VIP Anything or Nothing At All…
Mike Mograbi is an aquaintance of mine so I’ve been pretty quiet up until now about the VIP line of software and scripts.
And how they’ve given me nothing but headaches every time I’ve tried to install, configure or run one on my sites…
But Mike’s sold out the entire line of VIP Profit Zone products with rights now, and that can only spell trouble for the online community.
Why?
- There are now hundreds of marketers selling these products at super low prices.
- The marketers have no idea how to support their customers if the customer experiences troubles.
- Many of the scripts and software are buggy, non-intuitive and won’t work on all servers.
Which just wastes everyone’s time and money.
If you think I’m ranting for no good reason, you’re wrong. I’m trying to save you the money and the trouble. You see the sales letters and the graphics for these products are good, convincing, beautiful. Some of them even have demos running…but you’ve got to be a geek or a programmer to get them working on your own sites. Seamless integration or easy setup is NOT part of the equation in any of the VIP line I’ve owned or worked with.
The poll script was clunky and never ran right. The site creator was a waste a money (you can get free site creators that are supported, updated, faster, and oh! did I say free?), but the icing on the cake was when I fell in love with VIP Interactive Site Creator and even after spending two days in installation, customization, tweaking the code to change the template (which was supposed to be a one click deal), adding a logo, configuring my server, signing up for a larger hosting account to ensure I could handle the bandwidth demands for the video site I was creating)…it still never ran right!
True to the poor quality of the general population in the resale market, the guy who sold me the product for $7 (Doug Champigny over at www.sevenbucks.com), never answered my email asking if he knew a programmer who could fix it (I said I’d pay, I just needed a recommendation), never refunded my money or credited me for selling me a product that doesn’t work (I learned a lesson there about who not to buy from again), and never even answered my emails (twice!).
I eventually just dumped the software because it was so lacking in features.
Then I headed over to and installed Drupal. It comes complete with a video module plus a host of other features – all free. All supported in the forums. Easy to install (just a few clicks from a cPanel hosting account). Easy to modify to suit my market, my tastes, and the features I’m after in a website.
All lessons learned – be careful who you buy from, free tools and scripts that are supported and updated frequently are often far superior to the stuff dumped on a market and forgotten, your time is more valuable than your money, always google for a review of any product before you buy it!
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A side note: I have bought, installed, tweaked, and worked with at least 30 server-side scripts over the last 6 years on a variety of server types and hosting accounts. Many of them work very well, especially when the seller is the creator of the script and they’re ready and willing to support and assist their customers!
Tags: buy, community, money, resale, Resale Rights by Market, review, sales, sell, selling, timeRelated Articles
No wonder I can’t get the site working! I should have checked here B4 buying on eBay at a discount!
Now what do I do?
Now that Web 2.0 has hit there are just so many other ways to host videos on your site easily.
If you’re blogging you can post a video to your blog directly from youtube.
Or…if you’re considering Drupal – gosh I need to tell you before I forget! – don’t install from cPanel. It’s buggy. See the Drupal site to confirm. The only version that’s working is the download from the official site.
Finally there’s a new kid on the block – well, new to most of us. It’s just about to come out of beta with just a few tweaks to go. The programmers are hot shots, very helpful and hard working.
See them at pligg.com
Feature rich and, joy of joys, it’s shareware!
I agree with you on the VIP software. I actually did get support so was finally able to get it up and running but – - – - – i have no idea what to do next.
The readme shows how to install (I had to manually configure a couple files) but doesn’t show you how to do anything once you get into the admin area.
I just got this up so am going to spend a little time checking it out but right now I’m putting my money on – i’ll be dumping this.
Wow! I wanted to thank you for your honesty, I was considering
purchasing this as a free gift to my members, and it is sounding
like that might spell disaster for me even has a freebie.
Thanks again!
Mike