IndexTrader, I agree that Quote.com is pretty clueless about maintaining what should be their crown jewels, ie. historic data. I've offered to pay them for historic tick data for the futures contracts I trade, since they now only keep the past few months online. From the responses I got, it wasn't clear that they archived the older data before purging it off the servers, or that they even cared. It's a shame, because in contrast to their end of day data (which is totally unreliable), their intraday data is quite clean. Furthermore, it includes best bid/ask data, and cancelled ticks; the latter is useful for testing your filters (ie. you can throw the original dirty feed at your trading model and see how it handles the inevitable bad ticks.) And while some tick data providers aggregate multiple trades at one price level into a single tick, Quote.com preserves the original trade history.
Yes, the weird thing is they've got all the infrastructure in place to have a high quality feed, yet keep screwing things up somehow. Hard to say what the reason might be. Don't know if it's sales/revenue issue or just plain incompetence.
I suspect it's a result of the original developers leaving after Lycos bought Quote.com, and no one remaining with a thorough understanding of the software and systems. I've worked on enough software projects to recognize the signs. Judging from the past few releases, I think they're back up to speed on QCharts. I don't think they've got anyone equally competent on the server side yet.
Thanks for the offer Diode. I may take you up on that. For now, I am going to continue to pound QCharts about it and try to get others to do the same. The customer must drive their product improvement...too many have just left for other products which may or may not be better in different areas. I think management needs to be brought into the realm of their customers.