VPSLAND trouble

I purchased a new VPS for qa-site.com through VPSLAND. I've been happy with them in the past. I'd like to continue with them. But they don't seem to want my business.

I signed up on Thursday, and got 5 email notices (twice) basically saying they'd gotten my order and processed my payment.

There was some trouble initially with signing up, because it wouldn't let me sign up with my existing account. That may be my fault. I may not have had the right username or password. Okay, in the spirit of getting things done, I signed up for a new account, using my business credit card. And got the aformentioned notices that everything was fine.

But I never got any notice of being provisioned. I never got an IP address and password to log in. I wrote VPSLAND a kind note asking how long it takes to provision, and by the way, I have another account with them, can I combine them?

I got back several evasive responses in which they finally said my order had been deleted as suspected fraud. Now realize, I would have never even learned of this if I hadn't prodded them. So apparently their policy was to silently discard orders that they think might be fraud. To be fair, they claimed in the support email that the card had been refunded, but though I received 5 notifications (twice) that it had been billed, I have yet to receive any official notification that it's been refunded. I don't see anything on my card statement yet.

Not that I want it refunded. I'd much prefer the service, as I've been quite happy with VPSLAND in the past. And I'd really like to get started on QA-SITE. As of last night I'd corresponded with VPSLAND support several times attempting to figure out just what happened and what I can do to help correct the problem. Finally I received notice that it was "escalated."

I don't know what could have triggered a "suspected fraud" other than if they logged my IP Address it would show that I am nowhere near the zip code where my credit card bill is sent. It goes to Bellevue, Washington and I'm living in Ecuador. Okay, whatever. They have a right to determine what they believe might be fraud, and decide what risks they are willing to take. I'd rather there were more vendors more cautious out there on the internet, and with pressure, maybe the credit card companies could come up with a more reliable system.

But the lack of professionalism in notifying me, the ambiguity of the responses, and the "escalation" to what appears to be a black hole (to be fair, it's been less than 24 hours) are disheartening.

Apparently, the real problem is that VPSLAND has "upgraded" their billing system, and possibly my existing account has been lost in the transition. Fine, we all make mistakes. But I just want my new account working. We can sort out billing irregularities, consolidate my accounts, etc. later.

Tell me why I was suspected of fraud and what I can do to remedy it. If it's not possible, fine, I'll take my business elsewhere, but I'd really rather stay.

Moving on to the next phase -- QA Site

This past week I've been procrastinating. I have the One-Shore.com website (sort of) complete. It's good enough for now. It's untested on older browsers (including IE 6) and it's not the prettiest thing, and the copy is terrible. But it's there. I have what I want, it just needs edited.

Now the thing to do is get a working QA Site (a demo at least.) I've been putting it off. To be fair, Christmas has intervened. I decided about a week ago that I should do it like a real project - from concept, to proposal, to requirements, schedule, budget, on down to deployment. At that point I got lost in the process. After all, part of what I want to do is identify (or build) tools to help me do that sort of thing.

Speaking of which, something else I could be doing when I'm procrastinating is writing blog posts and wiki entries on tools and techniques.

I'm suffering from paralysis on what frameworks and tools to use as well. Should I use a project management suite like dotProject or keep it lightweight? Should I use bugzilla or trac? Should I use django, rails, php (which php framework), or java (which java framework)? Should I write my own framework (in which language?) Which tools should I promote? Should I write my own test case tool? How much should I do up front -- dashboard, web services, virtual appliance?
Should I be spending time looking for customers? Where?

Stuff like that. I need discipline. I need scoping. So that's what I'm going to do. Treat it like I would any other project. Only I'm the CEO, graphic designer, copy writer, developer, tester, project manager, sysadmin, accountant, and consultant.

I'll start with ONE RFP. Written by myself. I started to say "a series of RPFs" but then changed that. Now I'm changing it again. I'll write two. One as a potential perfect customer (knowing what I want to build.) And another as an internal RFP to implement that proposed solution. A "concept" document will proceed the internal RFP.

And then I'll do scoping. I'll come up with a list of features, and then pick the ones I can implement at first. That will (hopefully) be based on the fictional customer's RFP, but with an eye towards expansion to meet future functionality.

The next step is a project plan. How am I going to implement it? What tools am I going to use? It's okay if I don't like what I choose. After a month (or three), I can change. I'll give myself a schedule, and a budget.

After that, then is the design. I'll decide architecture and requirements. I'll document them according to my project plan. If my plan says word docs on a local file, fine. If it says dotProject, or a wiki, fine. I can change it. But try one and stick to it for a month. If I decide django's for sucks, or I really want to build my own PHP framework, fine -- but stick with something. Get a 1.0 out there. Make it a really small 1.0 There's always 2.0.

Plan monthly or quarterly. I think eventually quarterly will be a better fit. But when I'm by myself, monthly is fine. There will be a lot of rapid changes in tools, process, design, features. Release weekly or more. Document it, blog it.

There. Now I'm off to write my concept and fictional RFP. And read a bit more about writing proposals. That's what I'm doing today.

Blogs, Forum, Wiki and nav links complete and RESTful on oneshore.com

The One Shore blogs are set up and working. With the correct URLs. As are the forums and wiki. And the about, services, and contact pages. All the menu links work (except demo) as well as a few extra. They are RESTful and pretty (mostly) and are bookmarkable and seachable. They have content. The wiki still has a lot of subjects to fill in, however. http://one-shore.com and http://www.one-shore.com behave the same. They are all under the same document root (through aliases) so migrating from dev->test->prod shouldn't be as much work. VirtualHosts for wiki, forum, blogs, and demo exist but have been deprecated. I'm not sure I like that, but based on Kelsey's opinion I put them under. It does make navigation cleaner, because you can go from http://www.one-shore.com/blogs/company to http://www.one-shore.com/about/one-shore by just editing the path, without messing with the hostname. This loses the independent logging and (easier) access restrictions (and ssl) that virtual hosts have. We'll see.

So here's a quick site map:

http://one-shore.com == http://www.one-shore.com
http://one-shore.com/about
http://one-shore.com/about/one-shore
http://one-shore.com/about/aaron-evans
http://one-shore.com/blogs/company
http://one-shore.com/blogs/technology
http://one-shore.com/blogs/news
http://one-shore.com/blogs/work
http://one-shore.com/wiki
http://one-shore.com/wiki/tools
http://one-shore.com/wiki/qa
http://one-shore.com/wiki/development
http://one-shore.com/wiki/pm
http://one-shore.com/wiki/biz
http://one-shore.com/forum
http://one-shore.com/forum/f2-Shore.html
http://one-shore.com/forum/f15-Main-Support-Forum.html
http://one-shore.com/forum/f18-Tools.html
http://one-shore.com/forum/f20-Techniques.html
http://one-shore.com/demos
http://demo.one-shore.com/bugzilla
http://demo.one-shore.com/mantis
http://demo.one-shore.com/trac
http://demo.one-shore.com/qatraq
http://demo.one-shore.com/testopia
http://demo.one-shore.com/docuwiki
http://demo.one-shore.com/knowledgetree
http://one-shore.com/services
http://one-shore.com/services/qa-site
http://one-shore.com/services/consulting
http://one-shore.com/services/staffing
http://one-shore.com/services/web_development
http://one-shore.com/contact
http://one-shore.com/contact/sales
http://one-shore.com/contact/sales/qa-site
http://one-shore.com/contact/support
http://one-shore.com/contact/careers
http://one-shore.com/contact/investors
http://one-shore.com/contact/partners

Also the following external links:
http://demo.qa-site.com/
http://fijiaaron.wordpress.com
http://fijiaaron.blogspot.com
http://boneshore.runboard.com/ == http://www.runboard.com/boneshore
http://bqasite.runboard.com/ == http://www.runboard.com/bqasite

Plus lots of tools in the wiki, and more forum pages. As you can see, the forum URLs aren't the best. Getting it merely took a tedious series of cut and paste steps from a tutorial on adminpicks.com Let me just say, punBB is spaghetti and I salute the brave soul who created the patch. Actually, a patch wouldn't have worked because there's been some change since then.

So now my site is structually complete, and restful, it's time for me to get some rest, and then get down to the real work. Plus, there's going to need to be some backporting because I did a lot of stuff on the fly in production, and I don't have it mirrored in dev. Like the nav links, I think. And any blog, wiki, or forum content. And I still need to test the contact forms.

Site and Business progressing

Things are starting to come together.

The one-shore.com website is starting to get fleshed out. Yesterday I got the wiki (dokuwiki) installed and created all the tools links. Today I got the forum (punBB) installed and created categories.

The wiki is now more up to date than the tools links. I still need to enable rewrite on the wiki and give it one shore branding (colors, logo, and nav links to return to the rest of the site.) I also want to add the tools links to the side for easy navigation, as well as a link cloud, by most visited, and post info on the home page such as most popular, and latest updates.

The forum is fully branded with a bevy of sample categories and forums. I think I need to notch it down and just make a few major categories. One Shore, Tools, QA Site, Support, perhaps combining the last two. It goes Category->Forum->Topic->Post --- which is one more level than I anticipated creating it. Also, it seems that all the way down to topics, only the administrator can post. I'd like registered members to create topics, for things like adding a tool or posting a support question.

Multiple blogs are available on dev, but unbranded as yet. I may continue to use my wordpress.com and blogspot.com blogs for now, because it provides an offsite location and the possibility that someone may stumble upon it. Eventually I may mirror locally or migrate.

I also created forums on runboard.com, which offers an off-site location, but may be wasted space. It will be a good back up if I have to bring my own forums down.

Yesterday I setup a paypal account so I can receive payments through that. Today I got a skypein number: 206-801-1701, so I can receive calls from the US easier. Only sound (and hence skype) doesn't work on my computer, at least since "upgrading" to Vista Ultimate (it swears there are no sound devices) from Vista Home --so I will have to use Kelsey's for it. I think I may want to go with TalkPlus eventually.

Skypein is $18 for 3 months. It's a good number (though the geek in me wanted 1734) and I'd hate to change it if I start to depend on it. Talkplus is $6.99/month plus 11 cents a minute and can ring my land or cell number here in Ecuador.

The deciding reason I got a number is because I sent an email to be listed on bugzilla's paid support. I also listed as a user. And as a user of Mantis (I use mantis for the one-shore site development and Bugzilla for the qa-site dashboard and integration.) I also have demos of both, and will support either for customer QA sites. I also made a note on Dokuwiki about using them, and emailed Knowledgetree about using their product. Knowledgetree told me about sourceforge, and I registered on there, though I need to look and see what tools I support are on Sourceforge and add that to my sourceforge market profile. I don't think bugzilla or dokuwiki are.

Tomorrow I hope to fix all the links and get the about, contact, and services pages finally up.

I will be visiting the computer school at San Blas square hopefully this week and eventually the technical college looking for people with good english and computer skills looking to join one-shore. I'll also try to network with people online and contact open source project leaders, and maybe company like Knowledgetree, but also, for instance, Atlassian. Crowd is staring to look very appealing to me, though I want to have the option of java-free VPS accounts for lightweight users.

I'l post on craigslist, guru, and look for other places soon. I'm probably not willing to cold call or spam businesses, but need to find out how to talk to someone who might really be interested.