Experimenting with Your Business
By Bob Kaehms
Tom wants to put his small business on the Web. To prepare, he decides to do a personal/family Web site first. HTML and all!
Tom finds an ad on his ISP's Web site that offers Web hosting for $9.99 including DNS registration and 10MB of free disk space. Wow! What a deal, and what a learning experience. It appeared that his ISP, MegaBig, was offering the service, so Tom submitted the registration form expecting everything to happen in three days as promised, including DNS registration, account setup, and Web directory configuration.
Three days go by, and he gets a phone call.
"Hi, I'd like to sell you my Web-consulting services," says Marge, a Web designer.
"I thought it was all for free," says Tom. "I'd rather do my own Web site, thanks. Do you work with MegaBig?"
"No."
"How did you know about my account?"
"I used to work with SmallShops Internet Hosts. It was their ad you responded to. SmallShops just got bought by MegaBig."
"Oh. Well how do I get access to my account?"
"Call MegaBig."
Tom did call MegaBig. Customer support wasn't aware that MegaBig had bought SmallShops, and didn't have root access to the system that Tom's account was on. To make matters worse, his domain name (his last name) was technically owned by SmallShops, which, due to the acquisition, had more important matters to deal with. It took two months to get things straightened out.
In contrast, Bob was interested in the opportunity that low-cost, high-speed Internet access offers to small businesses.
