27dinner Update

This month sees 27-15 Jozi and 27-16 Durban taking place on the 27th November in their respective cities. It’s hard to believe we’re on our 16th dinner countrywide! Congrats and thanks to all who have worked so hard to make 27 a highlight in the tech / marketing calendar.

Special thanks must also go to Cape Town counterpart Dave Duarte who has turned the Cape Town dinners into an enormously successful movement. Check out the Zoopy video from the last event:


Thanks goodness someone interviews Henk. Before that I was getting a bit concerned :P


So back to Jozi – please note the change in venue to PRIMI FORUM MELROSE ARCH. Exciting news this month is that besides the very generous drinks sponsorship we can expect from the folks at Stormhoek, local Web-hosting dudes Afrihost have offered to sponsor all the starters at the event! (After all, Afrihost is all about helping you and your start-up get going on the Web.)

Expect also to hear some very exciting news from Justin about Afrigator. So exciting in fact that I think we’re flying Stii up especially for it :) Other than that we’re organising some interesting speakers to keep you inspired and entertained.

So all in all it ought to be a cracker, and I’m looking forward to seeing you and your friends there.

  • http://www.durbanscouts.za.net capdog

    Afrihost? Yeah right. I’m moving swiftly away from them, thanks very much! Absolutely useless.

    They upgraded the PHP version on my server without so much as a wimper to inform me, breaking my website in half. After much hours of downtime and anguish, I finally traced the problem which they admitted to.

    Then they moved my site to a different server and subdomain with four ‘w”s in it (wwww.durbanscouts.za.net) and proclaimed the problem solved. Uhh no….

    Hours of emails to the useless support technicians to explain to them why Google doesn’t like seeing two domains with the same content, they finally get it sorted out, but leave the (wwww) domain active, which Google indexes and sees as… duplicate content!

    Awesome! So I get penalised on rankings for that.

    Idiots, stay far away from them… this Thought Leader article also details a bad experience, although he doesn’t mention names, I can tell you with 100% certainty that it’s Afrihost…

    http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/ebrahimkhalilhassen/2007/11/14/the-service-domain/

  • http://www.mikestopforth.com Mike

    Well sounds like a good opportunity for you to come through and take them to task face to face mate (although you being in Durbs might be a bit of a limitation)…

    Still I’d send them a mail and get them to sort it out…

  • http://www.durbanscouts.za.net capdog

    I’ve sent them hundreds of mails – this wasn’t the first problem we had.. the last email I sent them was the one canceling my account. There’s nothing more to discuss!

  • http://www.afrihost.com Gian – Afrihost.com

    Hey Mark

    First of all like any business owner I hate reading or hearing anything negative about our company. Feels like somebody has taken a cheese grater to my nether regions.

    But the sad fact is that our crap does stink, we’re human and I know that we do drop the ball on occasion.

    I haven’t yet looked into your problem that you had – I’ll do that first thing in the morn.

    Fact is regardless of what happened you’re obviously disillusioned with us and for that I really am sorry.

    As you know we promise that if you have ANY website downtime we’ll pay you back DOUBLE your monthly hosting fee.

    I think it’d be fair to mention here that we did pay you back double your monthly hosting fee last month (R99 x 2) for the pain you suffered.

    I’ll never be able to promise you or any of our clients that there’ll never be problems.

    But what I can promise you is that I (and our whole team) am 100% dedicated to giving the best web hosting service we can.

    Sure we can improve. Sure there are things we’re working on.

    But what I do sincerely believe (and of course I’m biased) is that we provide a top quality service. And I promise we’re dedicated to getting better and better.

    Obviously I’d love to keep you as a client.

    If you think there is anything that I could do to help you out please email me at my direct email g [at] afrihost [dot] com.

    For any of our clients out there (or any future clients!) if you need anything or experience a problem with us please feel free to email me directly and I’ll make sure the problem gets sorted ASAP.

    Thanks

    Gian
    CEO, Afrihost.com

  • http://www.charlnorman.com charl

    Cant wait, want to meet Justin and Stii

    I’m gonna try live blog the event

  • http://www.ivolution-seo.com Ivolution-Seo

    Well firstly I’ve never been to one of these evenings and I’d love to come so if anyone can email more information about this that would be great.

    Secondly, I love the fact that you can use this site as a forum to complain and remedy :) it’s something special really.

    Thirdly, Capdog, give them a chance. I’ve heard Afrihost are great and I will be trying them out for my next site. In terms of what they stuffed up, wwww (easy typo), duplicate content issues on google, hey unless you’re an SEO, support guys haven’t got the foggiest about this sort of thing most of the time so it’s understandable. Anyways, I say give them another bash!

    AEWSOME site. Glad I finally it!

  • http://www.ivolution-seo.com Ivolution-Seo

    Found it. Not it.

    :)

  • http://doodeesthailand.blogspot.com/ Doodee

    Thanks for sharing