Kessler Freedman, Inc. Web Development

Sometimes Server Accounts Need More RAM

Wayne — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 18:57:45 +0000

In the recent past, we have had to increase the RAM on a variety of website server accounts. The reasons these sites need more RAM are multiple, but the results are similar: Insufficient RAM causes 508 errors or server crashes.

Most of the WordPress sites we have built have evolved over time, becoming more complex, which requires more resources. In addition, traffic has increased, particularly bot traffic, and these also increase strain on server RAM. This requires the increase in server resources.

As you might expect, server companies rarely upgrade your account RAM for free. We will let you know the need and cost of RAM upgrades for your server account if and when the time comes for it to happen.

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Happy Trails, Mailchimp

Wayne — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:07:48 +0000

I think our company has been a Mailchimp subscriber for over 20 years. As a company, we rarely use it at all – our email “blast” needs have very much declined in the last decade, mainly due to most communications being very client-specific. But we also used it for one client, who will not be needing it going forward. They are bringing their blast email needs in house (finally! :)) and at some point in April, we will cancel our Mailchimp account.

Mailchimp started out in 2001 and was immediately attractive to the big player in the blast email industry, Constant Contact. (By the way, I hate that name.) It was mostly due to pricing and ease of use. We had clients then that needed us to use their Constant Contact accounts to send emails for them back then. I did not like using it, it was clunky to a web developer. When Mailchimp came out, I recommended it to our clients as an alternative, and many eventually migrated there – and even better, took the task of blast emailing in house with the easier tools. Over time, only one remained that we managed.

I can’t help but feel that the effectiveness of these services has declined in the past decade. Part of that is due to a generation that has grown up on texting and mobile phones. Part of it is due to spam filtering and blocking software and new rules for delivery for major email hubs. Email still works, but not as well for immediacy as it once did. That is why you see these companies branching into SMS text services as well. We do not want any part of that.

And so, within the month we’ll be cancelling our Mailchimp subscription. We’ll have to figure out what to with that freed up money for the upcoming year.

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The sloppiness of it all

Wayne — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 11:00:22 +0000

I’m going to state my golden rule for web sites and internet-based features for organizations now, based on 30 years of experience:

If you are not going to commit to the human resources to intelligently manage specific web/internet features – YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE THOSE FEATURES.

I’m going to give an easy example. An organization that I have volunteered at for 25 years has an email list that allows all members to participate in both receiving from and emailing to the group. It has been a nice feature over the past 20 years or so, but I’m removing my volunteer footprint for this particular organization due to my personal interests, and somebody else needs to take over. Somebody that understands email, custom domain recipes, etc.

They do not have such a person as a volunteer as far as I can tell. They haven’t tried to hire such a person. Their previous provider has decided to quit offering the software service, so they need to move the list to a new provider. I gave them instructions on how to set up a new account with a different provider. I offered to transfer the list once they did that, but I was not going to pay for the list hosting any longer. They had months. They failed to get it in time and the list no longer works. Do people miss it? Hard to say – there is no list to communicate such.

They eventually did set up the account, which basically meant paying for it and creating a list name (which should be the same as the prior list name). They have a typo in the email used to log into the new account. They have a typo in the list name – which is 4 letters. C’mon. Hire someone to do this right, not somebody who cares so little they can not get 4 letters correct in sequence.

I know they will want me to fix this. As a volunteer. It is all due to sloppiness on their part, and a failure on my part to tell them THEY SHOULD NOT HAVE THIS FEATURE. They don’t have the available human resources to take proper care of this list. When an email list like this works well, it’s because somebody behind the scenes knows their stuff and is on top of stuff. That is not this organization.

This advice should have massive cognitive resonance for all strictly-volunteer organizations – and their volunteers. Volunteers come and go. So does funding. If the organization should pay for something that will be an ongoing concern and is likely not to, they shouldn’t do it. Commit or refuse. Simple as that.

But this is really key for every web site and feature on the Internet, not just volunteer organizations. If you do not have enough expertise in hand, either employed or contracted, you shouldn’t be offering something that really needs that expertise in support. And if you don’t know if you have enough expertise – find out now. Later is going to be more painful.

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The Shame of Tech Company Customer Support in 2025

Wayne — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 17:26:44 +0000

It’s a shame how tech companies have all-out bailed on providing even the basics on contact support for their online services. You can search their websites, and there’s no email address, no phone number. Laughably you find contact information such as this:

like someone is going to travel to them to ask a support question. (This is Sinch Mailgun, btw. It seems like a big FU to anyone searching to actually contact them.)

These decisions come from the executive offices of these tech companies and the pressure put on them by investors to reduce costs and increase revenue. Want to read something depressing? Check this out:

https://www.nextiva.com/blog/customer-service-statistics.html

and you’ll get a statistical understanding of how bad the problem is. Every year it gets worse. 80% of customers say they regularly encounter poor customer service.

This, WITH the addition of volumes of online documentation and AI implementation to weed through it. It’s great when this stuff works. It is absolutely terrible when it does not and the company provides no real option for human support. And that is happening so often these days. It can be a nightmare for a web developer when dealing with new-to-them online services and figuring out how things must be set up properly to achieve the desired functionality. It can be a non-starter for someone unfamiliar with jargon and code and support detail morass.

What’s the answer? I wish I knew. It feels like we’re heading for a time where general Internet citizens will need some kind of advocate just to navigate how to implement the services they want to use, let alone building it for others.

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Discontinuation of Design and Redesign of Wild Apricot Sites

Wayne — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 18:06:05 +0000

We have come to the decision that it is time for Kessler Freedman, Inc., to discontinue doing redesign and initial design of Wild Apricot hosted web sites. We may reconsider this decision in the future, but for now, that is our decision.

For our existing clients: We will continue to support our clients to the best of our abilities with Wild Apricot based sites that we have built and maintained for the foreseeable future. There is no change is our support of existing client sites.

Here is why we have come to this decision on the design element.

In today’s world, a client should expect their newly designed/redesigned web site to be good as a design for 5 years at least. Yes, it will have changes and alterations and it is possible that AI will be creating more massive changes sometime in the future, but for budgeting purposes on visual design, you should be able to use that design for at least 5 years.

We’ve been working with Wild Apricot for clients for 15 years at least, and to be honest, it’s never been a great visual design environment. There’s benefit to that, however, because the servers were very limited by software and the hosting arrangement as to what could be done by their clients – and how things could be broken by their clients. Security was on them. Functionality was on them. A lot of support was on them.

But over the years, Wild Apricot has fallen further and further behind on the visual design side. It is still good enough for a lot of smaller associations. We do see a lot of larger organizations only using Wild Apricot for membership and event components at this point, and basically plugging in that content into a more contemporary looking site using a different software and hosting framework for the majority of the public site. In these cases, it is more specific application purposed, and out of the main site hosting and design piece.

It has always been a clunky system to design in.

Recently a bigger problem has occurred. Application issues occur and support is needed, and support has gone from being pretty darn good, to being a lot less than that. Too slow, too inaccurate, not enough followup, too much delay. This has been an issue developing in slow motion for several years but it’s really not acceptable any longer.

To be honest, this isn’t an issue that impacts Wild Apricot alone. THIS IS AN INTERNET INDUSTRY ISSUE. Support almost everywhere stinks. The investment capital used to build internet services has gotten much tighter, and with that, budgets, and we all know that customer support gets impacted by budget cuts very early and severely when such cuts happen. AI is often touted as the answer. AI is only as good as documentation and data and software – currency and specificity – can be made. AI can be great. AI can also be that faceless phone answering/messaging software leaving people in limbo.

Unfortunately, the state of Wild Apricot’s customer service (and distance it has fallen behind as a site design option) is enough of a problem that we don’t think our clients should commit another 5 years to it by paying for a redesign or creating a new site on Wild Apricots. We might be wrong. But we wouldn’t tell our clients this if we had trust in Wild Apricot’s situation at this point. We just don’t think they are doing enough to support a 5 year commitment to their offerings. There are better options.

So, for our existing clients, here is what the plan is for the foreseeable future:

Kessler Freedman, Inc., will not provide a full redesign your Wild Apricot site for a new iteration on Wild Apricot.
Kessler Freedman, Inc., will continue to provide support services for your Wild Apricot website. This recognizes the fact that Wild Apricot controls the server and software environments and our support must be limited to within the capabilities of Wild Apricot.
Kessler Freedman, Inc., will provide consultation on migration options and if WordPress is selected for purposes of migration, KFI can provide redesign and hosting options as well.

We will be contacting our clients with further information in the near future.

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