Good Customer Conduct Guide
Please take just a few minutes of your time to read this... it may save you and
us hours of work!
1) READ OUR CUSTOMER FAQ!
A lot of your common questions are answered in this FAQ. SMTP settings, Outlook settings, FTP
settings, Perl/CGI script questions etc etc, it's all HERE already, so read it!!
2) DEVELOP AND TEST YOUR CODE THOROUGHLY @ HOME !!!
Our production web servers are not yours and yours alone, you will be sharing them
with many other people and many other websites so don't write ASP code and try it
out by running it on our live servers! This is a big nono... It is possible to cause
server downtime by running bad scripts that over utilize the CPU or hog the IIS
process.
We know you aren't all ASP gurus and can't be expected to get it right first time
every time, so all we suggest is that you run a copy of IIS (Internet Information
Services) or PWS (Peer Web Services) on your local computer effectively creating
yourself a development webserver that you can play with and run your code on. If
it runs ok on your local box without any adverse side effects then and only then
should you upload it to the server for testing.
If you don't know anything about setting up PWS or IIS, just gotowww.google.co.uk and do a search for "Setting
up PWS" or "Setting up IIS", both of which are free pieces of software that come
with Microsoft operating systems. A local development environment will increase
your knowledge of coding a lot faster.
3) BE INFORMATIVE WHEN REQUESTING SUPPORT
We quite often receive support requests that contain 1 line of text along the lines
of:
"Why can't I do so and so... I get an error!! Help!"
Which is fine from your point of view... but not from ours! Make sure if you request
support that you always include as much detail as possible about any error that
may occur, your username, website name, any applicable passwords and the environment
(operating system, web browser, ISP etc) you are using which causes the error.
4) DO NOT MASS MAIL FROM OUR SERVERS!!
Quite simply this isn't what they are for, they are there to serve webpages. Mass
mailing your customer database takes a long time and a lot of bandwith and CPU usage,
so don't do it. If you setup PWS or IIS as mentioned above, then you can use your
local machine and a local copy of your database to accomplish this far quicker and
more reliably.
Mass mailing will more than likely get your website shut down.
5) BE WARY OF THIRD PARTY SCRIPTS AND APPLICATIONS
Not every script that can be downloaded from the internet works 100% reliably. Make
sure you don't blindly trust something you've found on a free scripts site without
testing it out first.
