Iomart Group PLC have recently released details of their financials showing a turnover of £16.6m (2004 - £7.4m) with annualised sales running at £20m and operating profits of £1.8m.

Iomart also claim to have 200,000 customers, which given their recent performance over the transfer of a domain away from them totally amazes me.

At the beginning of May a new client asked me to take over the domain management and Web hosting of one of their domains - all in a day’s work, HA!

Easy, request Iomart to change the IPSTag to my tagholder and then I can change the name servers and have the website up and running on the new servers within 24 hours.

First of all, Iomart charge £49.00 + VAT to change the IPSTag; this is what I refer to as a "Sour Grapes" charge - as in you move your domain away from us and we’ll whack you with a hefty "transfer" charge.

Iomart requested an authorising fax on letterhead paper signed by the legal registrant quoting the domain name and new IPSTag - perfectly reasonable. Sent 5th May.

So how should the £49.00 charge be paid for? My newly acquired client has to go into their control panel and pay by credit card, then Iomart change the IPSTag and the transfer goes ahead. And if the client doesn’t know their username and password Iomart emails it to them.

This is what happened, but said username and password didn’t work, client emails them to me and I try - dead right, it doesn’t work.

Back to Iomart. I phone them (10-15 mins listening to repeated statements that they are "experiencing heavy demand for this service") to be told that my client will have to send them a cheque. Cheque gets sent on 6th May with a covering letter stating the domain name concerned… and we wait a week, nothing.

I phone them up and they say thay haven’t received the cheque.

I phone the client to ask for a cheque number. Client has gone on holiday and won’t be back ’til this Wednesday (yesterday).

I speak to the customer today, get the cheque number and confirmation that the cheque cleared yesterday, and call Iomart.

I speak to a young girl in "billing" who insists that although Iomart received a cheque no. the same as my client’s cheque number it’s not my client’s cheque. Bit of a coincidence methinks and ask her to doublecheck her facts, but she’s adamant there’s no mistake. Billing girl asks me to find out which bank account the cheque has been paid into.

I phone client, client phones their bank to be told that the bank doesn’t know and can’t find out the recipient’s details unless banked at the same bank. Back to square one - getting really uptight now but retain professional attitude when calling Iomart again.

Billing girl still maintains the cheque is not my client’s. She tells me it belongs to a company in Wales. I make investigations, call the company and speak to Mike. Mike confirms he paid Iomart, a company he says is "difficult to deal with"… but paid them last year!

Back to billing girl. I don’t think she’s enjoying these conversations with me now, but still insists company in Wales is the only cheque with the same cheque number. She still claims Iomart’s accounts system is accurate. I point out that the Welsh company paid their cheque over a year ago, so why would it only just have been paid in (sorry, I forgot to mention she had said the cheque was paid into their account on 16/05/05). I’m getting nowhere and say I’ll be complaining to Nominet before ending the call.

Think about it some more, and decide to see if I can escalate the matter to management level. I call again and ask to be put through to Customer Services. "You’ll have to call another number" - 0870 050 0303 - I recognise this as "Technical Support", and dial it, ask for Customer Services only to be told I’ve got Technical Support. Obviously no Customer Services within the company - but think to myself that I’d already worked that out, pah!

Another girl on the line says she’ll find me someone to speak to and puts me on hold… back to the billing department and the "billing" girl again.

Billing girl says she was going to phone me but didn’t have a number - at least she’s right about that.

Guess what. They’d made a mistake and the IPSTag would be changed today - what a waste of an afternoon. Perhaps I’ll ask for a refund for my client.

Just goes to show that not all Web hosting companies are same!

By the way, I don’t charge for transfers to or away from us so if you’re asked to pay more than £15.00 + VAT in transfer charges give us a call - there is a way round it. ;)

One of the most important parts of my job is to ensure when a domain name is transfered between hosting service providers (HSP) the client’s email is disrupted as little as possible, with the ideal situation being no email losses at all.

But unfortunately there are so many companies out there who "just don’t get it"!

This is a topic that was bound to come up sooner or later in this blog, because so many Web design companies who handle their clients domains and hosting just don’t know how to do it properly.

So, anyway, I get a call this morning from a print and publicity media company that has taken over an old account of mine, requested the domain name transfer, which went through, but obviously didn’t make any provision for the seemless transfer of the company’s email facilities…

So now this guy on the end of the phone wants to know if I have an email forwarding address for his newly acquired Web client! Well, at least he knows enough to forward email to an existing mailbox of his newly acquired Web client, because a quick fix is better than nothing.

Taking a deep mental breath, and in my usual polite and professional way, I explain I don’t know of any such email addresses of my ex-client.

I go onto explain that his client used to use a catchall mailbox that their internal server collected from and then distributed via the internal network. I went onto explain that one of the staff didn’t work from the main office, collected mail from home and needed a separate mailbox to collect from.

It was obvious the guy didn’t have much idea of what I was talking about, and quite honestly I don’t blame him for that - he’s probably been saddled with looking after the websites for his company’s clients, because they don’t have an inhouse IT guy. He’s probably a designer or marketing bod, with little or no training in Internet matters - so it’s the company that’s to blame - it’s all down to the management… that’s what I say.

Still, that’s not going to be any consolation to my ex-client. Ah well, life’s full of little surprises.

My name is Richard Williams, and I’ve been working in the Internet industry for nearly 10 years.

In that time I’ve encountered many many horrendous practices of domain name registration agents, Web designers and hosting service providers that combine, all too often, to make the small business owner/manager tear his or her out at the sheer frustration of dealing with these people.

And it doesn’t just affect SMEs, I’ve dealt with Japanese conglomerates that have fallen foul of some very questionable practices within this industry.

All this has given me a very hardened attitude towards the perpetrators of the practices that give the non-Internet industry business community such a hard time.

So expect some straight-talking, coz I’m very passionate about this.

You may even come to think of me as a latter day “Robin Hood” fighting an industry of “Prince Johns”, who knows! :)