no more webcom.com

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SoCalHoops News

A Word About WebCom.com. . .
Just Say No--(Jan. 15, 2001)

	What	WebCom.com (a wholly owned subsidiary of Verio
	Where:	On the Internet
	When	All the time. . . except when you need them. . .
	Who	Don't bother asking. . .

Ok, so this is war. . . .Do Not Use WebCom. Boycott Verio. Really. We mean it. We're moving and getting the hell out of Dodge as soon as we can. . . and if you're smart you'll get out too. At least before the FTC comes crawling and snooping around and before the class action begins. . .

For the last four and a half years, we've been hosted by WebCom, and generally, except for the first year, things have been "good" with this company. Well. . . ok, they've been tolerable, not exactly good. . . But all that changed in the last year. WebCom, a small webhosting company was purchased, lock, stock and barrell by Verio, one of the new internet webhost companies which is, not unlike the 800 lb. gorilla, a kind of dangerous creature, because it never really knows a good thing when it sees one, except to smash it, burn it and destroy it. Little did we know that the manner in which the company calculated disk storage fees, and "web traffic" fees was deceptive and misleading. . . and that we've been suckered. . . So, we're leaving WebCom.com.

We'll make this short and sweet. For the last two years, we've been recommending WebCom.com as a good place to host a site, any site, and by displaying those silly little "Hosted By" buttons, we've also gotten a benefit, in that it has reduced (but not eliminated) our monthly fees. That's right, since we don't have advertising here on SoCalHoops, it actually costs us money to maintain the site. With WebCom.com, the service has been tolerable, the technical assistance only moderately annoying, and just like a lot of internet companies, they're not really around when you need them most, i.e., when something goes wrong, that's when you really miss their lack of 24 hour service. Oh, sure, they'll take your credit card and your check. . . But we're not going to pay WebCom.com any longer because we've had it.

In the last two months, they've charged us what we paid for a year's worth of hosting. . . Now we like to provide a service as much as the next guy, but we're not crazy. . . and WebCom.com really just isn't interested in providing us with any kind of affordable fee structure, so they've left us with no choice but to look for better digs elsewhere. Today they pulled the final indignity and we'll be looking to move that portion of SoCalHoops which still remains on their site (we long ago moved about two thirds of the site to another webhost when they jacked their rates last year). WebCom ended "Hosted By" referral program entirely effective January 15, 2001, and the result is that every "hit" now actually costs us money. . .and that's not why we host this site. We do it for the benefit of everyone who is a fan of basketball in Southern California, but frankly, we also don't want to do advertising. . . revenues are (allegedly from what we hear from the Fox and Rivals guys) dropping, and likewise, we don't think that a subscription format would be viable and we wouldn't feel right about doing that anyway. . . But the bottom line is that with the kind of traffic that we generate daily (which is substantial, easily more than 100,000 page views a day), we have no choice but to move SoCalHoops to another location. . .and muy pronto. . .

Don't get too worried; SoCalHoops isn't going anywhere from your point of view. . . all it means is we will move the remaining files from WebCom.com's server and then once we get everything working normally, we'll switch the domain name to our new host. Hopefully this will all be seemless and invisible as far as you, our readers are concerned.

There are plenty of other quality web hosting companies, literally thousands out there who will (a) be happy to get all the traffic which you, our readers, can generate, and (b) who will also be happy to get a monthly fee from us to host our site.

Hey, screw WebCom.com. Really, that's the way we feel about them, and their view of the world. So, do not patronize WebCom.com. Avoid Verio too. Tell all your friends not to visit any sites hosted by WebCom.com. or Verio, and boycott their services.

At least for the short term until we get the time to move SoCalHoops to a new webhost, you'll be seeing the new "Not Hosted By" and "Anti-WebCom.com" logos in various locations around SoCalHoops. . . who knows, maybe we'll just leave them there even after we move. . . they look kinda cool. . .

Oh, and if you click on either of the logos, you'll get an e-mail pop-up box, so you can send WebCom your own personalized message. . .tell them how you feel about the fact that instead of writing about hoops and games, we'll have to spend time moving files and performing administrative tasks which we would not have to do if they weren't such pigs. . . .

Gotta run. . . Dream Classic in less than 24 hours. . . tons to type and need some sleep. . . Later.