A few months ago I was invited to speak at a club thirty miles from me. I went to their website to get a rough idea of how long it’d take me to get down there a few nights before. The day of the meeting, I went to the website to print out the directions and — nothing. The website was down. Yikes!

I guessed that our District website would have directions and they did, so the story had a happy ending. Except… it wouldn’t have had a happy ending had I not known about the District website, which many Toastmasters don’t.

The problem is that the website was being provided by a local technology company free of charge, with the caveat that it wasn’t guaranteed to be up %100 of the time because they were using it as a test website themselves. I provided “positive feedback” (I griped) and they’ve since fixed it. There are plenty of free website hosting sites out there, and anything less than %100 isn’t good enough.