Well, after much humming and haw-ing and begging of input from fellow Facebookers, I decided to go with my website format at http://www.terraspiritessentials.com. I hope that business picks up a bit. I invested so much money into it, money that I should have put into the family. It was my hope however (and still is) that one day this little eStore will help generate a bit of cashflow.It will help when we move away one day to have a product line to sell. And I truly do enjoy making things!
I have been with Webs.Com for quite some time, back when they were FreeWebs.Com. I had stumbled across them through Facebook and was looking for a site to promote the idea of a Pagan Community in our area. It was easy and cheap (5.00/mnth to remove ads, free if you have a domain name, which I did). I created my husbands site there as well, his is still there and is quite content. After a time however, as FreeWebs grew, I noticed many glitches when editing and downtime, but as I was used to the site and comfortable with the set up and such, I stayed there.
When my business became more of a reality than a passing fancy I opted to go through them as well. However, the page errors and glitches got worse. I searched high and low (well, through Google) for ‘best canadian small business webhost’, and came across a few constantly occurring names before deciding on Cirrus.
It looked good,”Full personal and business websites for $4.98/month 3000mb space, 50 gb transfer, with FREE web design!!!…” Hell Yes! Sounded great, and they are Canadian! I clicked merrily around their site, looking for that deal, but was unable to find the one for that price. Ended up with a $15+ /month plan, was totally confused about how to get started, I was told that it offered osCommerce and SiteBuilder. (found out when looking for help with their Plesk SiteBuilder that the version 3.2 they use is quite outdated. Plesk’s own people suggest that an update is necessaryas they are now onversion 4.5!).
I started with osCommerce… got horribly confused… looked for my SiteBuilder, and was told I can’t have both. One or the other. Absolute crap, as right on their page it states they are both included. I told the person I was communicating via my trouble ticket with that I felt that it was false advertising. He told me, quite frankly “If you arent happy with our service, don’t use it”
Nice
Never mind that I was only a few short weeks away from having my fifth and final child, and that I was trying like mad to get a site up and running, and products ready…I had just bought my .ca through them, and it was locked for the initial time period.
So I stuck with them. I used their templates for a site and it looked alright, but there was no options to add taxes, and shipping was just ONE price. That was it. For all products. So I could charge ten dollars shipping, and that would be it, whether it be for one pack of incense or a HUGE order. I opted to guestimate and include shipping in the prices, and offer bundle packs for peeps to choose if they wanted multiple items, but if you wanted to buy multiple items NOT in a bundle pack, perhaps some soap AND some salve AND some incense, well then my dear, you would have one pricey order.
Oh, and another annoying thing, when done in Canadian currency, every price had a comma instead of a period… You want to buy a pack of incense, 4,00 please. ? How about a simple (.)? Made it look like as a Canadian I lived in a land with pretend money.
I tried updating with new items last night and Cirrus was taking so long to load in between edits, when putting pictures up and going from page to page that it would log me out, and there is no autosave, so I would have to start all over again.
Their site is NOT very reliable. Many times over the past few months I would go to log in at CirrusHosting and some strange chain of text would come up, internal errors etc.
So combine the very unprofessional shipping issues, odd looking currency, and SLOW loading time, I thought… SCREW it. I took a look at my old site at Webs. I had deactivated it… I put the links for both my pages up on Facebook, asked for opinions and made the choice to slink back to Webs.
I just wanted a little store to sell my things, and if I can’t have that, then all the other neato features at Cirrus do nothing for me, not the 50 free email addys or php and all of that. Webs and a Gmail addy for now, lol. Oh, and combine it with rude support people that treated me like a moron. (I do however admit that I am technologically challenged)…. Bye Bye Cirrus. I changed my DNS to redirect to my Webs page. www.terraspiritessentials.com. Now I just need to figure out how to adjust my cname and mx so that I can use Google Apps to set up an email. When I redirected terraspirit.ca I sort of deleted all my emails. Including some semi-important downloads through PayPal that I just remembered!!!!
Well, its 1:04am. The wind is slamming the rain against the bedroom window, Demetrio is sleeping across my lap, his cheek resting on my breast.Time for me to get some sleep!
