Hosting your Ecard: Troubleshooting Tips

Clients can easily host one of our ecards right on their corporate website. Simply stated, our ecards are mini one-page websites that play video. Just like any simple webpage from a website, generally, you can just upload it to your website in a directory of your choice. Then, open your web browser; go to your website and voila! There it is, playing as expected.

While the process of hosting your own e-card is straight-forward, if you find it not working, we’ve included a few tips to help you troubleshoot.

Please note that these tips assume you have the technical knowledge and capacity to upload the e-cards files to your website and fully administer a corporate web server (or access to persons who do). It does not provide any step-by-step instructions for yours, or any other, specific server configurations.

1. Double-check that you are using the correct URL to your e-card.

   Often, a link with a small typo or a link split into two lines gets clicked or copied into the address bar. This can happen when a webmaster or IT Team emails you the link after placing the e-card online, but somewhere between them and you, the email gets garbled and the link breaks. Be sure the link is correct.

2. Double-check that all the e-card files have been uploaded.

   For example, let’s say you created a directory called ‘happy-holidays’ off the web accessible root of your site, you would upload all the extracted e-card files there (do not upload the un-extracted “e-card.zip” file). In this example, once the files are uploaded, you should be able to access the e-card at: http://www.domain.com/happy-holidays (replacing “domain.com” with your company’s website domain.

3. Ensure your server correctly serves the required video formats.

   Our e-cards are served using HTML5 video. The three video formats are MP4, WebM and OGV. While it’s common for server’s to have no problem serving this content correctly by default, your server may be set-up differently. This often results in the e-card working in some browsers, but not others.

   Servers running an old operating system or ones that have never been required to host videos may not be configured to run some of these relatively new video formats. Most often the mime-types for video/webm and video/ogv are being served incorrectly as plain text or not all. By using the Console in the Developer Tools section of your web browser (the same browser where you experienced the e-card not working) will indicate to you if this is happening with your server. Often, hitting F12 on your keyboard will open the browser’s Developer Tools. Otherwise, you should be able to find the Developer Tools under the settings or menu section of the browser.

   Your server must correctly serve the following mime-type formats:
   video/mp4, video/webm, video/ogv

4. Some networks are faster than others and no network has 100% uptime.

   If you notice your e-card is slow, try it out on different networks. For example, try viewing your e-card on devices that use different carriers. Sometimes, a carrier could be experiencing a brief network outage or poor connectivity at the time you are testing. Also, compare local Wi-Fi connections with carrier connections using the same device. You can do this by toggling Wi-Fi on and off. You can also compare office Wi-Fi with your home Wi-Fi. If you experience variances, you’ll be able to identify which network sources are causing them to prompt further investigation.

The above is the list we currently use as the basis for our approach to troubleshooting clients self-hosted e-cards and we encourage you to use it in your own troubleshooting process. As more tips make their way into out process, we’ll add them to the list above.

While we cannot re-configure or make changes to your web server or website, we’re here to assist as much as we can. If after you have exhausted the above tips and your corporate holiday e-card is still not working, let us know so we can help.

Posted: 2015-08-20