After i tried to find "Introduction Page", no luck either for this. Can you give me the links for those pages?

Meantime i would like to comment on the informations you are giving.

"Permissions" are the real permissions you are giving to any group or people internally or on the internet. You can allow the owner of a file to Write, Read and Execute it, while not allowing anyone else even the permission to Read that file. You will find more information on this by Googling around "linux file permission".

In the Linux world the "/" is the "home" directory where everything is starting. As sub-directories of "/" you will have many more directories, "public_html" is one of those sub-directories where everybody would be able to access the content from the internet. So you can understand why, if you put something in the "/" directory, it wont be visible from the internet! Knowing this allows you to hide files in the "/" for internal purpose, because internally from scripts you can access files almost anywere on the server.

But there is a lot more to learn about directories hierarchies on Linux, again i suggest you to Google around to get more informations on this.

Without having seen the HostGator Wizard on this, i hope they took the time to explain briefly their main directories hierarchies...

[matgalla]

Regentronique.

http://74.52.116.98:2082/frontend/x3...ted/intro.html

Above is the link to the page I was referring to. (Alternatively, go to the Hostgator Control Panel ... there, under Preferences, is the Getting Started Wizard ... then skip through to the 2nd or 3rd page)

Thank you for taking the trouble to make things clearer for me - you have done! And my apologies to Hostgator. Apparently, they hadn't left something out as I had thought. However, they could have put an explanation for people at my level. After all, I don't think they want to confine their sales to people who are already expert in Linux etc.

As you will see, they have explained their main directory heirarchies and I was able to understand this - once I had had a good sleep!

I have already acknowledged that HG provide an awful lot of help on their site. In fact, maybe so much that I would have trouble finding the answers I need!!

Anyway, without wishing to denigrate HG, I may be switching to a smaller hosting company that specifically caters for dummies like me. (I point this out to explain why I may not be able to respond to any further comments)

Thanks again for your help. At my stage, just learning what I need to learn is a great help!

[matgalla]

Regentronique.

http://74.52.116.98:2082/frontend/x3...ted/intro.html

Above is the link to the page I was referring to. (Alternatively, go to the Hostgator Control Panel ... there, under Preferences, is the Getting Started Wizard ... then skip through to the 2nd or 3rd page)

Thank you for taking the trouble to make things clearer for me - you have done! And my apologies to Hostgator. Apparently, they hadn't left something out as I had thought. However, they could have put an explanation for people at my level. After all, I don't think they want to confine their sales to people who are already expert in Linux etc.

As you will see, they have explained their main directory heirarchies and I was able to understand this - once I had had a good sleep!

I have already acknowledged that HG provide an awful lot of help on their site. In fact, maybe so much that I would have trouble finding the answers I need!!

Anyway, without wishing to denigrate HG, I may be switching to a smaller hosting company that specifically caters for dummies like me. (I point this out to explain why I may not be able to respond to any further comments)

Thanks again for your help. At my stage, just learning what I need to learn is a great help!

[regentronique]

Thank you matgalla for the details,

using myself the old "x" cPanel theme for specific reasons, i did not remembered about the "Getting Started Wizard" available on the "x3" cPanel theme. Mostly because those instructions are coming from cPanel and not HostGator...

Creating, installing and maintaining web pages is not as "straight forward" as many beginners think, there are several things to learn in the way.

Many are learning by trial and error and some other use tutorials as the one you saw yourself.

Gwyneth created many usefull threads here, to help newbies to get a grip on basic concepts ...

Maybe another smaller hosting company could be more usefull for you, maybe not. It all depend on the owner attitude, support service dedication and the quality of communications...

[gwyneth]

Originally Posted by regentronique

Creating, installing and maintaining web pages is not as "straight forward" as many beginners think, there are several things to learn in the way.

Many are learning by trial and error and some other use tutorials as the one you saw yourself.

Gwyneth created many usefull threads here, to help newbies to get a grip on basic concepts ...

regentronique, thanks for the nice comment.

Originally Posted by matgalla

Anyway, without wishing to denigrate HG, I may be switching to a smaller hosting company that specifically caters for dummies like me. (I point this out to explain why I may not be able to respond to any further comments)

Thanks again for your help. At my stage, just learning what I need to learn is a great help!

IMO, in your quest for a "company that caters to dummies" you should distinguish between getting information that's useful to you and having things done for you.

I'd like to posit that something like this forum is the best possible combination of knowledge about the specific hosting firm; all of the other pieces, not specific to host firm, of getting a wide variety of sites and applications to work; and most important, specific steps to combine them.

In my opinion (and experience) it's the equivalent of a group of helpful neighbors with diverse skills available at diverse times to offer guidance, suggestions, rueful accounts of what not to do, specialized tools that take a fraction of the time and effort of any alternative, and brainstorming.

Getting input from peers (fellow customers) is also crucial, particularly during your early hosting experience, to learn when the hosting firm is at fault, and when you are.