I believe this is in relation to a previous issue
Randy wrote
" believe that I've found the root of all the server problems that I've been having... As I said, I get these weird errors, WITHOUT EVER MAKING ANY CHANGES... They just start happening... Tonight, while talking to the hosting company about these errors, always the same error messages, they told me that if I would "UPGRADE" my account, that this would probably fix these errors... I asked, "What does this have to do with anything, I'm not doing anything special, just running standard ASP pages...?" To which they could never give me an answer to... BUT, here's the real issue: With this Group Buy, I've been using tons of bandwidth... Although my hosting plan is UNLIMITED bandwidth, I really didn't suspect that they thought I'd be using UNLIMITED... Now that I am, they are wanting more $$$ out of me to cover some of these bandwidth costs...
At least this is my opinion... And they can make these errors go away just in an instant of my complaining about them... I suspect they think that I'll just get tired of complaining about 1 day per week and ante' up with a more $$$ hosting plan... So far I've not caved in... as I've not went above or beyond the hosting plan that they sold to me...but they have went against their bargain by promising me less than 99% downtime...
We'll see how this pans out..."
YEP, I'm on tech support with them right now... They've removed the XML parser code from the web server now.. This is why you're seeing the error on the checkout page right now... I've not changed the code...
They're trying to force me to buy some of their "other" services, so they keep taking portions of the site down and causing headaches...and everytime I complain, they keep saying, "you need to upgrade to the $79.99 per month account"... AND again, I've asked for a written guarantee, that if I do upgrade and I keep getting these XML Parser and email server errors, they have to refund 2 X the price of these upgrades, back to me... They won't do that, much less, give ANY guarantee of any kind...
I know, I could just change hosts... But, I'm between a rock and a hard place... All of this group buy stuff it already set up there, everyone knows the URL's...and I just bought an SSL certificate to secure the domain for payment... Those are not cheap, not transferable to other servers and they are also non-refundable... So if I change hosts, the SSL is useless and another will have to be bought...
Here's just a little bit of what I've been fighting for over a week now:
To start with, on any of the pages where I send emails from inside the User Console, the host started requiring "authentication"... Which isn't a problem to add to the code, but I'd like to have been informed before they made the change to the server so I could have prepared the code and site before they "just changed the server and caused the site to go down"...
SO, I did what they asked and added the authentication lines to the code that sends the emails, and was back up and sending emails... About 2 days later, same thing: More email errors...SO, I was back on the phone with them again... This time, they are telling me that now I can't "send mail on someone else's behalf"... I am sending emails from my server and the FROM line is Chance's email address... SO, I set up a new admin email address on my domain, to send the mass emails and password requests...etc, from, and aliased them with Chance's email again... This worked for about 2 days, then started getting the same email errors...
This time, they told me that I couldn't send more than 1 email message, per object creation to send mail... I'm using a server object CDO to send the mail... SO, in order to get around this, I'd loop through the database of email address's, and create and destroy the CDO object each time... This way there was only 1 CDO object creation per email being sent... This worked for about 2 days, then started getting the same old errors...
This time, they don't like that I'm sending out the "vast amount" of emails at one time as the server does for mass emails... We're sending about 800 each time...in about a 2-3 minute window... They're now limiting the amount of emails that I can send from the email server to 75 in a 5 minute time span...
SO, now if I spend the time to write code with a timer that sends out the mass emails in that prescribed time-frame, I'm sure that within 2 days, they'll change the quantity/time formula or something and all of that work would be in vain as well...
The part that really ticks me off, is that each time I've gotten one of these email errors, they'll hit me with the "you need to upgrade to the $79.99 per month account"... SO I can clearly see what they are trying to sell... It's obvious...and I really don't mind buying it, but like I said before, there will have to be some kinda of a written "up-time agreement" before I'll send them a dime after all of this...
If they'd just emailed or called me and told me that they didn't like my bandwidth usage or email server usage, and that they'd like for me to upgrade, I'd upgraded right then... But the sneaky way of extortion that they've used, I'm just not caving in....yet.
Randy