Light the blue touch paper and retire..........

[nikko500]

I run a small hosting service and when I saw that joomla was to post a list of hosting providers, I thought, (with increasing competition from monster companies cramming hundreds of sites on their hard disks for $1.50 p.m.), what an ideal place to boost sales.
That was over four months ago and now I am perplexed as to what the criteria actually is for getting a place in the list. When you think of the thousands of hosting companies out there, how is it there are only a 15, after over 4 months, in Joomlas resources! Oh yes, sorry, you are only volunteers and you are really busy!

Lets examine the list of 15, is it a random list? No. Who is at the top? Rochen Ltd. Who are they? Well, they host the Joomla site and at a guess, a lot of Joomla moderators being part of this company. OK, so if you are a member of the "club" and you roll your trouser leg up and give a strange hand shake, why shouldn't they be at the top of the list? ( I know, I'm bitter )

Moving the goalposts.

When I first sent my application, it was a simple form. "Fill in details of you and what you offer", thats it? OK, filled it in and sent it off. After about a month and checking my page with the dreaded "Pending" icon, I did some research and found out then you need permission to use the joomla logo and the joomla name. So, emailed opensourcematters.org to get the OK and then revamped my pages with a disclaimer etc. and sent joomla the email from OSM giving the ok to use the 'joomla' name on my site.
Waited, waited and waited more..........
Then, horror, my application has been deleted!

I informed the resource dept via their form and got a very polite letter saying that I must now provide a joomla installation with admin password so that the details can be checked. Fair enough, I thought, so I installed a site for them and submitted the details.

War of words.

I got an email from 'GB', joomla resources, with no polite greeting or a signing of his name. His first comment being " Virtualmart would not install properly, the file is attached". Install? I wasn't aware they were going to install things on my server, Anway, why worry, couldn't do any harm can it? Not having installed Virtualmart before, I found that he was trying to install an old version so got the new version and installed it with no problems. Had he read the Virtualmart docs thoroughly, he would see that certain folders need to be made writable just for the installation process. Shock, horror, making folders writable? his reply: "this concerns me about your hosting skills". What? Do I need insults like that? I am well aware of keeping my server secure.
He then goes on to say I should have 'fgci' on the server, (I think he meant 'fcgi', but that is an easy mistake for someone just out of primary school!) My server works very efficiently as it is and have no complaints about security or reliability and nor have my customers.

In conclusion, I wish to stress, my VPS setups only has a dozen or so sites per a partitoned hard disk. I monitor the server and software methodically as I wish to give my clients the best support.

Back to my Joomla Resources application, it's still there with the dreaded "Pending" icon" but I do not hold out a lot of hope............

ps Thanks for the email from the head of resources which was both polite and informative.

[Wendy]

Hi Nikko,

First of all, thank you for your feedback. You seem frustrated and confused about the criteria for being listed as well as the wait time for approval. I hope I can help to clear that up.

Please see my recent blog post on the Community site: http://community.joomla.org/blogs/commu ... an-up.html Wherein I link to previous attempts on our part to communicate the new requirements to all registered members of the JRD as far back as July 20th. We really tried to get the word out there. We posted a sticky in this forum, we blogged about it. And as we understand that not everyone reads the community site or checks the forums (as much as we wish more people would) We even set up a system email informing everyone who was registered (as of July 20th) to inform them of the changes and possible consequences that would result should the required information not be received by our team.

When you submit your checklist, JRD editors are of the understanding that you've read the requirements and comply with them as they are clearly stated on the Approval Checklist:

*Hosting companies have a special provision that they must provide us a working up to date stable link to a Joomla! install to review that your servers are setup correctly. With your final review please submit administration URL and Super Admin and password. Speed is not a part of the review process. We want to confirm you have PHP running with user privileges set in an optimal way for security and usablity issues related to dynamic CMS (suPHP, fcgi, PHPSuExec or something equivalent). You can delete the site after our review. We will notify when we are done with the site.

To go through all the steps of making sure you do qualify (as per the requirements you should have already read clearly) and find that you, in fact, do not qualify... is frustrating. That could perhaps explain why the email you received from a member of our team was not as friendly as you may have wanted.

To reiterate, you *need* to have PHP set in an optimal way for security and usability issues such as: suPHP, fcgi, PHPSuExec or something equivalent. Can you confirm that you do? If yes, we will check again and approve your listing. If no, and you still wish to be listed, please make those changes and let us know when they are done.

I'm sorry this has been such a hassle for you. But please note, it is not because of 'busy volunteers'. It is because you do not (as of yet) fulfill the JRD guidelines for being listed as a hosting provider. And you know what? Most hosting companies that submit also do not meet them. *That* is why there are so few listed.

Maintaining the highest possible quality of listings for our community is our #1 priority. We'd love to have you included in the hosting category as well as other hosting companies that meet our guidelines.

[nikko500]

Hello Wendy
Thank you for answering some of my points.
I wasn't expecting a reply from you, the super arbitrator, I was gearing myself up to answer to Mr. Cool Brad, with his brand of forum rudeness ( He should take his shades off and see that he is talking to real people). Never mind, the sun is just rising where he is.
Re my server setup, I am talking with my techie guys and see what they come up with.
Will no doubt talk again