Gadgetopia

I’m currently looking for a ColdFusion MX hosting provider (no, I haven’t found another shiny object — we inherited a bunch of sites from someone else).

I thought I had found a good one that was recommended by someone I trust, but their new customer sign-up interface threw a fatal, unhandled error halfway through the process.

So I call their tech support and actually had to send them a screencap of the error screen. Their response:

1. You may be missing the CV2 number.
2. It could be that you are not using Internet Explorer. (That is the browser that would need to be used.)
3. The security settings may be set too high on your computer.

I translate this as the following:

1. We’re not error checking. We prefer to just throw up when we get something we don’t expect.
2. We don’t support 1 out of every 10 potential customers. New business is not that important to us.
3. Our interface is so poorly designed that it needs to get unnecessarily friendly with your system. Trust us.

I’m sanctimoniously withholding my business from this company, even though they met every other criteria I had. Not supporting non-IE browsers (and not bothering to tell you this or check for it before you start the process) was enough for me to withdraw.

I don’t want to get all philosophical, but this is just sloppy. If they’re this bad with their sign-up system (you know, the system that puts food on the table), then how can they expect me to trust them with my Web sites?

So, this leaves me in the market for good ColdFusion MX hosting. Preferably, I’d like a virtual server on which I can host unlimited domains (not a dedicated server — I only need like four or five sites). However, I’ll consider anything. And it has to be Windows (someone else wrote the sites specifically for Windows, we just have to put them somewhere).

Any recommendations?