Where Does One Best Go For Information?

[bstrouss]

As a satisfied TCH customer of over 10 years, but admittedly a casual webmaster (especially lately) I find I am rusty when it comes to managing my sites and determining if they are relatively safe and secure. I also have some questions that I think are probably answered in the forums or in the help system, but I can't always find them by searching, and find I spend a fair amount of time just trying to figure out where I should look. I find the forums to contain a lot of old information that I am unsure of its applicability today, and the Help System to have some good content but not necessarily in a concise "here's what you need to know" perspective. A suggestion would be to clean it up a little and consolidate the information into a single support system (no small task, I assume), and provide a "New? Here's what you need to know" post that covers some of the basics for a new (or rusty) webmaster. Maybe that exists, but I'm not seeing it. I hate wasting resources by creating tickets when the information exists, and hate waiting even a little while for a response to a ticket when I know it's a common question that has been answered somewhere.

 

I wonder if I am doing all of the right things, and if new users to TCH are doing the right things to prevent them from having (or opening) a path to my sites and email. We all get a lot of SPAM, but in the past I've had email sent to some of my rarely used forwarding email addresses all at the same time, which I believe would only happen if the server was hacked (or someone hacked and did a tedious search through my reseller account) since I never send mail to or from those. (I set them up for certain opt-in mailing lists so I know where email is coming from). I've also been reading older posts about the potential technical inability to get true isolation from other users on shared servers using PHP and MySQL. I view web hosting a little like automotive self-servicing on a highly computerized car --- it's important to know what you know and what you don't, otherwise you can create a lot of damage. I'm a little concerned about the damage I might cause with an old script or version of some open source software, as well as a little concerned about the damage my sites might suffer due to others' knowledge of shared server holes (or lack thereof).

 

And allow me to share one of my pet peeves. It's the messages of little value that the friendly staff members sometimes post. While perhaps a nice touch to welcome the new user or to provide a quick answer, these messages remain there for years and require all future users to scroll through them to figure out if there is an appropriate explanation. It discourages customer self-service when a customer spends time reading these, and pretty soon everybody just uses the ticket system and knowledge gets lost. I suspect that is happening, given the age of so many of the posts. Some answers are great and I want to say THANKS, but that would just waste others' time. I've been a member for ten years and show up as "new to the forum" presumably because I'm not an active user. Please don't welcome me again (and again and again)!

 

Thanks for listening / reading! I hope these are useful suggestions.

[TCH-Bala]

Thank you for your thoughts and and business. We will surely take all this into consideration during our next upgrades.