I had a customer call, saying he (and his daughter) was having difficulty uploading his new website to his hosting company, and also getting the emails related to his domain name (www.dteducation.net.au).

If he has a straightforward unix hosting provider, then this should be easy…

Well, it wasn’t.

As often happens, people don’t realise that hosting and domain names are 2 different things (which can be combined (but I personally prefer not to).

It eventually transpires that he already had a domain name (from a while ago), and thought he would get a hosting package for it.

He didn’t realise that he had also transferred his domain name over to domainnames.com.au.

At first, I looked at their support documentation. It was a little confusing, but then again, I was specifically looking for information on activating emails and uploading webpages… the email info was ok (but didn’t work), but uploading web pages didn’t make any sense…

I eventually handed this over to Mandy, as I was too busy to look into it at the time.

She eventually realised that he had opted for the free hosting package.

That means that you cannot upload pages. But you can choose from a large range of online templates.

It also means that technical support is limited to email only.

I think its pretty good for a free service… but personally, I would prefer to pay between $100 and $200 per annum, and have more control over my website.

Anyway, even the online template wouldn’t work properly (IE7 would say something about website not found).

A whois showed that the domain name registrar was distribute.it … were they related to domainnames.com.au, or to their website support site (onlinesupport.com.au)? We couldn’t be sure.

After a few emails to support, the problem was fixed. I suspect it might have been a minor configuration issue with domainnames.com.au.

Anyway, I showed him how to use the online templates… and there was the start of another problem:

It worked fine at the office, but the java code for displaying templates didn’t work on the customers PC. I eventually tried on his laptop… and it worked (at last!).

I’m told that the main PC had an infection a while ago (and a local PC store had fixed it)… looks like the disinfection caused some subtle damage to windows XP system.

Anyway, customer is happy to use the laptop for now, so I leave it as it stands.