One has to wonder about this mans core business aptitude. We have sent over 6 emails including the corrupt backup file they pawned off on us only to have ALL of them bounce back! The first two I excused, but then when they sent me a second email address and them bounced back too I was somewhat concerned. I guess the icing on the cake would have to be the email they sent me with instructions to "reply" as a means of getting them an email, only to have that bounce back also! LOL

How in the heck does this guy run a respectable IT company? His companies email system isn't capable of receiving incoming emails! LOL, I guess that's one way to cut down on complaints!

Lets talk about this forums wonderful spell check facilities while we are at it. At one time it worked great, now days you have to click the spell check button 10 times to catch any mis-spelled words, not to mention sometimes you have to scroll up or down a whole page just to see the list of suggestions! LOL

I'd send an email, but you know it would just bounce back. Apparently ole' Rajiv Khaneja was on vacation last week, so naturally his systems were also on vacation with him. LOL

No,

If Sparklit and Stellar Enterprise are unable to come to terms before the end of the month the forum will take on a banner advertisement at the top of the page rather than our company logo.

In addition, custom avatars would cease to work. Also it may result in our swear words being replaced with ***** and there would no longer be any more uploading photos, however inserting photos via a link would still be supported.

I would still remain in control of the forum, all post would remain, private forums would remain, and basically the show would still go on.

The only people who stand to lose is Sparklit. They would lose cash flow stream, although thanks to our friends who keep hitting this site up with the sole intention of driving up our billable impressions Sparklits advertisers would be footing the bill for such abusive impressions, rather than Stellar Enterprise.

I am not sure how much money companies such as this one gets paid by advertisers, however I was for the most part a somewhat steady stream of cash for them since 2006. That's all about to change however, and honestly if they are not going to provide a backup of all our quality post and information, along with make some sort of concessions for the abuse that is most certainly going on with regards to malicious impressions, then why not let some advertiser foot the bill?

We are nearing 1 million total hits, and I think that might just be for the past few years, although I could be wrong about that. It could be since the start of the forum, but I dont recall.

I think Sparklit would have a much easier time hounding their advertisers for these malicious impressions than they will this company. After all the advertisers have absolutely no idea the abuse that's going on with regards to people being pissed off and just trying to drive up our cost with programs that hit the site. It's sort of like a Denial of service attack, but set low enough as to not be too brazen.

Then again the idea of 5 or so members that actually visit and post to this site generating 70,000 impressions in a month is somewhat rediculous. Thats over 2300 visits per day. If you check the stats box towards the bottom of the page the little ticker usually says anywhere from 280-360 total visits per day. Not only that it also says that the most visitors to ever visit this site at one time totals like 4 users and 5 guest back in 2009. If we got 70,000 visits in one month there would be no way possible for that statistic to be true. To even get 300 visits per day would mean that at any given time there would be at least 16 visitors on at one time.

Then we have the stats that are kept by our hosting company (GoDaddy) which should be almost an exact match to the hits on this site, since the banner at the top of this page draws from GoDaddy every time each pages loads. Total request for that file (banner) is some 60,000 hits LESS than what I am being billed. Sparklit claims GoDaddys metrics are incorrect, but why would GoDaddy do that?

It's clear to see the site is under attack, 24/7. Sparklit does not want to do anything about it, plus they cant even seem to recieve emails without them bouncing back to me. So it's obvious they feel they can make more money from this abuse off advertisers who dont know any better than from THIS COMPANY (Stellar Enterprise), who monitors the traffic and knows better.

Just imagine that PowerStroker! Advertisers who pay for web advertisements are paying money to companies for absolutely nothing. It may also explain why some websites have like a million users and what appears to be major traffic, when in reality its over-inflated. Unlike other sites I do not allow un-confirmed email address accounts to be created. I delete over 100 user accounts every year or so because they are spoof accounts where as a fake email address is entered that does not exist. Several times a month I have to delete and ban them annoying advertiser bots that crawl the internet and sell all kinds of strange stuff.

Even though I have spent years writing about this, it seems that forum hosting companies would rather just collect billable impressions from advertisers who dont know any better, than make an honest living and collecting the fair amount from the forum owner.

Do the math PowerStroker... You will find that what I am saying is true.

Additionally, since the backup of the forum was part of the last deal, and Sparklit was paid in full, they are legally obligated to supply me with a backup that contains all post and users. Eventually they will have to pony up the data or face a bitch slapping. Once that happens, I could easily have that data merged into a new forum software design and host it on the godaddy end. In the mean time part of the agreement states that this site will continue to run, with Advertisements and some minor loss of features, at no cost to me.  Rajiv Khaneja and his company Sparklit will then collect from advertisers royalties for the false impressions that Stellar Enterprise has refused to pay for.

Do you see whats happening here? I will update the "Might be firing Sparklit" thread with the conversations I have had with Sparklit, along with email proof that the 6 emails I sent them with the corrupt data backup of this site were returned undeliverable. The link to that thread can be seen here-

http://autotrend.activeboard.com/forum.spark?aBID=91042&p=3&topicID=39210897

-- Edited by SELLC on Sunday 25th of September 2011 09:34:17 PM

Here is a little story I posted back around this time last year on "The Admin Zone", a feminist site with a jerk for a moderator.

10-10-2010 

As some of you may know already I am disgusted with the practices of many forum hosting companies. While its not a big deal to pay a small amount of money each month for hosting fees, its entirely another matter if you are being charged per impression. Many popular turn key web forum hosting companies charge each time your web forum is visited. Some refer to them as Hits while others call them Visits, some even call them Impressions. Make no mistake they are all one in the same and cost you money.

 

Typically the software to run a web forum is what many folks are paying for. Hosting the software is generally inexpensive and the hosting service is offered by a great many Registrars. Typically a registrar sells such services as domain name registrations, hosting plans, advertisement plans, and all different kinds of other things that your more advanced users know is a rip off. However given the amount of money it cost for a static IP address, the server hardware and server software it can be cost effective to just pay someone to host your data providing they have a reliable up time and a competitive price. This can also save you a lot of time on the back end, so that you can focus on whatever it is you do.

 

I have found some companies to be better than others, yet what I have been receiving the most complaints on are forum hosting companies. I have been investigating a forum that pays a forum hosting company per-impression and has been for the past 4 years. At first the forum started out with a relatively low amount of views per month. While this forum is by all standards a VERY SMALL forum, its very interesting to see how these companies can get greedy. I am going to show you a break down on the amount of hits or impressions of a real life web forum.

 

January 2009: 3,537

February 2009: 2,404

March 2009: 6,906

April 2009: 12,113

May 2009: 5,214

June 2009: 2,692

July 2009: 4,084

August 2009: 5,788

September 2009: 5,858

October 2009: 5,902

November 2009: 6,300

December 2009: 5,318

January 2010: 6,199

February 2010: 9,010

March 2010: 10,555

April 2010: 11,235

May 2010: 11,838

June 2010: 17,193

July 2010: 32,350

August 2010: 28,240

September 2010: 22,018

October 2010: 22,479

 

Keep in mind what you are looking at is the amount of impressions of a real life, active forum that is in operation at this very moment. The number that is next to the date is the amount of hits, views or Impressions for that month. Notice how the forum has had relatively little activity since January 2009. Now take a look at July 2010 where as there were 32,350 impressions for that month, with nearly 20,000 impressions the following months. What we can see here is pure GREED. The forum that has generated these numbers has less than 250 members and also less than 10,000 posts TOTAL since it opened in 2006. The most users ever online were 5 members and 4 guests on March of 2009, so it is clear to see the site can in no way be doing these numbers without being artificially inflated. I have received word that the owner of the site will often times see upwards of 100 guest show up all at one time, yet NONE of the forums will show any current views, as if 100 people are just visiting the site just to see the sites main forum list, without ever clicking thru to an actual forum.

 

I think its quite clear to see that many forum hosting companies are crooked, and in my opinion have software that hits these forums in an effort to raise the amount of billable impressions. Now this forum we are looking at has been set up in an effort to bring light to how many people lose their forums to large companies. What you are seeing is PROOF that many forum owners get tricked into paying for impressions that are really just abusive. No one but the company that is hosting the forum has anything to gain by spending the time racking up 20,000 impressions in a month. You can also imagine that the bigger the site, the easier it is to boost the amount of artificial impressions.

 

Much like your popular web forums that are taken over by companies such as VerticalScope, and IB also know as Internet Brands (Owned by Hertz Penske) these small web forum hosting companies are also bought out, but often times with much less fan-fare given the fact that they are just offering the hosing service, and do not have public forums to which people can take notice. What we have going on ladies and gentlemen is a classic case of ABUSE, for the sole purpose of inflating a forum owners hosting bill. Over time if the forum proves to be a success with many unique users the abuse will continue in addition to valid usage by these unique members. Its harder to spot on larger forums; however a private forum as shown above where as there are maybe 4 or 5 unique users with many private non-public forums, its quite easy to see what is going on.

 

Once the site gets large enough to where the forum owner is paying 100s of dollars a month in hosting, the company that host the forum will offer to insert advertisements in an effort to help off-set the cost. What this does is takes away the forums right to allow people to speak freely due to the fact that Advertisers now have stake in paying for the forum. Eventually if the site does well attempts will be made by large forum companies to buy it out, and then pack it full of advertisements. Not only that they will also start systematically weeding out all of the veteran users in an effort to keep what is going on under their hat. This is why you always see some really upset people whenever a forum is bought out, and often times the agreement will set fourth terms to keep secret the details of the takeover.

 

So the next time you tell someone to blame the guy that sold out, you had better think twice, because often times these people that build successful forums are not selling out for the money, they are selling out in order to erase hosting fees that could easily rack up into $1000s of dollars, which if you have been paying attention were probably abusive charges to begin with as some software program automatically visits the site in an effort to raise the billable impressions.

 

You should also know that the web forum stats shown in this thread are from a REAL WEB FORUM that is active at this moment

 

Thank you for taking the time to read this thread.

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Then I wrote this 9-27-2011

 

Its been awhile for me, and despite trying to work things out with Activeboard aka Sparklit, I have found that the claims I have made are in fact true. While I now have a whopping 6 members posting my site seems to have gone viral.

 

November 2010 23,977

December 2010 31,492

January 2011 35,886

February 2011 36,295

March 2011 33,826

April 2011 35,237

May 2011 40,901

June 2011 37,696

July 2011 69,494

August 2011 58,403

September 2011 51,583

 

Now I would like to think I am cool enough to pull down these kind of numbers posted above, but honestly I only have about 3 posters out of the 6 that are posting a few times a week, myself included. Currently we see more visitors a day (380-400) than this site we are on now!

 

Of course I am now considering becoming an Ad supported forum just because I no longer wish to be walked up the ladder of pricing in what I consider to be abusive impressions. Here is the ladder just incase you were wondering,

 

Page Views	Monthly Fee	Extra Usage Fee
50,000/mo	$14.95	$0.50 per thousand views
100,000/mo	$21.95	$0.50 per thousand views
150,000/mo	$32.95	$0.40 per thousand views
200,000/mo	$43.95	$0.38 per thousand views
250,000/mo	$54.95	$0.38 per thousand views
375,000/mo	$73.95	$0.35 per thousand views
500,000/mo	$88.95	$0.30 per thousand views
750,000/mo	$119.95	$0.28 per thousand views
1,000,000 or more

 

So here we are, going up the ladder with only one problem! Where are the users? It all feels very un-natural if you ask me. Back when I first wrote of these disturbing increases in traffic I worked out an agreement with Activeboad to increase my billing level to the 25,000 plan (the plan I used to have is now no longer exist), so now naturally they are trying to bump me to the 50,000 level and I got a good idea that this trend will continue, even though we only have 3 members that are posting weekly with 3 more that post from month to month.

 

Additionally they also wanted to charge me for a backup of my forum users and post! YEAH! After paying these people per month they actually wanted to CHARGE ME for a backup file! After going around and around with them, and agreeing to upgrade my plan to the 25K plan they agreed to send me a backup file of my forum. Well come to find out a few months ago the backup file they sent me was corrupt! Even had it tested by a paid IT professional who confirmed this. I write to them that they sent me a corrupt file and they ask me to email the file back to them, after sending the file to three different email addresses all 6 emails were bounced back! To date I still dont have a working backup, and I refuse to pay a dime until after I have a working backup and something is done about the abusive amount of traffic.

 

Now I asked them if they were the reason behind all these AMAZING numbers and they became very offensive. I was even told We re-did our URL scheme in July, which resulted in a few forums being indexed a bit more heavily by Google. For most forums this was not an issue, but it looks like yours may have been hit a bit harder. I'm willing clear 20,000 impressions worth of overages to compensate in this case, which is probably far higher than the actual number caused by Google. It will take an even 10$ off your bill.

 

So. It appears that I have having to pay for spider/crawler traffic? And that they are doing things on their end to manipulate this to INCREASE the amount of billable impressions?

 

What I want to know is how much are these banner advertisers really paying? And do they know that these companies are charging them per-impression advertising fees for what amounts to abusive impressions? Whatever these advertisers are paying must be a large amount if they dont want cash from me anymore and would rather run the site ad-supported. Perhaps the big time advertisers do not question their metrics like we do? Currently our banner on the web forum pulls from our GoDaddy hosting account, but there is a problem! The metrics from the banner file do not match the metrics of Sparklits! Keep in mind every single page will pull the banner from GoDaddy since it is our forums banner.

 

So here I am! Back again! With PROOF!

 

http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=89234

I'd have to say it's a sad state of affairs when the U.S. Govenment beats your web hosting company in the time it takes to resolve an issue!

Hell even ole' Boehner, Cantor and Reid hammed out a deal in less time!

You cant even get any lower than that!

-- Edited by SELLC on Wednesday 28th of September 2011 12:32:08 AM

I have to be honest with you here, I think you're getting seriously boned with this sort of hosting/forum costs. Particularly when there are hosting plans out there that more or less charge a flat fee.

My 500Eboard.com forum is getting 1,200-1,400 hits per day (that's individual users + sessions, not raw hits which is much higher than that) and I just pay a flat fee of about $65 a year to my hoster. And I control the software, do my forum database backups about once a week, and so forth. Now if I suddenly took a huge traffic spike (say 100K hits a day or something) they would charge me more, but I'm nowhere near that threshold and never will be given the limited nature of the 500E and early AMG +126 cars.

You've been majorly doing the BOGU (bend over, grease up) thing for a long time, and I'd litter these Sparklite hosters (sounds like a Ford ignition product to me) like a piece of trash. Enough of the BOGU. Take control of your destiny man. Otherwise you're going to be at the mercy of folks like Benzworld and McClare who bump up your hit count.

gerryvz wrote:

---

You've been majorly doing the BOGU (bend over, grease up) thing for a long time, and I'd litter these Sparklite hosters (sounds like a Ford ignition product to me) like a piece of trash. Enough of the BOGU. Take control of your destiny man. Otherwise you're going to be at the mercy of folks like Benzworld and McClare who bump up your hit count.

---

 Trust me Gerry, we have been taking control. This time last year we agreed to charges and a rate plan increase from $4.95 to $7.95 a month with the provision we were given a forum backup. So until that gets sent to us, it's definitely on them.

Back when I agreed to the $7.95 I took that number and timesed it by 12, the total proved less than forum software, so Sparklit was kept on board. Now they want to bump me to $14.95 plan "Double" what I was paying. There are some months on my bill where they claim the forum cost +$30! This is because they bill in .50 cent increments per 1000 over the plan. They are crooks no doubt, any reasonable company would automatically revert to the next higher up plan, but not this guy Rajiv Khaneja's company. Crooked.

In one of their emails they tried to akin their business to a cell phone bill. I guess that was their way of saying "I know we are scheming, but other people do it too". Well I got news for this guy, if my cell phone company tries to screw me, they will get the ax too! Total BS.

Still, I will have a great story by the time all is said and done. We are making changes to better suit our needs. Been staying busy, so it's frustrating to pay someone for this kind of work, yet spend so much time dealing with it. Not worth it, and without a backup its a total loss, nothing to show for all that money spent. Almost feels like a fraud.

CHEAP ASS MOTHA FUCKA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

THIS POST WILL COST YOU $0.09!!!!!! AHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHA

Hold the press folks!

We may have found someone/something I was wrong about....

Seems there is more to this Rajiv guy than meets the eye... We may have a rising star...

Still too soon to tell... But if the US can't seem to stop China from all the hacking, how is ole' Rajiv Khaneja going to do it? Seems the folks in China are costing him money too! Maybe Rajiv will give me a hand in saving the United States, so I don't have to go it all alone?

Stay tuned.