[ILUG] [way-ot] darklight.com should, never, ever, be considered for web-anything

[Niall]

On Sun, May 07, 2000 at 12:02:35PM +0100, Jonathan Stein wrote:

> I have quite a few good friends on this list, and possibly one or two
> clients, I thought I may come back to you on your 'opinions'. Your views on
> the trailing text and the floating banner are more than likely correct,
> however since most of the visitors to that site are either new to the
> Internet or inexperienced on the Internet, this sort of thing isn't as
> irritating. In any case I have removed these useless 'eyecandies'.

I wonder why did you remove them ?

> professional or even as a more humble Linux user (without m$), you are
> unable to close a window, you need to read your mouse manual.

Your mouse manual wouldn't help - that maddening wandering window wouldn't
close by clicking its close button - I don't know why, because that's a
window manager thing, but I couldn't close it with a mouse click - I had to
give the window focus (not easy) and use a keyboard command to close it.

> The eyecandies on the first page were used as an attention getter,
> subsequent pages did not have this content - I fail to see the relation
> between this and a level of service, and as regards design, I do hope you
> have something more substantial than www.suberic.net, which btw would make a
> great WAP site due to its lack of anything other than text (why bother with
> html at all?). 

Suberic.net does its job, without needless graphic clutter, and would be
quite usable by a visually handicapped user.

> And the attitude of wishing bankruptcy on any company just because your
> design 'preferences' do not mesh, is either childish or due a bad hair day
> (probably both).

That's a fair cop - bend over Kevin :-)

> As regards the servers we use, new content covering them is due to go online
> in the next two weeks. Yes Darklite-SCE uses alabanza.net, how much would I
> have to pay in Ireland for access to a world class hosting facility, along
> with PIII550, 512Mb Ram, 9GbSCSI drives and 100Gb monthly bandwidth
> scalable? The hosting farm my servers are located in is one of the best in
> the world, and although I have researched the possibility of coloco in
> Ireland, any person in the hosting business will be able to tell you that
> the prices are ridiculously high. 

As a consumer of said services, I agree. However, I need physical access to
my servers, so I pay up and look cheerful if the business case justifies the
price. I read that there is a big web farm being built in City West under
contract to the government and prices are set to plummet, if one can believe
what one reads.

> I'm sorry if I consider the price my clients pay to be more important
> that the physical location of my machines,

That's fine, as long as your clients are aware that hosting with this Irish
company is not the same as Irish hosting.

> and as Adam Beecher correctly pointed out support is of critical importance

What kind of support do I have when I'm not dealing with the people who own
or host the machine ?

> rather than machines location which is just as fast as any Irish host

This I'm afraid is wrong, both in theory and practice. To get to a machine
in alabanza.net or any US based "world class hosting facility" an Irish user
has to fight for a scare resource i.e. his ISP's transatlantic links and
more than likely pass through several more routers. Just doing a rudimentary
ping -c 20 I get

--- www.clubi.ie ping statistics ---
20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 140.022/158.989/180.024 ms

--- www.eircom.net ping statistics ---
20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 120.034/145.463/200.020 ms

--- www.darklite.com ping statistics ---
20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 220.022/235.474/259.990 ms



BTW I picked the Irish hosts to ensure that they were NOT on Esat's network
so that INEX would be used, to be fair to darklite.com. However, traceroute
showed that I was getting to www.clubi.ie via u-net.net routers rather than
INEX (though still much faster than to darklite.com). Comments, Thomas or Dave ?

> Slaving for the corporate whore machine,
> 
> Jonathan Stein
> Managing Director,

Surely the MD doesn't have to slave for the corporate whore machine :-)



Regards,


Niall  O Broin