Just a while ago, I got a mangled voice-mail message from someone named Jillian at APlus Web Hosting, Dedicated Hosting and Web Design. Well actually, all I got was Jilian at APlus, everything past that was messed-up. Fortunately (I’ll explain why in a minute) I was away from my desk in the test lab, performing some Q/A testing of my CSS on the Mac. Something I tend to do if I when develop a product on a PC-based browser; but I digress.
Anyway, the call is a bit garbled so I return Jillian’s call at 877-527-0877. I get some guy instead. I ask for Jillian but she’s unavailable. So I tell them the phone call was garbled and ask what the call was about – paranoid I had missed the call of a potential client. No such luck.
Instead, he asks me if I recently purchased a domain and proceeds to try and sell me web design, web hosting and dedicated hosting services. So I ask the guy (whose name escapes me) if their web development adheres to industry standards for usability and accessibility? Instead of saying “yes,” “no,” or “let me check,” the guy says “Absolutely, we’ve been doing this for the past seven years and in fact we set the standard.”
Amazed at this statement, I ask the guy “are you telling me that APlus established the current w3c standards for web site usability and accessibility?” His answer was “sure did!”
Not seeing APlus listed anywhere on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Members list, I tell the guy to “please don’t piddle on my leg and tell me its’ rain” followed by “you’re lying, how am I supposed to trust you with my business when, IMHO, you lie to me like this?”
“No, I’m not” he assures me, and then goes onto some schpiel that his company has been around for 15 years (whereas before it was 7), blah, blah … yeah right, and there’s are condos in the towers of this bridge in Brooklyn my cousin Athey can sell ya cheap if you’re willing to pay cash.
Speaking of Brooklyn, all this reminds me of when I lived in NYC back in the early 80′s. A co-worker and I went to a personal computer store to check out the new fall line of 80186′s. There we were greeted by a ‘cugine‘ of a sales guy named ‘Tony.’ When we expressed dismay that the computer we were interested didn’t come equipped with an operating system, Tony replied in a very NY accent: “look … you’re a programmer … I’m a programmer … you write your own operating system.”
Wonder if the APlus sales rep is related?
July 15, 2005 at 2:34 pm
Interesting to see when the domain expires…
A WhoIs reflects:
Domain name: aplus.net
Record last updated on 2004-07-11 00:00:00
Record created on 1998-08-10 00:00:00
Record expires on 2005-08-09 00:00:00
Domain servers in listed order:
ns1.abac.com 216.55.128.4
ns2.abac.com
Registration Service Provider: Abacus America, Inc. DBA Aplus Net
Registrar: NAMES4EVER, http://www.names4ever.com
I also found that there SSL is expired!
Server Type: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.8.22 OpenSSL/0.9.7e mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a mod_jk/1.2.6 PHP/4.3.10
To answer a few of your questions about validation:
CSS: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=www.aplus.net&usermedium=all
XHTML: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.aplus.net
July 16, 2005 at 2:42 am
Ohh man that is hilarous that they tried to do that, hopefully that tech was confused about what he was talking about.
July 19, 2005 at 11:50 pm
Hi!
God bless you for using your skills, and showing the world.
BTW, the following page has a bit of an error, whilst i was browsing.
Parse error: parse error, unexpected ‘
July 28, 2005 at 8:44 pm
it’s on par with some of the telemarketer calls we get at the parsonage.
August 1, 2005 at 11:30 am
APlus has called me a few times after I registered a domain. I’m thinking that’s a violation of the whois use policy.
Once it was fun to answer their ‘what are your plans for this domain’ question with, ‘pretty much what’s up there now’.
August 5, 2005 at 2:21 am
Dean,
It doesn’t look like the APlus service gets very good reviews, especially from http://www.webhostinghandbook.com/db/aplus/review/. If this company was around for 7 ~ 15 years (since even the tech is confused) then why are they still using Form Mail from back in 2002?! Any reputable web host would prefer to use up-to-date code and if it isn’t, they would code it themselves. Sounds like the techs don’t even know what all they offer (thinking Kinder Surprise?!
I wouldn’t exactly consider them a good host to go with.
After reading the aforementioned review, and the email you got I wouldn’t be surprised if both were true. May this be a lesson to us all!