Cortana says “Something went wrong, try again in a little bit”
My Cortana has not been working properly since last last, when I tried to create a reminder it would get as far as far as the part where you tell it the time of the reminder and then it would bomb out with “i’m sorry something went wrong. Try again in a little bit”
So if I said “cortana, remind me” or “Cortana remind me to do somehting”, this works, and then it asks when you want to be reminded, which is when the error occurs.
If I say “Cortana remind me to do somehting at 5pm”, then this results in an error.
Although bizarrely, it turned out that despite the error, the reminder is actually created, which I didn’t realise for quite some time, so ended up creating dozens of reminders which would all go off one after the other.
I tried every solution I found online to no avail, but then finally I managed to speak to a Microsoft support tech who knew the answer, which I am sharing here.
Open regedit and navigate to the following folder HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search
Find the key named “SearchboxTaskbarMode” and change the value to 0
If the key doesn’t exist, right click in the right panel and create a new DWORD (32 bit) value, name it “SearchboxTaskbarMode” and set the value as 0.
Now restart Windows.
After windows has restarted, edit the SearchboxTaskbarMode key and change the value to 1, then reboot Windows again.
Hopefully this has solved your problem and Cortana is now working properly.
Very few things have disrupted the digital marketing scene as greatly as WordPress has in the last decade. Thanks to the platform’s free and simple content management system it made it possible for anyone, regardless of levels of technical knowledge, to create at least a rudimentary website. This possibility is boosted further by the seemingly endless library of themes and plugins.
According to the latest stats, WordPress powers 35% of the internet as of 2020, an increase of 2% compared to early 2019 and a 4% rise from the previous year.If you count only the CMS-built sites, then about 60% of them are WordPress
However, while creating a basic WordPress website isn’t hard, maintaining it can be, especially if you are not technically minded and not sure what is required to maintain a WordPress website. So, to make things easier, below is a WordPress website maintenance checklist info graphic that can assist you in maintaining and optimising your website.
But, before we look at it, here are the Top 10 WordPress website maintenance tasks that need to be done on a regular basis.
1. Page Speed and Loading Time
Website page speed is an important ranking factor and as such, monitoring it regularly is essential. A slow website speed and load time can hurt not only your site’s traffic but it can also affect your site’s search ranking.
Ensuring that your site’s speed is optimal, is one of the first website maintenance tasks that you need to undertake. This can be done with tools such as GTMetrix or Pingdom Website Speed Test.
2. Update WordPress Plugins and Themes
One of the reasons for a slow website speed and load time is redundant plugins and themes. Apart from taking up a lot of database space, these outdated plugins and themes can also compromise your websites security.
As such, it is crucial that you update all WordPress plugins and themes on your website frequently or delete them entirely if no longer useful.
The security plugins mentioned below will inform you when you have updates pending, or there are several ways that you can perform automatic updates, such as using installatron which is supported by many hosts such as Guru.
It is generally recommend to install the WordPress updates manually, at least major updates, in case it breaks your website, so you can fix it or rollback immediately.
3. Website Security
Often overlooked, this should be a high priority on your top 10 WordPress website maintenance tasks.
Hacking, malware and spam are a common problem across the internet. On average 30,000 new websites are hacked every day. These 30,000 sites are usually legitimate small businesses sites, that are unwittingly distributing malware.
To ensure that you don’t fall prey to these malicious threats and cybercriminals, it is important to implement a security solution to monitor and protect your site and fix any vulnerabilities immediately.
One of the most popular security plugins for WordPress is Wordfence, which I recommend that you install the free edition as a bare minimum. This will provide you with a Web Application Firewall (WAF) to protect your website from common threats and will also scan your website daily for any issues or vulnerabilities, outdated plugins, abandoned plugins and send you a report.
Another very good plugin is Malcare, which as well as providing a WAF and daily scans, also purports to automatically remove any detected malware from your website or your money back. This is the only plugin I am aware of which offers automatic malware removal.
For the ultimate protection for mission critical or eCommerce websites, you also want an external proxy firewall solution such as Sucuri, that scans all traffic and blocks anything malicious before it even reaches your website.
4. Daily Backups
One of the major website maintenance tasks that need to be done on a daily basis, taking your site’s backup will ensure that all your hard-work is safe and secure in the event your site crashes or is hacked.
Your host should be taking regular backups anyway, but some of the cheap/crappy hosts only do backups once per month whereas high quality WordPress hosts such as Guru, FlyWheel, wpx hosting, Kinsta do daily backups.
Check with your hosting provider how often they perform daily backups and make sure you you know how to restore those backups, in fact perform a test run so you are ready in case of disaster.
If your host does not backup daily, then you should definitely be running you own backups, which is always a good practice regardless just in case your hosts backups fails.
Thankfully this can be completely automated as WordPress provides you with a huge options of backup plugins like BackUpWordPress and BackWPup that makes your task of taking a daily backup of your entire website and database easier.
5. Clean Up Unused Media files
These are images and media files which are no longer in use on any of your pages or posts. Un-used media files can take a lot of your website storage space, which uses up your disk space quota and increases the size of your backups.
This may also affect your site’s performance and load time since the metadata for all these files is stored in the database and as such, you need to delete them from the media library completely to ensure that your site is running effortlessly and your database is well-optimised.
6. Review Your Site’s On-page SEO Elements
An SEO-friendly WordPress website is essential in order to increase organic traffic and to boost site’s ranking on SERPs.
The on-page SEO elements on your website will help enhance users as well as search engines experience when navigating your site. Thus, reviewing your site’s on-page SEO with an SEO audit is important to boost online growth.
7. Find and Fix All Broken Links
Dead links (404 errors) or broken links are frowned upon by Google. Too many dead links can get your site penalised as this leads to a poor user experience.
Scanning your site and fixing broken links is recommended in order to optimise your WordPress website. To accomplish this task, you can make use of the Broken Link Checker WordPress plugin that helps detect and re-direct broken links successfully.
8. Optimise Your Websites Images
Large, un-optimised images and media files are another major reason for sluggish website speed. Optimising your websites images is important in order to improve site performance.
It also helps improve your content marketing strategy and page speed scores, thus leading to increased ranking on search engine result pages.
If you have comments enabled on your site/blog, then you need to process these on a regular basis.
Visitors to your site/blog will quickly become annoyed if their comments never get approved and equally nobody will want to read the comments if they are full of spam.
It is recommended to moderate your comments or implement spam filtering to avoid spammers, otherwise the notification emails will bombard your legit subscribers with emails every time a spammer comments.
If you do use spam filtering, keep an eye on it to make sure it is still working.
10. Check Your Contact Forms
If the contact forms or any form on your website stops working, you will not be receiving sales enquiries from potential customers or support requests from existing customers.
Contact forms can stop working for a variety of reasons, a common issue is with the email address that the forms are submitting to or the email account being used to send the emails has had its password changed.
Check your forms at least once per week to make sure they are still working.
In Conclusion
I hope you found these top 10 WordPress website maintenance tasks useful. The above-mentioned WordPress website maintenance tasks are the most essential, however, there are a few more equally important routine tasks that you need to accomplish.
Take a look at this website maintenance infographic below, which is the beginners guide on how to maintain a WordPress website effectively. And undertake these tasks in order to optimise your website so that it runs, performs and functions smoothly across all devices and browsing platforms.
I learnt something new about how Google G Suite (Gmail) treats forwarded emails this week, which may explain why you have had issues with forwarded emails vanishing into the abyss, because it turns out Gmail auto deletes forwarded emails.
Email forwarding is something that is done regularly, usually because the end user needs another business email address but already has an email account and doesn’t want yet another mailbox to login to and check email, so instead they just forward the email.
So a common situation for me is that I setup a new website/domain for a client, and they will want a generic email address such as [email protected] forwarded to their existing email address and contact forms etc will also go to this email address.
So I will usually set this up to forward to myself while I am working on the website, then change the destination to the clients email once the website goes live and I know everything is working
Now I have had an instance recently where I was not receiving any of the forwarded emails when I forwarded them to my G suite account, but when I forwarded to my outlook.com address, they arrived just fine.
According to the hosts logs, the emails were definately being delivered to Google, so I contacted Google support to find out what was going on, here is the explanation I got about these missing emails.
If you’re sending mail to an external address (e.g. [email protected]), which is then auto forwarding your mail back to yourself, due to the nature of how message auto-forwarding works in Gmail when you are the original sender, the email is auto archived rather than sent to your inbox.
When a duplicate of the sent mail is auto-forwarded back to your account from an external address that is not seen as yours in Gmail, Gmail’s archiving then removes the duplicate (the one that would be sent to your inbox) from storage, so you’ll only have the one mail there, which will be the one you sent.
The fact that Gmail auto deletes forwarded emails at all certainly seems like a strange default behaviour which would clealry confuse a lot of people and probably explains the whereabouts of many email I have not received in the past and emails my clients had claimed have not been received too.
I have actually tested this a few times, I sent an email to an addresses that forwarded back to me and then kept a close eye on my inbox. I saw the email arrive briefly and then immediately vanish, which does seem to confirm what Google have told me.
Where this has probably confounded people is that the issue can seem intermittent, as when testing contact forms on websites for example, the issue will not occur, since the email does not originate from your own email address, it comes from the websites default from address, so it will be delivered as normal.
All issues aside, G Suite is still a great business solution, which I highly recommend to my clients for business critical email, and the ubiquitous Gmail for personal use. If Gmail isn’t your thing, then the next next is Microsoft Office 365 mail.
Disclaimer: I use affiliate links (who doesn’t), this makes no difference to you, but gives me a small commission if you then decide to make a purchase from that company. Please note I do not ever recommend a product or service just to get clicks. Unlike a large proportion of reviews out there, my reviews are legitimate, honest and based on personal experience of actually using said product/service. If you have a problem with affiliate links, don’t click them, simples.
Last year I received an email from Kinsta asking me if I would do a review of their WordPress hosting, which I agreed to do, so here it is.
I would first like to clarify that despite being asked to write this Kinsta WordPress hosting review, it has not been sponsored, I have not been paid or offered any incentive whatsoever, so, like all my reviews, it is completely unbiased and based on my actual first-hand experience.
For the purposes of this review, I will be using my current host Guru for comparison, so this will also conveniently serve as a Kinsta vs Guru review at the same time. Although it probably isn’t a fair comparison and I am expecting Kinsta to win.
It is also worth mentioning that 6 months have passed since I was originally asked to write this, so they had forgotten about me by the time I wrote this, and I certainly did not appear to be getting any special treatment from their support dept.
Unlike most other people who review and compare WordPress hosts, I do not think that speed and TTFB is the be-all and end-all and the only thing you should care about. Customer service, security, reliability, price and features are also important factors that you need to take into consideration.
There is little point in having a super-fast website if it is not reliable, the host does not care about you or your business (yes Siteground, i’m talking about you), the tech support is incompetent/unhelpful and the servers are insecure or unreliable,
The Migration
I used my own website for the testing since it is running multisite (with 6 sites) and so is the biggest and most complex site that I manage. This does make it more of a PITA to migrate as most backup plugins do not support multisite unless you pay for a pro licence.
I used Migration Guru to migrate my site, as this is the only FREE plugin that does multisite that I am aware of, it is also better than many of the other backup plugins, including the paid plugins. For regular sites I have been using wpvivid, which I discovered a little while ago, which has a very handy auto-migration feature, even in the free version.
I didn’t bother asking Kinsta to migrate my site, as this always takes too long to ask the host to do this in my experience and I didn’t want to sit around waiting for a week, so I just did it myself, ergo I cannot comment on their migration skills.
Performance
According to their website, Kinsta use state-of-the-art technology like Nginx, PHP 7.4, LXD software containers, MariaDB, and compute-optimized VMs to make sure your website loads in the blink of an eye. Featuring complete resource isolation, automatic scalability, and high availability.
Powered by Google Cloud Platform and its 22 global data centers. Everything is interconnected over their premium tier network, designed to minimize distance and hops, resulting in fast and secure transport of your data.
This setup is far superior to your average budget host, who will be running Apache + MySQL in a non-isolated environment, which is slower than NGINX + MariaDB.
Kinsta also supports Cloudflare Railgun, which ensures that the connection between your origin server and the Cloudflare network is as fast as possible.
I am not going to go overboard with the performance testing, since as I mentioned above, this is not the be-all and end-all, but just one of several deciding factors when choosing a host.
According to Kinsta, there is no need to use any caching plugins, since that is all handled automatically on the server. So I will be following this advice and not doing any caching on the site itself.
Note that my live site is using LitespeedCache + Cloudflare
TEST 1
This is with Cloudflare disabled (bypassed) for kinsta, which is not required according to their docs. CF minification is also disabled for both sites.
I performed the test 10 times and the average loading time was as follows
Kinsta 1.61s Guru 1.66s
So kinsta is only 0.05s faster, which is literally nothing, so it is a tie.
But bear in mind that Kinsta does not perform any minification on their side, so despite what they say about not needing to use a plugin, you obviously do need a plugin to perform minification or use the Cloudflare minification as below.
TEST 2
This is with Cloudflare enabled on both sites with minification.
Kinsta 1.59s Guru 1.87s
So on average, Kinsta is only 0.28s faster with modification enabled. This is rather disappointing considering the price difference between Kinsta and GURU.
Load Test 1
The load-test simulates multiple users and simultaneous connections, thus showing how the host can cope under load. I performed the tests using k6.io.
For the first test I used 20 virtual users from a region in the USA.
As you can Guru’s average response time was 100 ms faster at 220 ms compared to Kinsta with an average of 319 ms. So not only was Guru faster, but also managed to handle more requests per second.
Load Test 2
In the second test I switched the region to UK, which is where the sites are hosted and upped the virtual users to 50.
50 virtual users Region: London (UK) Duration: 5 minutes
Kinsta Load Test 2Guru Load Test 2
This time round Kinsta wins, so has better response times from the UK, but only by 22 ms. Other than that, both hosts handled the load equally.
I must say that I find these results very surprising, especially when you consider that GURU is shared hosting while Kinsta is dedicated WordPress hosting on the Google cloud platform and is 5 x the price for the cheapest plan. I was honestly expecting Kinsta to win this hands down.
In theory, Kinsta should scale better if you have a high traffic site due to the fact it is a dedicated cloud platform, which is presumably the type of client/site that Kinsta is targeted at, rather than the small low-traffic site.
Security
This is the one area that most people do not consider or pay any attention to and which most WordPress reviews also completely ignore.
Kinsta employs active and passive measures to stop attacks and malicious intent in its tracks. Continuous monitoring for uptime, DDoS attack detection, software-based restrictions, SSL support, and hardware firewalls. Bottom line: your site is monitored and secured 24/7.
Kinsta hosting has a number of features that will reduce the chances of you being subject to DDoS attacks.
All of the sites hosted at Kinsta are stored behind the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Firewall. Each site container (where your WordPress site lives) runs on a virtual machine in one of multiple GCP data centers. This is behind a load balancer, which is then secured behind the GCP firewall.
All of this makes it much harder for a DDoS attack to get through.
Another Kinsta feature which can help protect you once a DDoS attack has begun is GeoIP blocking. Kinsta will detect any DDoS attack and alert you to it. You can then use the Geo IP blocking feature to block the geographical area from which the DDoS attack is coming.
This means you can safely block a geographical region where an attack is coming from and IP addresses from that region will no longer be able to send requests to your site.
FTP
Only SSH and SFTP are allowed. Plain FTP is disabled. Why is this good? Because Plain FTP is completely insecure as everything is sent in plain text, including your login credentials.
MYSQL
Remote database access is only allowed via SSH. Again this is a good thing, as it means the connection and all data is encrypted.
Did you know. Most of the popular budget hosts still allow the insecure, unencrypted connection protocols and do not have DDOS protection
Features
As is usually the case with specialised WordPress hosts, they also have their own custom control panel which has a limited set of features when compared to the likes of CPANEL, since it is only for WordPress.
User management & audit log
You have the ability to invite additional users to your account and assign them one of three roles: Administrator, Developer or billing. Thus limiting what they can do and access.
You also have a very handy audit log, which shows you all actions performed by each user. Very handy if your site mysteriously breaks and you need to find out why.
Analytics
Kinsta has some handy-looking analytics to tell you how your site is performing, response times, Geo & IP, CDN usage and more. All very simple to understand with graphical charts.
Backups
Kinsta do daily backups as standard with the option to create up to 5 manual backups, backup every 6 hours for an additional $50 per site/month or hourly for an additional $100 per site/month.
This once again is rather expensive in comparison to Guru, who perform backups every 4 hours on all standard plans (which start from only £4.99) and hourly on their pro plans (which start from £29.99) at no extra cost.
Although the Kinsta backups seem considerably easier to manage and more user friendly, with the option to restore to staging or live . My Guru backups by comparison are done with R1soft backup via cpanel and are quite cumbersome to deal with and I have on many occasions had to contact Guru support to get them to perform a restore as it wouldn’t work via the control panel.
Tools
They have a few handy tools in the control panel to make life easier without having to resort to plugins.
Search & Replace. Use this handy tool to replace any value in your database. Very useful when changing domains or migrating a website.
WordPress debugging. Use this tool to see warnings, errors and notices on your website.
Restart PHP Restarting your PHP engine may clear out some issues that lead to site speed problems or connectivity troubles.
New Relic monitoring New Relic is a PHP monitoring tool you can use to get detailed performance statistics on your website. Use with care as it impacts site performance.
Force HTTPS Redirect all visitors so that they visit your site through HTTPS. This greatly enhances security, and search engines like this too, so it helps your SEO.
Support
This is the one area where most hosts fail dismally. I have signed up with a host and then left within a few days due to the terrible support and customer service.
My interactions with Kinsta support overall were positive. They attempted to give detailed responses to all my questions and didn’t try to pass the buck. They appear to be knowledgeable and capable of giving relevant technical responses.
Obviously, my experience with Kinsta support is limited, for the purposes of this review, and while I have no complaints, I don’t get the feeling that they would go to the same lengths to help as Guru have.
There is no phone support, only live chat or email, which may be annoying for many people. They also use the same live chat that Elegant Themes use. This has driven me up the wall before as it isn’t really a live chat, it is a ticket system in the guise of a live chat, so you could potentially be sitting there for hours waiting for a response.
What is Managed WordPress
The term “Managed WordPress Hosting” is very ambiguous and tends to also be misleading. A lot of customers believe this means that the host is also managing their website, which is not the case. In many cases you are getting nothing extra at all and it is just regular hosting.
I received an automated email from Kinsta about a vulnerability in one of the plugins I use. I then noticed that there is no options on Kinsta to even update WordPress or plugins/themes, which you do get on Guru via Installatron. So I asked Kinsta to clarify what exactly they mean by “managed WordPress”.
Here is the response.
Hi Russ! I just wanted to help clarify the security features we use here to help harden the server – please note that we do not automatically update plugins though. There are three main pieces when it comes to security:
Securing the environment itself.
Securing WordPress.
Monitoring the traffic that and activity that reaches the site.
We handle item 1 completely. Our environment is secure. To date, we’ve never had a site compromised due to a weakness on our platform, nor have we ever had any sort of data breach. We feel strongly enough about how we’re holding up our end of the bargain to offer a security guarantee: https://kinsta.com/knowledgebase/security-guarantee/.
We help with item number 2 by having a variety of WordPress-specific security features such as monitoring and banning IPs with multiple failed login attempts, blocking access to xmlrpc (except for known services), and disabling the execution of code in wp-uploads. Having said that, we don’t police user activity or force updates. So it is possible, for example, for a plugin vulnerability to be exploited if a user fails to keep plugins updated (or if the exploit is used before an update is available). It is also possible for users to create really weak credentials and have a site compromised that way. You can further strengthen this piece by ensuring you always keep all themes, plugins, and the WP core up to date and using a good security plugin to force users to use strong passwords.
What we don’t do is very much in the way of item number 3 and that’s where a good WAF like Sucuri can come in useful. Our Sysadmin team does run a firewall on our platform and do a lot of manual banning of IPs based on certain activity profiles as well as automated banning of obviously malicious activity (like repeated failed SSH login attempts), but you aren’t going to get the same level of WAF protection as what you’d get with someone like Sucuri. Having said that, the vast majority of our customers do not use a third-party WAF and do not experience any issues as a result of that.
I hope that helps clarify further, please let us know if you have any additional questions!
Since schools have now shut down and kids are stuck at home 24/7, parents need to keep their children entertained and their minds engaged. Luckily there are plenty of online resources to help with this, as long as you have an Internet connection and a computer, laptop or tablet.
I thought it might be helpful to put together a list of learning resources for kids stuck at home during coronavirus epidemic. Planning a learning day will help reduce the stress and anxiety for parents and kids. Even if your daily homeschool schedule is very loose – a bit of organisation will give your day a framework.
Kids will obviously not be learning at the same pace as they do at school, but it is ok as long as they learn something new every day, and they have fun on the way. Although if your kids are into it, you may find they learn more than they do at school.
If you haven’t received any resources or learning plans from your kid’s school for the closure period, use these resources as inspiration to make one yourself.
I will be adding to this list over time, so do check back occasionally for updates.
General resources:
Khan Academy – Free online courses, lessons and practice.
BBC Bitesize – Want to access daily lessons and revision tools as well as support and advice from other students? BBC Bitesize has your child covered whether they’re in primary school, secondary school, or aged 16+.
IXL – Offers personalised learning in maths and English while covering hundreds of different skills for children in reception up to those in year 13.
Math resources:
Wuzzit Trouble – for number sense, problem solving and creative and critical thinking skills
Math Snacks – collection of entertaining math games
Times Tables Rock Stars – In either paper form or online, Times Tables Rock Stars is a carefully sequenced programme of daily times tables practice.
Reading and writing apps:
Marvel Hero Tales – an educational app that embeds vocabulary and grammar practice into a game. You can find it both in the Apple Store and the Play Store.
Middle School Confidential – graphic novels written by anti-bullying activist Annie Fox. This story is about a group of friends who help bolster one another’s self-esteem in the face of teasing, bullying, or mere self-doubt
Reading Rewards – a reading tracking app in which kids log their reading time to earn incentive points toward rewards, which parents or teachers can determine.
Global Digital Library – Digital storybooks and other reading materials easily accessible from mobile phones or computers.
Science:
Discovery Education: Lessons about viruses and outbreaks for different grade levels.
NASA Kids’ Club: They have made their entire collection of images, sounds and video available and publicly searchable online: 140,000 photos and other resources available for you to see.
Creative time:
DIY.org – Creative Challenges – an educational app and learning community where kids can access a collection of project ideas and how-to videos.
Wizard School– combines videos, drawing, and interactive challenges to get kids engaging with material that interests them.
Lily – Playful Music Creation – a digital music composition app for iOS and Android.
Peak is the slickest brain-training app available, with a polished collection of mini-games covering subjects including memory, language, mental agility and… what was it again? Oh yes: attention.
There are more than 30 to play in total, with enough variety to stop your daily session from becoming a chore. The free app has plenty to do, but a £3.99 monthly subscription lets you play all the games as often as you like, personalises your daily “workouts” and gives you more stats.
Elevate is a strong rival to Peak: it has similarly clear visuals and simple, accessible mini-games to test your wits against. There are more than 30 here testing memory, focus, maths, comprehension and other mental skills.
The app is keen to get you logging in regularly, tracking your “streaks” on its calendar, and tweaking the difficulty levels as you become more adept. Here too, a Pro subscription (for £5.99 a month) unlocks more games, and lets you play them as often as you like.
The veteran of the bunch, and the service that set many of the features that are now familiar from its rivals. Here, a selection of mini-games are mixed and matched into a daily programme, with the obligatory stat-tracking to show your improvement over time.
As with those rivals, a monthly subscription – £8.99 in this case – unlocks more games and features. On mobile, Lumosity is more expensive, but the fact that you can use its website from your computer too may appeal.
Fit Brains Trainer Android / iOS (Free + in-app purchases)
Fit Brains Trainer
Another fresh, modern take on brain training for mobile devices, Fit Brains Trainer has more than 35 games, grouped into different workout sessions to keep your daily practice from feeling stale, whether you’re testing your memory, concentration, language or other skills.
One interesting addition here is games based on your “emotional intelligence” (EQ) – an aspect that’s more to the fore than with rivals. Like Lumosity, you can also log in to the website from a computer to carry on playing. A £7.99 monthly subscription unlocks the full features.
Cognito is the most game-like of the five apps in this roundup, wrapping a story of sorts – secret agents and global spying missions – around its brain-training tests. It still has all the serious features of the genre though: memory, logic and word mini-games, and stats tracking how your skills improve over time.
It also promises to pull in data like steps and sleep from Apple’s Health app, to show you how exercise and shut-eye affect your mental agility. As with its rivals, you can play for free every day, but a subscription – £5.99 a month – beefs up the data and gives you unlimited access to the games.
A sustainable company is one that focuses on effectively managing a number of concerns, including financial, environmental and social concerns. Most business owners fail to properly understand what it means to build a business that is sustainable and has the potential to stand the test of time.
The fact is that any business owner that wants to ensure that their venture has the potential to grow and develop into a highly profitable and prosperous company needs to take sustainability seriously. When it comes to shaping a more sustainable future for your business, it is not necessarily an easy task; however, there is plenty of help available to make the process somewhat easier.
Keen to learn more about how you can shape your business to be stronger and more sustainable, allowing it to stand the test of time? Have a read of the tips and advice below!
Build your business on beliefs
Core beliefs are a key aspect of any business and are a crucial element of value creation. For example, say you run a marketing company that is built on the premise of offering ‘marketing with love,’ which at a deeper level means providing a marketing service that is ethical and kind; these are the core aspects of your business. Therefore, you need to ensure you stick to them and grow your business around them. You can’t simply change direction, because otherwise everything that your business stands for will be called into question, which will impact your ability to sustain your success.
Create a value proposition
It is not that the services you offer aren’t incredible or that your product is totally unique, but a value proposition is about determining your go-to strategy for marketing what you have to offer. You need to select a strategy that allows you to drive value and address the clients’ problems. Don’t lose sight of the fact that your entire business is built to meet a need that your customers have. In order to be successful in doing so, you need to get your marketing approach just right, including your social media strategy, your content creation, and your SEO. If you’re not highly skilled in these areas, don’t be afraid to source specialists such as link building services or social media specialists. To give your business the best chance of success, you need to put the right support in place.
Growth and comfort don’t go hand in hand
Growing your business means stepping outside of your comfort zone. If you want to give your company the best chance of success, you need to be willing to step outside of where you feel comfortable and take risks that have the potential to be successful. Things are constantly changing, and you need to be able to adapt to these changes; otherwise, your business is sure to fail.
To create a business that is stronger and has the potential to be more sustainable, take note of the tips above, and utilize them within your business strategy.
In this article, I will be showing you how to setup a 1:1 diet consultant website, online store and booking system for your One2One (1:1) diet consulting business.
Note: I am in no way affiliated with One2One, Cambridge Nutritional Food or any other subsidiary.
I manage another website called Foodbooking which provides online ordering for restaurants and takeaways etc and that site has started to get a lot of signups from One2One (1:1) diet consultants trying to use it to take online orders for the 1:1 diet products they are reselling.
The problem is that a restaurant ordering system is not at all suitable for this purpose since it is not an online store for selling products, it is a food ordering system, so orders are meant to be accepted in real-time for collection and delivery.
This has prompted me to create this article showing you how you can setup your 1:1 diet consultant website using WIX + ECWID, which is a far more appropriate solution, and yes you can even get all this for FREE.
WIX
With the Wix website builder, you can use all the following features on the free plan.
Website Builder
Online Store
Subscriptions
Booking System
Customer Management
Member Badge system
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Here is a quick demo site I have put together to show how it works.
Demo site for 1:1 consultant
Wix has become pretty well known over the last few years, in part due to their TV marketing and youtube campaigns, which I am sure you have seen, starring the likes of Heidi Klum, Jason Statham and Gal Gadot. Wix is one of the biggest players in the website builder competition and hosts a massive 160 million websites.
Wix offers an excellent drag-and-drop site builder to create small, basic websites so is perfect for a 1:1 diet consultant website. There are 100s of free templates available. Wix provides its own web hosting as well as domain names (free and paid). The App Market makes it easy to add extra functionality such as photo galleries or eCommerce.
So what is the catch with the FREE site? Here are the limitations
You will have the wix ad banner across the top of your site
You cannot take online payments
You cannot use all the addons
To remove these limitations you will need to upgrade.
The features on the free plan are adequate for most startups who have ZERO budget and just need a very simple website. However, the biggest limitation for you here might be the inability to take online orders, which does make the online store kinda useless, unless you only want it for showing products and will take payments manually.
The good news is that If you also need an online store with online payments and cannot afford to pay for it, there is a free solution to this too, called ECWID. Scroll down for more details.
Wix Pricing
£0
Free Create a free website with Wix ads.
£3
Connect Domain Connect your own domain with your Wix site. Your site will still show Wix ads. (Plan is not available in all countries).
£6
Combo Ideal for smaller professional websites. No ads and plenty of storage.
£8.50
Unlimited The right plan if you need a lot of web space (up to 10 GB included).
£13
Business & eCommerce Best plan to create an online store or use premium apps like Wix Bookings or Wix Hotels. Higher plans (VIP & Unlimited) available too.
Here is a really easy to follow video tutorial to help you setup your 1:1 diet website using wix.
Take Online Bookings
Do you want to take bookings on your 1:1 diet consultant website? no problem, this is also easy using the wix bookings addon.
When you set up your site using the ADI, you can specify that you want a booking system, and this functionality will be added for you automatically, and you then simply need to set up the services you want to take bookings for.
Here is a handy video tutorial to show you how its done, you can skip past the addon installation step if you already added this using the ADI.
Creating a free store with ECWID
So you have your new 1:1 diet consultant website setup in Wix, but now you want to take online orders for free.
First signup for a free ECWID account here to set up your store and add your products. The free plan is limited to 10 products, if you want more than 10 products then you will need to upgrade.
You can then add your Ecwid store to your Wix website in just a few easy steps with the help of the Ecwid app. Just add the Ecwid app to your Wix site and then connect your store.
Adding the Ecwid app
Log in to your Wix account.
Select the site you would like to add a store to.
Open Ecwid App. Otherwise you can find it manually as described below.
Click Edit site.
Click Add Apps:
Type “Ecwid” in the search bar, click on Online Store by Ecwid:
Click +Add to Site → +Add App:
Once you add the app, it will show sample products until you connect to your store. Connect your Ecwid store to sell your products on your website. See below how.
On the same page in your Wix Editor, double-click the blue Double-click me button:
If you do not have an Ecwid store yet, fill in the fields of the registration form, click Create Account and follow the sign up instructions:
Grant the app permissions by clicking Accept:
That’s it! Your store is now connected to your Wix website:
Save the changes and publish your site.
Connecting your existing store to your Wix site
If you have an Ecwid account already, you can connect it to your Wix site to sell from there.
On the same page in your Wix Editor where you added the Ecwid app, double-click the blue Double-click me button.
In the popup, click Connect Account:
In the pop-up, log in to your Ecwid account. See the detailed instructions in our article about logging in.
Grant the app permission to access your store data by clicking Accept.
That’s it! Your store is now connected to your Wix website:
Common questions I get asked by clients include:- “why does my website say not secure”, “do I need SSL”, “why do I need SSL, I don’t sell anything on my website” and “what is the difference between paid SSL and free SSL”, so I will attempt to answer those questions here as simply as possible.
In an age where internet security is more important than ever, it’s vital to let people know that your site is safe to use. A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate is a type of website encryption key that encrypts data between the visitor’s browser and the server.
Fortunately and also confusingly, there are many different SSL options you can use. Let’s Encrypt is a free and open-source Certificate Authority (CA) that offers SSL certificates to anyone who has a domain name. Paid SSLs offer the same base service, but provide your website with several additional features.
In this article, I will explain the differences between Lets Encrypt vs Paid SSL Certificates, and help you decide which may be most suitable for your website. Let’s start with the basics!
Why Are SSL Certificates Important?
SSL certificates are complex, but in a nutshell, what they do is encrypt your visitors’ connection to your site. This helps to protect both your site and customers from data breaches. SSL certificates act as the backbone of a more secure internet and protect the sensitive information we all send over the web.
Without an SSL certificate, any data exchanged between a user and a website is sent in plain readable text, so can be viewed by anyone who is able to snoop in on the connection, such as on insecure or public wifi networks.
You can easily spot SSL-secured websites, as their URLs begin with HTTPS (rather than the old standard, HTTP). In some browsers, you may also see an icon in the browser bar that lets you know the site you’re visiting is secure. Google’s icon looks like a small padlock.
Unfortunately, a lot of people (including website designers and hosting providers) believe that an SSL certificate makes your website secure and protects your website from hackers, which is simply not true.
If your website has a vulnerability that makes it insecure and hackable, then an SSL certificate will do nothing to stop this. In order to make sure your site is secure you need to keep it updated and make sure it is being properly managed especially if you are running WordPress or similar.
Naturally, an improvement to your site’s security is always a good thing. However, securing your site with an SSL certificate can also result in a few particular benefits:
Improved Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and rankings: Google considers sites that have a SSL certificate to be more trustworthy, and tends to rank them higher on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Improved visitor trust: Adding an SSL certificate also improves your users’ level of trust, since it proves that your site is actually owned by you or your business.
SSL certificates have recently become almost essential. In an attempt to improve the overall level of security on the web, Google now marks sites without HTTPS connections as unsecured. Most users won’t make payments on a site with these kinds of warnings, so not implementing SSL could mean lost sales (as well as a reduction in traffic for any site).
Let’s Encrypt vs Paid SSLs: What’s the Difference? (3 Key Categories)
There are several options available when selecting a SSL certificate, and its important to find the right choice for your site. This means selecting a Certificate Authority (CA) – aka the business you’ll buy your certificate from.
Let’s Encrypt is one of the most popular options on the market, as it provides SSL certificates completely free of charge:
On the other hand, there are also plenty of paid SSL options. While you may wonder why you’d pay for a certificate you could get for free, the difference in price results from a number of key distinctions between free and paid SSL services. Let’s look at a few of the most important criteria.
1. Validation Levels
There are actually several different types of SSL certificates, which vary based on the level of validation they provide. The three main options are Domain Validation (DV), Organization Validation (OV) and Extended Validation (EV) certificates. Each offers a higher level of security than the last, and requires a more comprehensive vetting process.
Currently, Let’s Encrypt only offers DV certificates. While this may be enough for smaller and more personal sites, larger business and e-commerce sites often require a higher level of validation. Sites that are secured with OV and EV certificates are also more often displayed as secure in browsers, which as we mentioned is vital for improving visitor confidence in your site.
That’s not to say Let’s Encrypt is a poor option. In fact, it’s backed by some of the world’s largest companies – including Facebook, Mozilla, and Google. At the same time, you’ll need to look elsewhere if you want an OV or EV certificate.
2. Support and Warranty
Let’s Encrypt and paid SSL options offer varying levels of support and warranty as a part of their plans, alongside the certificate itself. Due to its small team, Let’s Encrypt is unable to provide direct support to users facing technical issues. It does offer a community support forum, however, so users can assist one another.
Paid SSLs will also typically provide some kind of direct technical support, and offer troubleshooting help if something goes wrong. In addition, these plans should come with a warranty – insurance for your certificate against fraudulent transactions and other potential issues.
It’s also important to note that SSL certificates come with a limited lifespan. Let’s Encrypt certificates have a maximum lifetime of 90 days, although the renewal process is 100% automated – meaning that your site shouldn’t be left unprotected, although sometimes the hosts automated renewal doesn’t work, so you should make sure you have notifications enabled to tell you if something fails. Paid SSLs have a longer lifespan, usually ranging from one to three years, and renewals may be either automatic or manual (depending on your provider).
3. Price
It’s hard to compete with a non-existent price tag. Let’s Encrypt is able to provide SSL certificates for free through its use of automation. However, a lower price tag means the absence of certain features and support. Check with your hosting provider for SSL options, or you are free to purchase your SSL from anywhere as long as you are willing to perform the manual installation and setup.
Especially if you use your site for business or e-commerce, this is one investment that’s likely to be well worth the upfront cost.
Which Type of SSL Certificate Should You Choose for Your Site?
Ultimately, your decision will come down to the individual needs of your site, as well as your budget. If the site you are looking to secure with an SSL certificate is a part of your eCommerce business, it’s worth looking into paid options with higher levels of validation. The extra layer of security will reassure potential customers, benefit your search engine rankings, and protect sensitive user and customer data.
On the other hand, Let’s Encrypt is a nice option for blogs or simple websites without eCommerce or which do not store personal data and that simply need to get the lock in the browser to say they are secure, Once your site starts to grow or you implement eCommerce,, you can always upgrade to a better option.
At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself “who actually checks the ssl certificates on websites they visit”. The answer to this is barely anyone. People who are more internet savvy may refuse to purchase goods from a website that displays the “insecure” message in the browser.
The average person doesn’t understand what an SSL certificate is and certainly won’t be clicking on it and checking what type of certificate it is, what level of validity it has and where it was purchased from.
Conclusion
With so many security risks out there, it’s important to make sure that your site is properly secured. SSL certificates do just that. They also reassure your visitors that their connection to your site can be trusted, and can even improve your SEO.
Let’s Encrypt and paid SSL certificates both enable you to add a secure connection to your site. However, they offer differing levels of validation and support. Most business and e-commerce websites will be better off opting for a paid SSL certificate, whereas smaller sites may find Let’s Encrypt to be sufficient.
Need Help?
I do offer SSL registration, renewal, installation, and support. So feel free to get in touch if you need help with any of these things.
So it is that time again for me to praise the companies that provided great customer service over the last year and to name & shame those should be embarrassed at the abysmal excuse for customer service they have provided.
In the list this year we have.
Guru Cloud Hosting
Anker
People Per Hour
Zen Internet
Gradwell
Bitdefender
Europe Registry
Google
Trustpilot
THE GOOD
These are the companies who have impressed me the most and provided exceptional customer service, above and beyond what I would expect. I really wish there were more like this.
I transferred my web hosting to Guru in Feb 2019 after spending about 10 months (too long) with Siteground and finally getting fed up with their terrible customer service/support.
IT has now been almost 1 year with GURU and I still do not have a single complaint to make about them, which coming from me is quite a testament to how good they are. Unlike many hosting providers, they do not pass the buck at every opportunity (GoDaddy and SiteGround should learn this), they actually make every effort to help you and solve problems for you.
Also unlike most other hosts I have used, the support team are not jobsworths and do not give out incorrect or incompetent advice, at least not to date. Every support person I have dealt with actually has the requisite technical skills and knowledge and knows what they are doing.
Oh and the response times are very good as well, I have not yet had reason to complain that it took too long to get a reply to a support ticket. Sometimes it is annoying when they refuse to help via live chat and insist on opening a ticket. I know they do this for security reasons, but this could be avoided by simply asking for the security question/answer on the account, but that is literally my only qualm.
I have purchased a few Anker products over the last few years and so far I have been very happy with both the quality and customer service.
Back in 2018 I purchased an Anker ergonomic mouse due to developing RSI, but while it is a perfectly good product, sadly my RSI was so bad that it didn’t help. When I commented on this in my Amazon review, they contacted me directly and offered to send me an alternative mouse to see if that would help my RSI, completely free of charge.
I will note that I have since had physiotherapy for my RSI, and using this mouse is significantly better than a regular mouse, which causes me pain within minutes.
Anker Ergonomic mouse
Fast forward to 2019, I started having some random problems with the mouse, it would just randomly freeze and stop moving and one of the thumb buttons stopped working. I contacted Anker support, not really expecting much since I expected it was out of warranty anyway.
Once again Anker offered to send me a replacement mouse, for free, no questions asked. So to date, I have now had 3 ergonomic mice from them and only paid for one of them.
This is well above and beyond the level of customer service you get from most companies, in fact I cannot think of a single other company that gone quite this far, except in a “we just want you to go away” type situation.
I do somewhat suspect that this may be in an effort to ensure they maintain positive reviews on Amazon, but they never asked me to adjust my original review, I chose to do that off my own back, so I am still happy none the less.
The Bad
These are the companies which while not a complete failure, have been disappointing, let me down on multiple occasions and could certainly do better.
Peopleperhour is a popular freelancer website which I have been using for the last year or so to do various freelance work such as IT support, PCI compliance testing, website design etc.
There are a number of issues with PPH, such as the extortionate 20% commission they take from the freelancers and then charge us 20% VAT on the money we are earning rather than charging it to the buyer, which I think is a complete rip-off, but that is another matter for another post.
When it comes to customer service, how good or bad it depends on your issue. For general enquiries and questions, the customer service is not too bad, the issue is when you have a problem with not getting paid, then you suddenly discover that PPH are completely biased toward the buyer.
I have had several instances where I have done work for someone on PPH, and they have decided to rip me off and not to pay me, which unfortunately is very easy as all the buyer needs to do is reject your invoice and it’s game over.
There is an escrow type deposit system, which PPH claims protects the freelancer, where you request a deposit amount, which the buyer must pay in advance when accepting a proposal. But in reality, it is useless and makes no difference whatsoever, as regardless of the deposit, the buyer can still just refuse to pay the invoice and request a refund of the deposit.
If you find yourself in such a situation, even if it is 100% clear that you have done the work, PPH customer service will do nothing to help and will side with the buyer every single time, even though it is the freelancer who pays their salary at the end of the day. We earn all the money, do the work and pay their commissions, but get nothing in return.
You will literally beat your head against a brick wall trying to get PPH support to see common sense or logic, they simply don’t care. Which is very backwards when you think about it logically, as pissing off a freelancer is going to lose them a lot more than pissing off a buyer.
The only response you can get from PPH is to “ask for a higher deposit”, which as mentioned above is completely pointless and only benefits PPH, as they can refuse to refund the deposit to the buyer as well, thus keeping the money for themselves.
PPH need to stop being so greedy, give more rights to the freelancers and treat us with more respect, as without us they would have no business.
I have been a customer of Zen Internet for about 15 years now. At my former company, we used Zen at the office, all staff had a Zen connection at home and I have also had Zen business at home for the last 10 years or so. During this time I have also referred many friends, colleagues and clients to them.
I chose Zen originally due to their massively positive customer feedback and reviews, and I stayed with them due to those reviews being true, i.e. the superior customer service and support and the reliability of the connection.
When Zen started offering mobile services as well, I transferred all our mobile contracts over to them too, expecting the same level of service. But alas this is where everything started to go downhill. it is the common issue where the bigger a company gets, the worse their customer service gets.
I had not needed to contact Zen customer service very often in the past, as we rarely ever had any issues with the broadband at the office or at home, but this changed with the mobile service and I found myself needing to contact them on a regular basis.
The customer service & support from the mobile team was absolutely terrible. Since they were basically just reselling EE, they couldn’t do anything directly, and just act as a man in the middle between you and EE, needing to contact EE customer service about every issue. So as a business service it is pretty pointless.
To cut a long story short, when I originally signed up I told the salesman I intended to use the service for business and personal use and it would be used by my wife and kids too and as such I asked about parental controls and the ability to block content etc. I was advised this was fine and that yes the parental controls Indeed existed and were available.
This advice I later learnt was completely wrong and when I had issues with the lack of security/parental controls I was quite rudely and arrogantly lambasted for giving phones to my kids, even though it was them who said their service was suitable for this. Needless to say that I transferred my mobile services away from Zen after this and I am now with EE directly, which so far has been a lot better service.
SO I certainly cannot recommend Zen Internet mobile for either business or personal use.
Sadly this was only the start of customer services going downhill, it does seem to have been getting gradually worse over the last few years, support has become less helpful, responses have become slower, often requiring emails to be chased for a response.
During a recent support issue, I was quite shocked when they sent me a loan router with absolutely no packaging or protection whatsoever. Turns out this is not a one-off either, as I discovered this is also how they post out brand new routers as well.
This is highly likely to result in damaged routers, which means any issues will automatically be blamed on your line, meaning you will be charged for an engineer call out since he will, of course, find no problem with the line.
Everyone knows how couriers treat parcels these days (especially Hermes) and everyone who posts packages on a regular basis knows that you have to use adequate protection in order to avoid items getting damaged in transit.
This is how ZEN post the routers, ZERO packaging or protecting, just 2mm of cardboard,
A recent issue with their sales dept essentially resulted in me cancelling a new order within 1 week, Zen then tried to blackmail me into a 24 month contract, which has left me very disappointed indeed considering how long I have been a customer, sadly proving once again that customer loyalty means nothing to some companies.
I no longer feel there is any benefit at all in paying more for their business service over a basic residential service and do not believe the customer service/support is any better as a result, but sadly they will not let me downgrade my service without being forced into a 24 month contract.
It is not yet bad enough to make me want to cancel my broadband services as the broadband service itself is still good and reliable and I rarely ever have issues, and I know many other providers have much worse customer service. But it is a real shame they have lost their great customer service USP.
just like Zen above, Gradwell is another provider who used to have really great customer services and was a pleasure to deal with, but this has gone downhill as the company has grown.
Once again I have been a customer of Gradwell for many years through multiple companies. I currently use them for both my business and my wife’s business and a personal VOIP number.
The once stellar customer service team have now become slow and unresponsive, regularly taking days or weeks to reply to tickets and often needing to be chased multiple times to get any response at all and getting through on the phone is equally as difficult.
When you do get a response they are often obtuse and disingenuous and require multiple back and forth (sometimes over several weeks) to get a more helpful response or a solution to the problem.
I used to be happy to recommend Gradwell to people, but I now find myself looking at alternative VOIP providers.
Bitdefender is one of if not the best anti-malware, cybersecurity product on the market. It does a lot more than most other AV products, has better protection and gets better detection scores. The other top spot contender is Kaspersky.
While I do concur that it is a very good product and I would recommend it as a cybersecurity solution for both personal and business use (not the parental controls though, this sucks), the customer service leaves a lot to be desired.
We all know that most level 1 tech support people working for large corporations are just monkey’s giving answers from a knowledge base and very rarely have any actual technical skills or know what they are talking about.
When you are dealing with a security product you somehow expect their support to be better than everyone else right? But no, the tech support/customer service really is quite useless for the most part. Often not understanding how their own product works and giving out completely wrong and bad advice.
Once you have gone through the hopeless level1 support, who will most likely get you to needlessly uninstall and reinstall the software, and eventually get escalated to level2 via a support ticket, expect to wait many weeks for any response.
When you do finally get a response from level2, they will usually just ask you for the same information that you already provided to the level1 tech in the first place, which you will then have to point out they already have, which they can see by simply scrolling down and reading the ticket history.
Don’t expect a speedy response from level, every time you reply, you will be waiting for weeks for a response, often needing to chase them when it seems they forgot about you.
If you are a very self-sufficient technical person, then you probably won’t need to contact support anyway, but if you are the average user, who is not good with IT and tends to contact tech support a lot, I would probably look for an alternative product from a smaller company with better support.
Almost all of the issues which I have needed to contact them about are related to their parental control features, which are completely useless, and I do not recommend using them.
These are the companies I have with who have the absolute worst customer services imaginable, in fact not even worthy to be called customer service.
I have worked with many different domain registrars over the last 20 years, from good to bad, but Europe Registry aka Instra Corporation Pty Ltd) is one of the worst, they are a complete nightmare.
To say their customer service and billing depts are incompetent would be a massive understatement. Dealing with them will leave you tearing hair out and screaming in frustration as they are unable to understand the most simple questions or perform the most simple tasks, requiring everything to be explained 10 different ways and repeated multiple times to multiple people.
I had a ticket open with this company requesting a very simple price update on a number of domains as we were being overcharged. All I wanted was for the price we were being charged to be updated to match the price on their website, simple right?
But this super simple request has dragged on for over 1 year and is still not resolved. IT took dozens upon dozens of emails and the involvement of multiple people, just to get them to understand this simple issue with the price. It then required sending them screenshots of their own website just to show them what their own prices were and demonstrate how they did not match our invoices. Honestly, it would have been easier to explain it to a 5-year-old child.
Another 10 months passed with no further responses or updates, and those very simple changes were still were not made. I chased them up recently and below is the final response I had from them, blankly refusing to update the prices (no discount was ever requested btw) and would thus continue overcharging.
Even if you have to pay more, I would recommend staying far away from Europe Registry and using another registrar for your own sanity.
I have been a Google g suite partner/reseller for many years, and for the most part Google technical support is pretty good, especially when you consider the mammoth size of the company. It is certainly a lot better than Microsoft support.
The issue is with partner support (PPS) and I use the word support here very loosely, as there really isn’t any, the dept seems to be run by fraggles. I cannot think of a single time I have contacted partner support about any issue where it has not been a complete nightmare.
It is completely impossible to reach partner support by phone. They do not have a phone number you can call them on and they absolutely refuse to call you. Even other Google depts, such as tech support cannot contact PPS by phone.
The only way to communicate with PPS is an email support ticket, which usually takes several weeks for them to respond to every email. There have been several occasions where I have had to chase them for months for a response and on some occasions had to resort to contacting an EMEA concierge because PPS simply wouldn’t reply.
When you do get a response, it is very unlikely that the person who responds will have any idea how to deal with your issue, and it will usually need to be escalated to multiple other people until they finally find someone who actually has any idea how anything at Google actually works, which takes weeks at best.
Believe it or not, it actually took me about 6 months just to get some reseller pricing for some specific g suite related addons. Not one single person in PPS knew what their own pricing was. I lost count the number of different people that got involved in the ticket and the number of times I had to re-explain what I wanted.
So if you have an urgent issue that only PPS can deal with, then you are literally screwed as the only thing you can do is open a ticket and hope that someone responds quickly, if at all.
Thankfully as a g suite end user / direct customer, you will never have to deal with partner support.
Everyone knows who Trustpilot are, and many know what a complete scam the site is, but not everyone has had the pleasure of dealing with their customer service team (aka compliance team).
If you are not aware of the nefarious and unethical way that Trustpilot runs their business and treats their users, then please read my Trustpilot – Can they be trusted article.
Since I regularly post reviews (good and bad), I sadly also have to regularly deal with Trustpilot compliance team whenever a legitimate review gets flagged for removal. Which is always a complete waste of time and an exercise in hair pullng, as the compliance team are dumber than a bag of marbles and always side with the paying advertiser no matter what evidence you provide to back up your review.
The only reason I even bothered to post reviews on Trustpilot at all is simply that it is so widely used and blindly trusted and some companies do not bother to monitor it or just don’t care because they get so many bad reviews it is too much effort, so your review stays intact.
I also post reviews on sitejabber.com which so far seems far more legit and to date, none of my reviews have been deleted, so I would recommend Sitejabber over Trustpilot any day. Of course I don’t know how they deal with malicious/fake reviews yet either.
On several occasions when I have posted a negative review about a company, the owner or representative of said company has retaliated by then posting false and malicious lies about me. Of course, getting these removed by the compliance team sheeple is nigh on impossible unless I am willing to sell my morals and sign up to Trustpilot as a paying business customer.
Trustpilot is likely going to re-appear on this list every single year as I cannot see their unethical practices changing any time soon. If you currently use Trustpilot, I suggest also posting your review son Sitejabber too.
It is probably no surprise to see Microsoft on this list, being one of the largest companies in the worst, they also have some of the worst customer services as well.
Every so often I will get a Windows issue that I cannot fix or has taken up too much of my time trying to fix and I will resort to contacting Microsoft support, as on the rare occasion you do find someone who actually knows what they are doing. Plus I used to have a support contract, so I could get escalated to level 2 after dealing with the level 1 muppets.
The most frequent issues I have had is with their family safety, which stops working on a regular basis on all of my kids machines and has been doing so since it was first introduced over 10 years ago. Their usual answer is always to delete all my kids accounts and start again.
In almost all cases the Microsoft level 1 support team have no idea what they are doing and will simply Google (or Bing) whatever issue you have contacted them about and just regurgitate that information or simply send you the link. 99.9% of the time I already tried everything they tell me to do since I already Googled it myself, or they tell me to do something which is complete nonsense and unrelated to my problem or even doesn’t apply to Windows 10.
If you are a non-technical person and thus will blindly follow the advice of MS tech support, they are very likely to make your problem worse or create new problems for you or make your entire system insecure.
They will also blatantly lie to you or give you ridiculous advice, especially the ones in India.
They will tell you they have escalated an issue to level 2, when they have done nothing of the sort and next time you contact them there will be no record of that conversation.
They will tell you that they are opening a case you and that someone will be in touch. You will receive an automated email with your ticket/case information, but nobody will ever contact you or respond to your emails if you reply to the ticket.
They will promise to call you back, but will never do so.
Live chat support will tell you to reboot your router or your PC, knowing full well it will end the live chat. Which is probably just a tactic to get rid of you because they do not know what else to do.
They will give you advice or take actions that leave your system in an insecure or unstable state.
For example, on one occasion when I allowed a tech to remote desktop into my machine, he enabled the default administrator account (with any password), disabled all my Microsoft services, including my firewall and my anti-virus, and told me the problem was solved, and left my machine in this state, telling me everything would be fine.
I can only imagine how many unsuspecting customers this so call Microsoft tech has “helped” by turning off all security and putting their entire system at risk, scary stuff.
I have been using QuickBooks for my billing & accounting for the last year or so, and the advice given by Quickbooks support is far too often completely wrong to the point of being incompetent and potentially damaging to your business, which is why I am listing them here.
My wife is a bookkeeper and manages numerous Quickbooks accounts for her clients and also has regular issues with the incompetent advice given by Quickbooks support and says her bookkeeping forums are full of similar complaints.
The primary issue is that the live chat support team often do not know how their own software works, which is the result of the bad advice. So you you need to be competent enough yourself with how such systems work to know when you are being given wrong/bad advice, otherwise, you have no choice but to accept what they are telling you.
Here is just one recent example.
I have all my recurring invoices setup to be paid by direct debit via Go Cardless. So the invoices are automatically generated by QuickBooks each month, and the request for payment is sent off to Cardless. When the direct debit is collected, GoCardless sends a notification back to QuickBooks, and the invoice is marked as paid.
I recently noticed that none of my invoices had been paid for an entire month, and upon further investigation, found that the GoCardless connection had been paused for some reason. I did not receive any notifications to tell me there was a problem.
When I contacted QuickBooks support they told me that none of this had anything to do with them. They advised me that invoices are generated by GoCardless and not QuickBooks, that GoCardless controls the connection and the integration and that they must have paused it and that any notifications should come from them.
They even advised me that they will simply mark all invoices as paid even if no payment is received, which left me rather horrified.
I knew none of this was true of course, but I contacted GoCardless anyway for confirmation. As expected GoCardless confirmed that their system does not and cannot generate invoices since it is just a payment gateway and not a billing system, which is exactly what I had told Quickbooks support.
They also confirmed that they do not control the integration and that is also handled by Quickbooks, nor do they have any way to pause a connection, even if they wanted to.
I then contacted QuickBooks support once again, armed with my responses from GoCardless to backup what I had already told them. This time however I spoke to someone on the phone, who was more competent on how their systems worked, and she confirmed that everything I had been told previously was completely wrong and misleading.
The only part that was confirmed to be true, is the fact that they will mark the invoices as paid, even if no payment is received, which is very worrying indeed. I have yet to see this happen, as all my invoices were simply showing as overdue, but this could certainly screw up your accounting as well as cost you a lot of money if you think your invoices have been paid, when they haven’t.
I have recently been using a new CRM system called Perfex CRM, and will likely be moving all my billing into this system and away from Quickbooks.
I have had this “cURL error 60: SSL certificate problem: unable to get local issuer certificate” error occur a few times now on my Windows server with my WHMCS installations. It primarily has affected payment gateways which are using curl to communicate, which in my case was Go Cardless.
Not being a PHP developer, I always tend to forget the cause of the problem when it crops up, so hopefully, this will serve as a reminder to myself as well 🙂
The reason for this error is that curl needs a certificate authority cert in order to communicate over https, and obviously neither php nor curl itself includes this by default and curl doesn’t use the certs already installed on the server for whatever reason.
As a result of this, the error also occurs every time I switch PHP to a different php version or when I install latest php version, thus once again breaking apps/sites which were previously fixed. So you need to apply this solution to every php version you have installed, just in case.
How to fix
To resolve the error is actually easy, you simply need to define your CURL certificate authority information path in your php.ini
Then, in your php.ini file, scroll down to the [curl] section.
You should see the CURL_CAINFO option already there, but commented out. Uncomment and set the path to the cacert.pem file. You should have a line like this:
[curl]
; A default value for the CURLOPT_CAINFO option. This is required to be an
; absolute path.
curl.cainfo = "C:\PHP\cacert.pem"
Save and close your php.ini.
You may need to restart your webserver if the changes do not take, or on windows, restart application pool, and try your request again.
If you do not set the right path to the pem file, you will get a CURL 77 error.
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