Well, here we go with another rant. It’s been a little too long since the last one of these, so here we go.
I have an account with 1&1 internet, to do Microsoft Web Hosting. The price was great for what you get (I mean, really, check it out for yourself!) but for billing… I guess it would be easier if we had a credit card, but the banks seem to disagree with us on that, so we used (or at least tried to use) a Visa Gift Card instead.
They have difficulty accepting them, it seems. And while you can pay with PayPal, it uses PayPal’s “Pre-Authorised Debit” system. Great, except for two things. One, it needs a credit card associated with the account, and two, it doesn’t work at all outside the US. Not that you can see that. You can go (from their merchant link to set it up) and set the authorisation, choose the maximum amount they can take, and as far as you can see everything is AOK. But if you sign in to your PayPal account (Using your country’s portal), there’s no sign of any pre-authorised options, you can’t adjust them or anything. ‘Cause it’s US only.
So now I have paid them using a Swift EFT, a direct electronic money transfer from my bank to them. I called them to confirm they’ve received it, and they claim so, but I’m still getting automated messages on my account details page saying it’s overdue. *sigh*. I’ll call them again on Monday and see what they say.
The other issue is that they run their .net apps at Medium trust, and with little sign of what version and extensions are installed.
The “Medium Trust” lead me to not be able to use Umbraco 4.0b (Which I was developing against on my local staging site). I’m hoping they’re running .net 3.5, ‘cause then I can use the newly-released Umbraco 4.1b (Which does work against Medium trust, but Requires .net 3.5). If they’re not running .net 3.5, I’m going to be screwed here, quite honestly. At that point it starts looking more cost and effort effective to buy a basic box on Amazon EC2 and use that to host, though the bandwidth costs there would be the main expense.
Still, live and learn, huh?
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