“Quite right too – filthy habit” – ed. I woke up with a headache and couldn’t get out of bed. And when I finally got up I couldn’t get my breath – even climbing the stairs left me quite exhausted. After breakfast I started on some more plasterboarding but it couldnt make much progress as it was wearing me out.
By 13:30 I had to call it a day and go and lie down. In fact I crashed out for a couple of hours. Liz rang me up to see how I was and Terry battled his way here through the snow (it’s carried on snowing non-stop and I’m up to my waist in it) to pick up some Ford Transit snowchains that are lying around here.
But I’m not moving. I fact I didn’t make myself any tea tonight. I’m going to just stay here and sleep it off.
In other news this webhosting thing isn’t going to die down any time soon and more correspondence has been received.
And as I said elsewhere –
1) having had an “encounter” with this webhosting service my own experience is that despite the manager’s verbal belligerence the truth is somewhat different and it was interesting to see how quickly the manager caved in when OUSA banged the big stick back in April last year. No question about legality, no question about defending customers’ rights and the privilege of free comment despite all of the previous hype from several years ago, OUSA banged the big stick and the manager jumped. And jumped by deleting files from the server, of course, without even notifying the owner of the files that they had been deleted. Now how illegal is that?
Now just imagine the situation where all of the OUSA branch files are in one place on one web server managed by one manager who has “previous” of caving in to OUSA. Any time someone posts something critical of The Powers That Be, all TPTB need to do is to wave the big stick at the manager and the manager is likely to simply remove the files with no warning if past experience is anything to go by. No court order necessary, no solicitors consulted, no right of appeal. Signing up to this offer is effectively giving OUSA the green light to censor all of your websites with no right of appeal. Editorial control of all of your websites in the hands of a OUSA Executive Committee sycophant – it’s an Executive-Committee dream come true.
2) I’ve also been told the price of this contract. It’s a commercial rate of £120. Now I reckon that there are over 200 sites likely to be affected by this – and all for £120. As you can imagine, its something that isn’t sustainable at that price. It won’t even cover the cost of the hard drive let alone the cost of the server and the administration. I give it four weeks at that price.
But on the other hand it could be £120 per site. And that’s not a commercial rate at all! My four sites cost me a total of £178 and two of them, as you know, are huge with tons of traffic. Hostgator will do you a website hosting for $4.95 per month – or about £40 per annum. When I managed OUSA Belgium’s website it was hosted on Bravenet for ZERO pounds per annum if you didn’t mind the odd pop-up every now and again. I don’t call £120 per site a commercial deal by any stretch of the imagination.
But do the maths – about 200 sites each paying £120 – that’s a turnover from OUSA funds of £24000, which is an awful lot of money when your organisation is struggling for cash to the extent of trying to ban disabled people from attending the annual Conference. It’s also a very healthy turnover for any company to show in its books and accounts, even if at the end of the accounting year it plans to hand it all back.
It makes you wonder what the purpose of it all is supposed to be.
