I was wondering how other Alabanza resellers were handling the latest bungling by Alabanza, namely the removal of the Site Creation tool with a whopping 4 days notice. In their announcement, they stated that the "customers site would be converted to static HTML". We have found this to be true only to a point. What the customer ends up with is that their site is still up in the maxpages directory, and is unmaintainable.

We have been manually downloading the sites, deleting and re-establishing the accounts, and then uploading the sites to the www directories because we don't know how Alabanza is setting the index.htm in the maxpages directory as the default.

This in a nutshell, Sucks. We are doing this on a case by case basis for our customers that have set up their sites using the Site Creation tool.

Does anybody out there have a better solution?

Thanks in advance.....oh, and Alabanza SUCKS.

Andy

:angry:

I'd have to agree. 4 days notice is unacceptable. That's one of the reasons we are going to be moving very soon.

Here's the announcement we sent to our customers: http://support.intersurge.com/news/viewnews.cgi?newsid990845340,41083,

In a nutshell, we basically explained how this had just been laid down on us, appologized, and offered personal assistance until an alternative was found. If a customer has been having problems, we've either been searching for some free software that allows him/her to edit their site in the mean time, or we have been personally doing the page edits.

I don't know if you check the hostcoalition forums or not, but in there there is a thread about this announcement that contains some rather disturbing evidence about Alabanza... specifically concerning their "not being able to reach a financial agreement".

Anyway, I agree with you that it was definitely a bad move on Alabanza's side, but for the most part our customers have been pretty understanding.

Brian

Fortunately, we had very , very few people using the creation tool. Only one user has had a problem with the conversion, and the rest seem not to mind too terribly that it's gone.

I am not affected, but this is a shame for Alabanza. I, personally, would move my sites as fast as I could - not because this tool would be so valuable but in fear what they will do next.
What an unprofessional behaviour!

I'd have to agree with you all. IMHO, Alabanza should have given AT LEAST 30 days notice before making a change like this!

A little bit of help in understanding how maxpages worked on Alabanza's servers.

First, in /etc/httpd/conf/srm.conf (one of the Apache configuration files), there is the following directives:

ScriptAlias /maxpages /home/httpd/maxpages/maxpage.cgi
ScriptAlias /maxpages-utils /home/httpd/maxpages
Alias /maxpages-images /home/httpd/maxpages

What this means is that whenever a domain is called with /maxpages after it, Apache will run the program /home/httpd/maxpages/maxpage.cgi (which I'm no longer sure what that does since maxpages doesn't run anymore - probably just calls the html files now).

The way they make it so that it will call maxpages by default is to stick a .htaccess file in the domain-www directory. That file contains the following:

ErrorDocument 403 /maxpages
ErrorDocument 404 /maxpages

This means that whenever Apache gets a 404 (file not found) or 403 error, then call the maxpages directory.

Finally, they just make it so that there is no default index page in the web directory, so that when you type in the domain name, you will get a 404 error, which will then send you to the maxpages stuff!

So my guess is that you can copy the html files to their directory, then delete the .htaccess file there (make sure there is nothing else in it), and it should work. Note that I have not tested this out myself, so be careful. :)

I hope this helps you (and others) out.

Oh well. What can we say? Alabanza doesnt give a crap. This way they get to save more money than they have saved from their ridiculous rise in prices and their 70% cut staff. We started to take action right away when they upped their prices in November found a much more reliable and realistic service. We are still in the process of moving, but we still have 1,500 clients on their servers, so we are getting complaints about the loss of the Site Creation Tool. We hate to blame things on other companies, but this time we decided not to cover for Alabanza anymore and we have explained exactly what has happened to the Site Creation Tool and who did it. Also left a special link for our clients who used the Site Creation Tool to, send complaints to
support@alabanza.com

Good job Alabanza. Your not only greedy, but selffish too. I strongly recommend no one go to Alabanza from now on. Simply because they are pricks.

Thank you for your time.
J. Strong

<off topic>

Jeez Anna, that was one heck of a first post!

Welcome to the board.

</off topic>

Thanks to everybody that posted, especially Anna! I had a feeling it was in the .conf file somewhere. Will give it a try and let everyone know.

And agreed, it's not so much that Alabanza eliminated the Site Creation tool, but how they did it.

I just makes you wonder what's next.......

Thanks again,

Andy