Woodsboro Town website
comes full circle… sort of…

(5/21) Woodsboro Town website comes full circle… sort of…

Frequent users of the Woodsboro Town website might have noticed the website down more frequently in the past few years, while others might have raised eyebrows at perceived lack of response by Town officials to e-mails. The root cause for both issues lay in the Town’s website host provider, Ipower.

Back in the late 1990s, Ipower, a Boston-based company, was the ‘go-to’ player for website hosting packages. Offering low rates, a plethora of great website design tools, and top quality technical support based in Phoenix, Arizona, influenced many, including Michael Hillman, the editor of this paper, to choose them as their website and e-mail host provider, and to recommend others do likewise.

In 2009, then-commissioners Scott Brakebiil and Bill Rittlemeyer requested Hillman, who had just finished redesigning the Gettysburg Town website, to redesign Woodsboro’s. In process, the website was moved over to Ipower to save money, which is where it has stayed for the past 15 years.

Unfortunately for Ipower, the competition in the webhosting world heated up in the ensuing years, making the business less and less profitable. To make up for the loss of profit, Ipower began to cut cost … bear with me … I’ll get to the dropped e-mails in a second…

First to go was the concierge centered customer support. A few years later, technical support was off shored, &c, &c. In March of this year, any pretense of providing technical support was abandoned. All support is now done through ‘chat’.

As technical support and reliability went down the drain, Ipower was sold and resold until it became nothing more than a ready place for spammers to set up a quick website to spam from. Unfortunately for Ipower’s other customers, like the Town of Woodsboro, they found themselves painted with the same brush: spammers.

As Ipower ramped up its open embrace of spammers, sites like Google, MSN, Verizon, &c began to block e-mails coming from Ipower hosted sites. So while Burgess Barnes could get a resident’s e-mail, if they used a hosting provider that blocked Ipower, he was unable to respond—at least with his Town e-mail account.

The downward spiral for the Town was finally arrested thanks to Alan Rugh, of Firestride Media in Walkersville.

In early April, Alan, who performed the last redesign of the Town’s website, noted that the website was down. Unable to get a response from the now non-existent Ipower technical support staff, Alan approached Commissioner Dana Crum about taking control of the website—again—and transferring it back under his control, which Crum authorized. Within days, the website was up and running, and the email issues resolved.

At the May Town meeting, the Town Council formally approved the transfer of the website to Rugh’s Firestride Media.

During this time, the Woodsboro-Walkersville News-Journal website, which was also hosted on Ipower, was suffering the same issues, and independent of the Town, also approached Alan about taking control of our site away from Ipower and moving it to Firestride. By the time you read this article, the deed will have been done and hopefully we’ll be able to e-mail newly elected commissioner Bill Rittlemeyer to remind him that it all started with him!

Now, when something goes wrong, the fix is only a few miles down the road.