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.
