Hi, The reason I found Lisa's presence on the web is because Homestead's compliance department served notice on me that come April 1st they are closing my 4 web sites (technically my account).

I am desperately searching for a way to rebuild my web sites as fast and as detailed as they originally are. I found Lisa by searches for web site building software. Her endorsement of Site Build It was a link I clicked on. Whether I buy into Site Build It or not the serendipity of finding Lisa's web content has been a blessing to me.

I learned most of what I know by trial and error and by reading a lot of books and online material. I wish I would have found Lisa's posts sooner. Some of the perspective she offers would have made things much easier and maybe I wouldn't be getting kicked out of Homestead.

Justin Kitch, the founder and CEO of Homestead called me but I missed his call. I may try to contact him tomorrow. Intuit bought Homestead from Justin for 170 million dollars. Intuit is the company that sells the popular tax return software seen at almost every office store in America. I may appeal to Justin and see whether he can get the decision overturned so I can have a second chance. I may come back to this forum and tell everyone what happened when I call his hot line.

I strongly feel that people should know the risk they are taking when they build a business with a site builder program and the resulting web site is posted on the site builder's program host computer. It turns out that a web host can cancel your account at any time for any reason. All the fees you paid and commitments made are null and void. You lose everything. Not just your web site (s). For me this represents a lot of money and even more time. Hundreds of hours as a matter of fact. I had no idea that this was a possibility and that I was putting my business in peril by disputing the responses I was receiving from Homestead's technical help department.

The reason that Homestead is scheduled to close my business is that I was argumentative. That's it. What I am talking about are one way help tickets I submitted that consultants answer with a written response. Yes, I protested the answers because I personally believed many answers were erroneous. Some were disrespectful. Some had symptoms that the consultant did not read my question (s).

I did not curse nor was I vulgar. But yes, I did become frustrated with the barrage of lame and inept responses to the technical issues I needed help with. I believe in my heart that putting someone out of business for being argumentative on help tickets is not commensurate with the tort. I also believe that web hosts should not have the power to act in this manner without legal arbitration. In other words, there ought to be some laws in place to protect us. For one thing I should have been properly warned that I may be heading down the road that led to this action. I had no idea that Homestead might consider such an action for disputing with technical consultants. The result of this dilemma has been profoundly traumatic.

Apart from the warning Homestead never issued, I also believe that closing my web sites without warning is a hostile and malicious action. It is inconsiderate and abusive. Yes, they closed my web sites for four days without warning before they turned them back on and notified me that they would be temporarily live until April the 1st. If being argumentative is unprofessional then the hostile act of closing someone else's web site without warning is more unprofessional.

Again, had I been warned that I was heading down this road then I would have had a chance to adjust my behavior and avert the risk I was taking.

All this said, I am happy that I found Lisa and that I also have found a place where talking about the type of situation I am in has a platform.

Thanks for listening.
Stretchsportguy

Hi Stretchsportguy, and welcome to the forum.

Wow. I am so sorry that you are in the middle of this situation. Several years ago my husband decided to build a new website for our business to replace the antiquated one that had been built by our web designer. It was not built in a way that that could be sitemapped/searched by the spiders.

After research, my husband chose to use the site building program offered by our host. There were several times when things were switched around, our template became discontinued and we had to find a new one, program would not work....you name it. Sometimes it did seem that customer service was not [I]really reading or listening[I] to what our problem was. After a while it is sometimes difficult not to get all in our attitude.

Now, I'm not the tech. person who can tell you how to do anything, but, is there a way you can back up your website and just have it hosted somewhere else?

If not, I sure hope that you can work out a new agreement with Intuit for your hosting to continue. Thinking of the saying "It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission", is it possible that you could ask to be put on a "probation" period? Thus giving you a chance to "redeem" yourself in Homesteads eyes?

Don't know if any of these are productive suggestions, but mostly, just wanted you to know that you'd been heard!

Take care, and do let us know how you resolve this.

Until next time...Annie

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Hi Annie, Thank you so much for a heartfelt reply. I may do as you suggest and submit myself to suffer a probation period. For the moment my hopes are vested in a pardon and the suggestion of a probation period may be looked upon as a compromise without Homestead losing face.

I tried using a site builder called KomPozer to save the html of my web pages but it does not work flawlessly. Some of the graphics from the Homestead templates do not load properly using the downloaded html. Apparently, you need some input from Homestead's server for the html scripts to fully function. This I am guessing is an integration which prevents piracy of templates.

I feel like I rented land from a large trailer park and parked my mobile home among thousands of others. Because I disagreed with the way the maintenance staff was helping me get settled, I feel that the trailer park administration would rather evict a disgruntled tenant rather than change their ways. After all, one tenant among tens of thousands is expendable. But to me, having to move my mobile home is unthinkable and downright devastating.

Cyber tenants are at a disadvantage when it comes to rental rights. There seems to be no legislation available to protect our interests. Our interests need to be defined and protected. Yes, we are in effect renting our space on the web. However, on the web once we have a presence then we own that presence and no one should be able to take it away. Especially if we have not broken any laws. I am a victim and was already a victim before Homestead chose to evict me. Their repeated careless manner in answering requests for technical support is what led to my misgivings.

It is my opinion that the standard use of this method to render technical support is neither practical nor effective. Even more, it lends itself to misgivings. I say standard because several, if not all, industries use the forum style submission method for technical support. In other words you submit your questions and someone sends you the solutions in a letter. I have been and still am a restaurant equipment, refrigeration, and air conditioning service technician. To me, this method is unthinkable. To a degree, if I wanted to hold my customers at arm's length and write them letters every time they called me for service, and thereafter expect them to fix the problems based on the information they supplied in their requests, then perhaps once in a while someone might get their equipment fixed if they were lucky or handy enough.

Thanks again Annie.

Hi and welcome,

Wow, I'm truly sorry you are having to go thru this. This must be beyond stressful. As far as getting your work, have you tried using the Firefox browser and going to "File / Save web page"? This will download all the images and files into a folder on your computer. Maybe that will be better than using Kompozer.

I really hope you get things sorted out soon. I can only imagine what you must be going thru having to just uproot everything and move.

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Hi Lisa, Thank you for the tip about FireFox. I will try it out and see what it does.

After keeping this from my wife for many days, she finally noticed I was not myself. My sister was visiting us today and she told my wife inadvertently about the Homestead situation. My sister bought a computer and has been getting ready to assist me in my online endeavors. This is how my sister knew what was happening but my wife did not.

I couldn't bring myself to mention it to my wife because she has been so excited lately after I offered to build a web site for her showcasing her glass painting hobby. My wife is a freelance artist and specializes in painting glassware and mannequins. My wife has been planning how she wants her web site to look. She has been asking whether I can do this and can I do that. I didn't have the courage to tell her that Homestead was booting me for the same reason she picks on me. Arguing. Imagine if she uses this as an affirmation for her own feelings about me. Web sites can come and go but a wife is supposed to last a lifetime.

Hello and welcome to the forum,

I used Homestead for 1 year and i decided to change host because there prices were so high for what they offer and thats very limited.

I have moved now from Homestead 1 month ago and don't regret it at all. Althought my website isnt up yet i know that whatever i create from now on will be safe and saved localy on my computer, so if this every happened to you in the future and you code your websites it wont be a problem.

For my Homestead had a lot of issues and one day you will look back on this change and be happy you moved.

What i suggest you do is copy all of your content to notepad so you have it backed up.

Homestead's support is the worst i have ever come across in any online business, the ansers seem to be pasted from there knowledge base. It took me 2 weeks for them to transfer my domain, i had to tell then that i wasnt cancelling my account but just moving the domain but of course i did cancell my account.

I have never been happier since moving.

Im really supprised the same thing didnt happen to me, i got pretty stressed as well from there terible responses which took over a day to get.

Jack

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Hi Jack, Thanks for the tip about notepad. I did exactly as you said and indeed saved the content of my 4 web sites. The problem is that it would be nice if I could transfer the actual web pages as they are, to the new host. This is what has me tied.

In my case Jack, it took Homestead three weeks to get my domain pointed to their servers. This was after they made several different promises to me saying it would be from as little as less than a week to as long as 10 to 14 days.

A part of Homestead's selling points was how easy and fast they claim launching a web site is for you and how they do most of the leg work to set you up. As it turned out they do nothing for you if you need to point a domain to their servers. In other words they give you the DNS codes and tell you to post them in your domain host's domain manager. The problem was that I had no idea where to go to find domain managers and neither did I understand what a Domain Name Server Code was or meant. It took me a day or two just to get the codes in the right place. Once this was done correctly then the promise made to me was that within a week or two I could begin to upload my web site. My domain web host told me it should only take up to 48 hours to get the domain pointing to homestead once the DNS settings were changed. Obviously, this was not the way it went.

I received various excuses and mostly I was told to wait and be patient.

Domain pointing was one of the first issues I ran into which began to cast doubt on Homestead's credibility in the technical department.

Thanks again, Jack

Thats also what i wanted to do but the code that it generates is pretty close to un-useable.

If you visit a website made my homestead and right click and view sour
ce you will see how bad the code is.

It really won't take you too long to sort this out, in a few days my whole website should be up and running again. I left Homestead 1 month ago knowing no coding at all. I have got so much help from this forum tho.

All you need to do is create a template using coding then simply add your content. Have you transferd your domains to another registar or are they not with Homestead?

Jack

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Hi Jack, Thanks for your ongoing attention to my situation.

I took a look at your web site. It looks great. Even with the content missing it looks comprehensive. Well done. I can't wait to see your web site when you reload it.

I am curious about the fact that you offer image submission.
If you don't mind, would you let this forum know whether you use a form for image submission and what exactly is in the form? Or do you use email?

I pestered Homestead about image submission missing as an option in their form creation software. In Homestead's site builder you can create a form that captures email and other pertinent user information but the elements necessary for your visitor to submit media are missing. For example, you need a disclaimer that says you have full rights to the submitted image or media and that the image is not copywrited by others. The user should not be able to submit the image until they accept and click on the terms.

If you are using a form that includes image submission plus accepting a disclaimer, please let me know where you got it and whether you paid for it. Thanks a bunch in advance.
Stretchsportguy.

I was really interested by your situation because it was very similar to mine about a month ago, i just want to reasure you that once you leave Homestead and have learnt a bit of HTML and CSS you will wish you got banned eariler. There way to limited in what they offer, i agree its perfect for begginers but the most anoying thing for me was editing 100+ pages which i had at the time to make a small change.

The benifits to changing your host to a real one is that if you set up CSS you can change the layout of your whole website by editing just one page.

Thanks a lot, that means a lot to me i originaly downloaded Lisa's free CSS template and editied it untill it looked like it is now. Then a great member of this forum re-coded it for me and changed a few issues i had with it. He is still helping me now with a few touches to the layout and the script for the submit email address.

Well when i was with Homestead i simply asked visitors to send me there images by email as you can image this is a lot of effort on their part. But when i do create the submition page i will be using PHP i have found a free script online which allows me to do this. It currently doesnt have a disclamor on it but using html you can create a forum that can include a tick box and you could write above or below to script what the terms and conditions are etc.

Homestead also charged crazy prices, I believe they do well because they do have the best drag and drop site builder in my opinion but once you learn to code you will never go back.

I will certainly try my best to help you out with what i can because i was in the same situation.

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I called Justin's office today. I had to leave a message. No one called me back. However, the compliance department did respond to an email I sent them yesterday asking for probation. Here is what they said...

Hello,

Unfortunately, we would not be able to grant a month extension. We can
extend until Friday, April 17, 2009.

Regards
Homestead Compliance Team

On Mon Mar 30 00:06:59 2009, (Stretchsportguy) wrote:
Hi, if probation is an option then I am willing to suffer the trial.
This may be a viable option in deciding to retract your decision to
close my web sites.

Transferring my web sites to another host is a seemingly
insurmountable task. Especially for someone who is using your site
builder for lack of technical savvy.

Thanks for considering this option.

Sincerely,
(Stretchsportguy)

Dear Website Babblers, I am grateful for the extension of time however, it does not redeem Homestead for exercising their ability to jeopardize someone's livelihood. Again, I strongly feel a web host should not have this power. We are all at great risk and probably don't know it. What went on between Homestead and myself was personal and had no affect on the scope of our business interests. Yet the hostile action of closing my web sites involves unrecoverable losses. Google and other search engines will never look at my web sites the same way. My search rankings for keywords fell drastically due to the notice Homestead published saying that Stretch Sport was closed. Homestead closed my web site for four days before they notified me about the April 1st deadline now extended to the 17th. The financial losses are also significant.

Is this the way a web host should act when they decide they don't like you? In other words if a web host decides you are breaking their personal codes yet you are not breaking any laws nor is your account delinquent, then if it so behooves them they can retaliate by extermination.

How does my argumentative demeanor deserve the obliteration of my web presence? In my opinion, the only time a web host should be permitted to suspend someone's account should be for nonpayment or if the federal government determines you are doing something illegal.

Notice I said suspension. I did not say close your account. In other words after you pay your delinquent bill then the web host should be obligated by law to make your web site viewable. Also, if you are found to be innocent of wrong doing in breaking any laws then again, the web host should be obligated by law to make your web site viewable. There should be a grace period that a web site remains in suspension before it is ever actually closed as opposed to suspended. Lets say a year. The grace period should be that a web host must hold your web site for a year before they can remove it from their system. In the mean time you have an opportunity to rectify a delinquency and/or a legal matter.

Under no circumstances should a web host be permitted by law to close your web site on their own prerogative. Legal arbitration should be the only way for a web host to be granted the right to close someone's account or remove your presence from the web. It should not be that based on their opinion that you were argumentative or disrespectful they can then retaliate by removing you from the Internet.

A logical mind would fathom that if Homestead thought I was too abusive for their taste, then they could have blocked me from using the medium where the incident occurred. In other words instead of closing my web sites, they could have simply refused to allow me to submit anymore help tickets. Is this not congruent? Is this not commensurate? Is this not fair? Is this not logical?

Thanks for listening.
Stretchsportguy

Ps...are there any lawyers in the house?

I have resigned myself to the fact that Homestead is not going to retract their decision. Therefore I am taking a serious look at Site Build It!

Most web hosts permit you to upload 50 to 75 megabytes of media. Site Build It limits you to 10. This means that I am forced to upload my movies to a third party such as Yahoo Video or Veoh or YouTube or others. I find this to be a handicap.

However, Site Build It has other redeeming qualities which may make up for this shortfall. For one thing I am able to align myself with many successful online businesses. Plus they have a plan that guarantees to monetize your web site. They also guarantee traffic. And they guarantee a high alexa rating over time.

Up till now on my own, within three months, I was coming out first on some uncommon key words on Google. After six months I was coming out first in Google search results for a few common search terms. For example, dynamic stretch, stretches, or stretching would result in as many as over 18 million results. I was number one. The same for sport stretch or sport stretching beating out even Michael Alter's book called Sport Stretch published by Human Kinetics.

The quandary about this achievement is that I never had more than an average of 20 visitors per day. The overall average was about 12. I wish I could explain this. If anyone who reads this thread can tell me something about this paradox then I would be greatly pleased. If coming out first on the first page of search engines does not drive a high volume of traffic to your web site then what does?

I have thirty videos posted on my web site and posted them on many video hosts such as YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo Video, Veoh, and others. Plus many of these movies were syndicated on video sponsored sites. If great videos do not drive traffic to your web site then what does?

My articles are found all over the web as well. If articles do not drive traffic to your web site then what does?

The back linking and returning visitors drove my web site to a 3 out of 10 ranking in only six months tantamount to web sites that have been online for 7 to 10 years. If a rank of 3 out of 10 does not drive traffic to your web site then what does?

My web site has been featured on other people's web sites. If getting featured on other web sites does not drive traffic to your web site then what does?

I am supposing that Site Build It knows the answers. Their guarantee alludes to it. Does anyone have a testimony about this when they switched over to Site Build It and got the results they were missing elsewhere?

To get your site contents (scrape your site):

Goto sourceforge and download the latest windows setup of wget (currently wget-1.11.4-1-setup.exe ). Run that on your computer to install it.

On your start menu select run and type in C:\GnuWin32\bin\wget.exe -r http://yourdomain.com where yourdomain.com is the domain you want to scrape. A box should pop up for a few seconds/minutes depending on the size of your site.

On your start menu select run and type in C:\GnuWin32\bin this will open the bin folder on your computer. You will see a folder called yourdomain.com with all the files from your site. (If the site has php links with ? and & you will have to change the filenames to open them )

Warning 1 DO NOT scrape someone else's site in violation of copyright.

Warning 2 DO NOT scrape a site with too much content because it will take a long time to scrape and also may fill hard disk.

Regards

Bob

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Well done ! That was a great move, From what i have heard and you dont need html knowledge etc to use it. Thats great, there space is limited but its fine to use youtube for now i mean it doesnt take up your space or bandwidth which is great.

Maybe later on if you decide to learn html you could change host. A lot of hosts offer unlimited space and bandwidth (they say they do but not quite true, but it would allow for 20gb maybe im not sure) so you can always move at a later date to benifit from uploading your own videos without youtube.

Jack

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Concept Skateboarding is getting better every day and best of all im learning much!

While I am anything but an expert on getting traffic, and this may seem obvious to everyone, if you are getting a top listing on a highly searched key word or phrase but no hits it would seem that the first thing to consider is your meta description.

People must be seeing it but no matter how appealing you think it is it must not be what people are looking for when they see it or they would check it out.

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