Well the Gorilla has found me out! Now I know what FREE really means.

4AM CST It appears that I've violated some of the small print over at Microsoft Dead-Office. They've pulled my nascent website down. I get an error message in both FireFox and IE7. What's really funny is that Google managed to archive it on the 16th and the page works better on their server than it did on Microsoft's! Working better I mean that you can activate the buttons and links in FireFox 2.0 whereas before when it was live, you had to use Internet Exploder. Its really annoying to have to use their web browser to look at my website. I guess that's what happens when its FREE.

The other thing I find that's funny is that the Dead Office button at the bottom of the page when you click on it pops open a certificate warning window. That might be purely because the certificate Microsoft put on it is only recognized by Microsoft or it might mean its for a different site since its cached on Google. In any case it didn't crash Firefox when I pushed it like it did on Microsoft's served pages.

Well in any case they haven't released the domain name yet. Its not like they can't find me! (Maybe they have Google blocked on their corporate network!) I would like to register it perhaps on another provider, perhaps a service a little friendlier to Linux and a little less friendly with dotNet, ASP and all that proprietary nonstandard Web technology.

I asked them politely to turn it back on. I even said Please.

5:30AM CST UPDATE!!!!!!

Its back on. BUT the live Office button NOW works without crashing my browser. hmmm. Maybe they're reading my blogs. A guy could get paranoid. I also got the certificate page. That was funny getting a unknown certificate warning from the browser from a Microsoft website.

Well what threw me off was that the network monitor page they maintain over there indicated that everything was fine. Well we know how reliable those messages are.

One little bit of information I picked up was that the servers and the provider is operating in Australia. Long haul even from Washington state.

All of the pages I created on the website were tagged as aspx pages, Active server Web form pages. Considering how little text I added to the pages. My "website" probably resides in a couple of clusters on a hard drive. Might have been archived in cold storage!

In any case it brings up an interesting issue. Do you really want to have your website hosted by the largest Gorilla on the planet when he insists on using what amounts to his toys? When he gets made at you and decides to go home, he'll take the toys with him. Do you want your business dependent on a corporate entity that has to depend on mass marketing and volume sales to reach and serve his entire market? How big a small business do you have to be to get the big Gorilla's personal attention to fix something broken especially when its FREE?