Another Opinion Among Many

My web host has advised me that they will be doing maintenance on the server tomorrow (15 Nov) between 8pm-10pm PST, which may cause my site or some of its services to become unavailable during that time.  Nobody likes down time, but everybody likes being told ahead of time! Thanks, Friendlier! You’re one notch farther up, in my estimation.

You can always visit my other site if you have a burning desire to see what I’m up to if this site is ever down.  Its located, of course, at http://mrcorey.com.

I wasn’t sure whether to do this post this soon or not, but I have some good things to say, so here it comes.

This is a mini review of my new web host, Friendlier.com. In response partially to a comment by Macbros, I write this post to give a decent idea of what my web host offers. Here’s what you can find in plain site on the front page of the home page:

FRIENDLY PLAN

• 100 GB Disk Space!
• 1000 GB/mo Traffic!
• 99,9% Server Uptime
• Free Domain for Life*
• 30Day Money-Back
• 24/7 Support
• No Set-up Fees
• Free Site Builder
• $4.95/month.

That’s the short list. I’ve colored the parts that I like the most. Honestly, after the uptime issues that I’ve had with XMGFree.com (which they’ve not really resolved - even now, over a year later - sorry Eric, I like you) and DSTInternet.com (you guys were unresponsive and slow to help - you get what you pay for), my priority is for uptime. After seeing that Friendlier.com had a good uptime record (via a site that showed various sites and their uptime), I was already interested in their service. I had already signed up at DSTInternet.com for a year’s service beginning at the end of April 2007. I am giving this hosting up and writing that purchase off. Sometime you get what you pay for and $2.95USD/mo is a good indicator of a cheap site (cheap on support).

You’ll notice that there are plenty of web hosting solutions presented to you via various ratings sites that fall in the $4.95-$7.95 per month range. I don’t think that there has to be a significant difference between hosts in that range. I do prefer to pay less, as most reasonable people do. The difference is that Friendlier.com (or Friendlyr.com) offers their wares at the lower end of the price scale with the features at the higher end.

By the way, the great uptime stats that I found out about may be attributed to the fact that their hosting is purchased from The Planet, which is the “number one privately held, dedicated server hosting provider in the world.” Many companies get their hosting from The Planet, as its got what it takes to host the largest, most demanding companies.

I must say that the generous disk space and the large bandwidth allotment is a good draw for me as well, but I doubt that I will ever need to worry about approaching my limits.

I like the fact that Friendlier.com uses cPanel. I missed that when I got my hosting with DSTInternet.com. I also like the fact that they have SSH access. SSH is one of the features that most hosts disable (except for the ones who pay a lot extra) it so that they won’t have to secure against it (which is just lazy). Its just so much more powerful when you want to maintain a website.

One thing that I like more than I thought that I would is the “chat” function of the support desk. Friendlier has a support staff that actually seems to know what they are doing and when you ask a question that is beyond the scope of the present support rep’s ability to answer, they tell you so and they advise that they will get someone who is qualified to answer your question to send you an email with an answer. How great is that?

I actually used the chat function before I signed up, as I was trying to find an alternative to my host at the time. The support person (I wish that I could remember - sorry) was free with answers to my questions.  I liked that they were automatically ready to answer my questions despite my not being a customer.

Things haven’t changed as far as that goes, as well.  I’m still getting great service.  I get to use cPanel, FTP, and SSH to access my site.  The pages load with blazing speed.  I’ve got lots of grow room, and best of all, the staff are still friendlier!

As any regular visitor to this site knows, I’m not big on advertising on my own site.  I’ve not felt the need to promote any particular product or company.  Occasionally, you’ve seen a widget go up temporarily when I was helping to beta test, or a plug for a site or cause that I wanted others to know about - without any intention of compensation for the plug.  This is going to remain true.  I will only promote what I believe in.  So, you may notice an affiliate link show up on my site for my new web host soon.  It will produce a small hosting compensation if anyone clicks through and decides to go with Friendlier.com

I will end this post here.  In case you didn’t figure it out from the above, I recommend that you consider Friendlier.com as your web host when you’re shopping around.

I’ve been seated at my new (and hopefully last) web host for a week now, and there are no real speed bumps that I can see yet. I tried to upload the directory holding my photo album, but there was a permissions problem, likely stemming from the folder being moved from another server. Replacing the folder fixed that. Now, I can upload the pictures again. Its going to be a lot of work, as I am not going to rely on the stored data from the old database. This way, the site should actually work!

I’ve effectively moved from DSTInternet to my new host, Friendlier.com. The move was reasonably painless for me. I ma interested to see if it was painless for you. Feel free to comment. I will certainly be “watching” my hosting from now on and I’ll be interested in seeing how it actually goes. I still have that good feeling that I mentioned on the old hosting (which may not have been restored here - I warned you!).

Forgive me for the hesitation, but I’d love to review my host, but, after the last two experiences with paid hosting after reasonably trouble-free free hosting, forgive me for being hesitant.

Let this be a notice (as in a Colbert notice! Wag of the finger and everything!) that I will be auditing my experience with you and your future could lay in my hands, as I rank well in Google for any term that I feel like, cos I write for real, not for money.

I see that, for the most part, my site has propagated around the world to be pointing at Frihost’s server again. I don’t know how long this will last, as its quite burdened and this site doesn’t help much.

So, if you’ve noticed that some images are missing and that its not quite “the same”, it will be returned to normal over the next few days.

As my paid host says, “Thank you for your patience. I need a little more time.”

Bla bla bla…

To answer your question, Macbros,

I am hosted with a company called DSTinternet, and yes they’re fast! I did a lot of research before I unleashed my wallet on them and I couldn’t find enough negative about this company to not use them. The pricing seems to fit my budget and the features are fantastic! The company responds to support requests nearly instantly via the chat box off the site. I haven’t tried phone support yet, so I don’t know if the number will be reachable from Canada. My only gripe is that the use the Plesk control panel and I’m used to cPanel. I’ll have to see if I can simply add IP addresses to a ban list, as I can with cPanel, or if I have to add them to my .htaccess file manually (which I will, you spammers!). They allow FTP access so whatever!

As far as the rest,

This site runs on Wordpress. I usually am running a nightly build from the development repository. I’m not quite nutso enough (but close) to go with SVN commits, but the snapshot may not work for me every time either. I test the installation with similar plugins and theming on my own computer before I replace what’s working on this site. I don’t “upgrade” every night - more likely every 10 days or so. The current version is 2.3 alpha.

I am using a completely hacked and modified version of the Fresh theme, which was ported to Wordpress by LEMONed from the original design by Wolfgang Bartelme. I haven’t even left the structure intact, as I’ve moved stuff all over the place. The theme is based on a header, footer, body, subfooter, and sidebar. It has 3 sidebars (2 custom ones for individual pages, to which I employ the Page Template function) and 3 footer/subfooters. It will not always be the one I use. There’s something being cooked up in the background…

This site uses these plugins:

• Antileech - Prevent errant parties from stealing your content and bandwidth. By Owen Winkler.
• Archivist - Selects a defined number of (random) posts from the archive and shows them on the front page By Martin Chlupáč.
• Bad Behaviour - Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site. By Michael Hampton.
• Compact Monthly Archive - Displays a compact montlhly archive instead of the default long list. By Rob Marsh, SJ.
• Digital Fingerprint - adding a customizable “digital fingerprint” to your RSS feed in posts. By Kirk Montgomery.
• DoFollow - Disable the “nofollow” tagging for comments. By Kimmo Suominen.
• Extended Comment Options - This plugin allows you to switch comments and/or pings on or off for batches of existing posts. By Mark Kenny.
• Extended Live Archives - Implements a dynamic archive, inspired by Binary Bonsai and the original Super Archives by Jonas Rabbe. By Arnaud Froment.
• Fancy Pullquotes - Creates pullquotes of given text to appear with a magazine-like style By Giorgio Gilestro.
• Google AJAX Search - Adds a Google AJAX Search box on your site. By http://dancameron.org.
• myQuote - myQuote is a simple and small Wordpress plugin which enables you to place a Quote or Text on your website. By Jesper Avôt.
• Photopress - Photopress adds some image handling tools to Wordpress, including a popup upload and browse tool, a random image template function, and a simple album. By Isaac Wedin.
• Recent Comments - Retrieves a list of the most recent comments. By Nick Momrik.
• Related Posts - Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. By Alexander Malov & Mike Lu.
• The Excerpt Reloaded - This mod of WordPress’ template function the_excerpt() knows there is no spoon. By Kaf Oseo.
• Ultimate Tag Warrior - Ultimate Tag Warrior is a tagging plugin, that’s heavy on tag visualisation. I Like Pi! By Christine Davis.
• Wayback - generate a list of posts from a previous period. By Chris Goringe.
• WP Grins - A Clickable Smilies hack for WordPress. By Alex King.
• WS Tooltips - Let’s you display cool JavaScript fading tooltips! By Christopher Hartmann.

For the moment, that’s all, but I will be changing and moving things around now and then. I have more plugins installed but not activated.

That’s about it for now.  If I’ve left anything out, I may add to this post later.

Attention, passengers. This flight may experience some turbulence as it moves to a new host. As your captain, I caution you to keep comments light, as they may not make it to the destination. I will be trying to preserve the integrity of things by employing the technique in this post, especially in regards to the comment by Bes Z.

Edit:

I couldn’t, for some reason, access my domain registrar’s panel last night, so the site was still “live” at the old host. Interestingly enough, though, as soon as I changed the DNS server settings to point to the new host, I was “live” there, according to a ping that I just sent. Wow! I’m even using Rogers’ DNS servers for name resolution here at home. Cool.

For those who are in areas where DNS takes longer to propagate from North America (specifically, Texas), there still should be no issues posting comments, as I’ve got the site still up at the old host, pointing to the database on the new one, as the link shows to do.

I’d like a bit of feedback about the move. Let me know if you still “see” the site as it was. My email address is in the sidebar, if you want to let me know that way. If that doesn’t seem to work, try mrcorey at gmail dot com. Leaving a comment here should work fine, though.