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The end of my ipage experience.

Quick recap: In July of last year, after a lot of research, I went with Ipage as my webhost, and paid for two years of Abalonofcalifornia. Many web comics are using Wordpress-Comic press to turn out some pretty decent looking comics, and I believed that with time, sweat and online expertise, I could join that pantheon of web creators. And I still believe that…but it ain’t going to be on this go around. In another year or longer, I will get another domain, maybe even with ipage.

There’s some lessons here, so let me sum up:

1. If you are not a site designer, buy one. I knew this in advance, and went with Wordpress-Comic Press with the hope that they would have plug-and-play options that I could piece together into a polished looking site. They did have options and tools…but it took three hard months to assemble a rudimentary site that would display my comic pages in sequence.

2. Special features require special help.  There are tutorial sites and generic advice that helped me with the basics but I couldn’t find specific advice to set up web based comic features…and I couldn’t understand advice on web chats, or the advice didn’t work. Worse yet, every time I tried something, a multitude of other features on my site would be altered and I would spend hours getting back to my starting point.

3. The vultures close in.  After nine months I started getting notices from ipage that I needed to renew my domain (remember I had paid for two years). I had finally disabled ‘Comments to the Author’ and just put up an email address, as a way of dodging “RoboSpam.” It worked for the most part, so I figured these notices were human spam. Then ipage change my password after a hacker scare, and advised me to add additional features. The designer of Comic Press came up with a new version of Comic press and two pages of complex instructions on how to transition a site from the old version to the newest version. After an hour I thought, “Maybe I should just install the new version and clean up the problems after the fact. The new version has to be easier and smoother than the old one, right?” I pressed the “ install” button.

4. Death by operator error. The new ComicPress quickly installed itself and my site became unrecognizable; features and tools in completely different places or absent altogether; and there were no help sites because this was a new version of Comic Press. Worse, as I had been warned, the update was irreversible.  I dedicated an entire day to hunting through the new version in the naïve belief that this program was designed for a nonprogrammer like myself. I can navigate an ipad if I’m under a teenager’s constant supervision, but this? Hah! On several successive days, I returned to the twisted wreckage of my site in the childish hope that somehow…it would be different…or I would see things differently.  I prayed, chewed through the “Word Press” codex in the vain hope that I would find clarity…in English. Nada.

5. Ipage delivers the Coup de Grace.  A week ago I returned from vacation to find several emails from ipage: “If you allow your domain privacy service to expire, your name,
   phone number, email address and mailing address will be published
   online in the publicly available "whois" database, exposing you
   to identity theft, fraud, stalkers, spam and telemarketing.”  Apparently for $8.99 per year, I could continue to enjoy the protection of ipage that I was told was an automatic benefit of this company, or I could not pay and be thrown to the internet wolves. I guess $0.75 per month protection is not blackmail, but for me, it was time to walk away from this relationship.