I’m going to Bite the Proverbial (and Expensive) Bullet

 

And decline Microsoft’s generous (NOT) offer to host my web site for $7.00 a month. Their new hosting service Office 365 DOES NOT provide ANY statistics on visits and it is next to impossible (which is the same as impossible for me) to set up a blog page on the site.

www.register.com owns my domain name and will provide a full-service web site for around $12.00 a month. I’ll be moving my web site (again, damnit) to Register.com at the end of next week.

I got a warning notice last week from Microsoft that they will be shutting down their free web hosting service at the end of April. If the web site owner wished he could pack up all his little bits and pieces and toddle off to another web hosting service or take advantage of Microsoft’s fee-based Office 365 service. Being sort of a proactive guy, I looked around, saw the prices from other services and decided to stay with Microsoft. So I got started on rebuilding my site on their new host. After several days of worry and tension the new site was up and running (and it does look good), but then I learned there were no statistics on visits and putting up a blog page was going to be well beyond my abilities since Microsoft made no provision for bloggers on the public side of the site.

Well, screw that for a really bad deal for me. To say that I am extremely disappointed in Microsoft would be a tremendous understatement. I am, in fact, rather pissed.

But that’s a personal problem, and I’ll learn to live with it. I’m going to be busy next week, doing once again what I’ve just done last week. Moving my web site to another host.

Oh, well.

I will say this about Microsoft and their total lack of concern about hosting small business web sites. It is rather apparent that they no longer wish to be in that business. If it were their intention to attract and retain small business customers they would have put much more time and care into the back end of their provisioning and support system for Office 365. But they did not, and it is clear to me they have no intention of recognizing long-standing issues with Office 365, much less fixing them.

So this author, along with any number of other small business owners from all around the world, is going to take his business and his money elsewhere.

Every customer has one and only one way to deal with any uncaring business; vote with your feet.