Time to rebuild my host spread

[TaoPhoenix]

Member Rosareven sent along a note that confirms what I believe is the best free hosting model - solid Free hosting with good specs and support, with the slide into Paid for special features and/or even further capacity.

She reports that she is "now paying for Decker Services' web hosting, who generously cut me a discount with SSH access."

[theraptor]

Looks like Hostalope just didn't have what it takes, your study is ever enlightening Tao.

Have you ever considered setting up a domain so that people can always access your page from one URL? Its not too difficult to set it up with multiple nameservers and low TTL so that when they access the domain xyz.com, it will attempt to load server1, then server2, etc.

[TaoPhoenix]

Rosareven's other news was that she is "This semester I am enrolled in a subject where web hosting is compulsory for all student, and the last week my fellow classmates have been hunting for web spaces for this subject."

Look at that! An entire class of prospective clients! Deeplist and Seraphim, do you want to post offers here? You two have the best support availability here, so you two get my recommendation. My initial advice is for you two to consult and work as a team and post roughly matching offers with separate specialties. Depending on how personality quirks go, I'd reckon it would be smart to have planned a Client Swap program so that between the two of you they get a great intro to the Free host world!

Part of my reply back to her:

"I picked two of my winning hosts and asked if they wanted to make site offers. Why don't you visit the thread and post the specs they think they will need for the class?"

[TaoPhoenix]

Looks like Hostalope just didn't have what it takes, your study is ever enlightening Tao.


I'll give every ounce of credit I can here. After a fairly typical new host shakeout Hostalope is in the running to have a solid server. I had to make my decision based on my difficult service experience, however another client may just do great with them. My study does require owner-coupon overrides to out-of-the-box policies, and we were unable to complete the setup to everyone's satisfaction.

[TaoPhoenix]

... your study is ever enlightening Tao.

Have you ever considered setting up a domain so that people can always access your page from one URL? Its not too difficult to set it up with multiple nameservers and low TTL so that when they access the domain xyz.com, it will attempt to load server1, then server2, etc.

Thank you for the idea, and in fact, that is just about to happen! I will have to migrate today's update over because the draft copy probably broke. It will soon be like the Debian theme of "something Stable" is what lands on the domain version, and the "testing" versions include both fresh experiments and a couple of PG13 buttons like Fark not on the more PG domain copy.

Today's board update was a bit of an event, especially since IsMyWebsite had been so strong as to win the lead spot for a while. I hardcode some of the button references to a single host so when they go down it takes chunks of the page with them.

Then with the status back into a lull again, I'll actually start writing for the page! (gasp!)

The admissions status of this coaster ride is a bit unclear. Chops to Logan for realizing that he is still learning and can't yet be confident of his results yet. I'm around looking things over, but Seraphim made a stunning comeback and Decker Services looks rock solid, and RLS is actually a paid host who offered a ferocious offer not to be ignored. Deeplist and Seraphim, please post my Ordinary and "Spike" bandwidth quotas. But rough guess is I have over 25 combined gigs of bandwidth on tap and over 5Gigs of space, so that's the bar potential new entrants are looking at.

[deeplist]

The board moved around little today, with one departure and previous leader IsMyWebsite sliding to the back of the ladder.

I guess that means that I am now in the lead.


Deeplist and Seraphim, do you want to post offers here?

Since my free hosting is on a per user basis and requires a custom request in order to consider it, I'd need a little bit of information before I'd be able to create any kind of offer.


Deeplist and Seraphim, please post my Ordinary and "Spike" bandwidth quotas.

I'm sorry, but I don't completely understand what you're requesting here.

[TaoPhoenix]

I guess that means that I am now in the lead.

Yes you are! Congratulations!



I'm sorry, but I don't completely understand what you're requesting here.

Ordinary bandwidth is just steady usage. But some of the better hosts have a grace for "2 day spikes" such as landing on a news site. I do eventually hope to write an article good enough to make one of the news sites. Meanwhile some of the nastiest hosts in the past used to threaten to cancel the account if the bandwidth went over.

[deeplist]

My policy is: Your bandwidth is yours to use how you want. Spike my servers if you want, they're built to handle it and won't flinch. When (and if) you reach 80% of your bandwidth for the month, I will contact you so we can evalutate together what the next move will be.

[Seraphim]

Since my free hosting is on a per user basis and requires a custom request in order to consider it, I'd need a little bit of information before I'd be able to create any kind of offer.

Same here. Class projects usually don't consume as much bandwidth as normal hosting accounts, and are often only used for the duration of a semester before being abandoned. But without having ballpark figures on how many projects they need to host in that time, and roughly what to expect for storage space requirements, it is hard to tell what plans would be best suited. Most likely though the normal 500MB/5GB Bandwidth would do fine for them unless it is a really involved class with a lot of flash or java on the sites or any kind of video feed.


As for bandwidth, I haven't provisioned any kind of spike vs normal bandwidth. Your assignment is yours to use though, and if I like what I see should a spike appear I might even give you a little bit more as long as the servers hold. Like before I might choke it a touch if I see it's coming too fast and impacting other clients.

But you'd have to get quite the audience to get it to that point though. A couple of times now I've been hosting live feed chatlogs from events with several hundred people in attendance for a MMORPG with some thousand players, and there has been no ill effects on my services at all so far.

[Rosareven]

Hi Tao,

Just got back again. Sorry I didn't realise that you have posted my update here. I believe majority of my class have already selected their respective hosting, and paid host with SSH was emphasised in my class so they're not trying to look for free hosting anyway. I did already recommend Decker Services' paid hosting to others.

It's not relevant now but I'll post the specs for my class anyway:

- 100mb at most for assignment-purpose projects unless one wants to eventually move beyond school assignment
- bandwidth that is enough for approximately 100 hours of text transfer per month, aka not much
- PHP5, MySQL, SSH (to learn linux command line environment for web purpose), FTP
- cPanel or any admin interface not necessary, we have to learn to control the web space via ssh anyway

I may be missing a few things but as you can imagine, there is not much needed for our class other than SSH being the point of learning objective.

[TaoPhoenix]

Hi Tao,

Just got back again. Sorry I didn't realise that you have posted my update here. I believe majority of my class have already selected their respective hosting, and paid host with SSH was emphasised in my class so they're not trying to look for free hosting anyway. I did already recommend Decker Services' paid hosting to others.

It's not relevant now but I'll post the specs for my class anyway:

- 100mb at most for assignment-purpose projects unless one wants to eventually move beyond school assignment
- bandwidth that is enough for approximately 100 hours of text transfer per month, aka not much
- PHP5, MySQL, SSH (to learn linux command line environment for web purpose), FTP
- cPanel or any admin interface not necessary, we have to learn to control the web space via ssh anyway

I may be missing a few things but as you can imagine, there is not much needed for our class other than SSH being the point of learning objective.

Well play then! I m still glad that we got some useful info posted to the thread!

[TaoPhoenix]

My old email address for Azoundria is unused now.
Someone from the IsMyWebsite team sent me this note.


--- On Wed, 8/17/11, IsMyWebsite Admin <ismywebsite@gmail.com> wrote:

> From: IsMyWebsite Admin <ismywebsite@gmail.com>
> Subject: How To Get Help Re: Service Outages
> To: taophoenix@yahoo.com
> Date: Wednesday, August 17, 2011, 6:34 PM
> This email address is retired.
>
> Please use private message if you have a working account.
> Secondly try
> emailing matthewcomp@hotmail.com.
>
> --
> --
> Name (Username)
> Support Council
> http://www.ismywebsite.com/

[oniscorp]

Looks like Hostalope just didn't have what it takes, your study is ever enlightening Tao.

Hostalope is still up and running strong. As Tao has already stated, there is a misunderstanding between the two parties that caused this to go downhill. It had nothing to do with the quality of our hosting and this is the first complaint we have received thus far. Tao is always welcome at Hostalope.

We also have a brand new feature coming out that may interest some of you. Can't say what it is yet :)

[theraptor]

Hostalope is still up and running strong. As Tao has already stated, there is a misunderstanding between the two parties that caused this to go downhill. It had nothing to do with the quality of our hosting and this is the first complaint we have received thus far.

You are relatively new here, so let me explain to you a very important aspect of hosting - It is called service, also known as support. You say that the misunderstanding with Tao had nothing to do with the quality of your Hosting? I'm afraid that it very much so does. When you act hostile and confrontational with a client who requires assistance, the quality of your service, and therefor the quality of your hosting declines tremendously. And the fact that you have a special agreement with Tao about how he is being hosted is no excuse. When you take in client, no matter how you choose to do so, you are staking your reputation as a host that you will provide them with a certain things to the best of your abilities. The fact that you got so hostile about a simple change of subdomain - something that can be done in WHM or DA in under a minute, and can be done via SSH in under 5, sets a very bad precedent about how you will act when there is an actual problem of a larger scale. Just look at Decker Services, are they a great host because they have an exemplary track record of uptime? Yes, but that is only half the story. Decker Services is a great host because deeplist is very patient and helpful when it comes to his clients - often when his clients have done nothing to deserve it. Part of being a great host is being able to deal with people who will be rude, and in this incident Tao hasn't even been rude. He politely made a simple request.

A 4 month old host shouldn't even be making the claim that they are "great". The great hosts are the ones that are there for you every day, year in and year out. Maybe if you can stick around that might be hostalope one day, and this will all just be a bump in the road of experience. There is a reason that there are only 4 hosts on Tao's study page. Too many free hosts come and go, and screw over their clients in the process. Hopefully this won't be you.

[Tyler]

You are relatively new here, so let me explain to you a very important aspect of hosting - It is called service, also known as support. You say that the misunderstanding with Tao had nothing to do with the quality of your Hosting? I'm afraid that it very much so does. When you act hostile and confrontational with a client who requires assistance, the quality of your service, and therefor the quality of your hosting declines tremendously. And the fact that you have a special agreement with Tao about how he is being hosted is no excuse. When you take in client, no matter how you choose to do so, you are staking your reputation as a host that you will provide them with a certain things to the best of your abilities. The fact that you got so hostile about a simple change of subdomain - something that can be done in WHM or DA in under a minute, and can be done via SSH in under 5, sets a very bad precedent about how you will act when there is an actual problem of a larger scale. Just look at Decker Services, are they a great host because they have an exemplary track record of uptime? Yes, but that is only half the story. Decker Services is a great host because deeplist is very patient and helpful when it comes to his clients - often when his clients have done nothing to deserve it. Part of being a great host is being able to deal with people who will be rude, and in this incident Tao hasn't even been rude. He politely made a simple request.

A 4 month old host shouldn't even be making the claim that they are "great". The great hosts are the ones that are there for you every day, year in and year out. Maybe if you can stick around that might be hostalope one day, and this will all just be a bump in the road of experience. There is a reason that there are only 4 hosts on Tao's study page. Too many free hosts come and go, and screw over their clients in the process. Hopefully this won't be you.

Yup, agreed. I also can't say enough about Decker Services, if he ever opened up his own datacenter and the price was right we would very likely purchase several servers. I seriously can't say enough about him, I've never seen a host with the same quality and dedication that guy has.

[TaoPhoenix]

TheSwagBay's original ad (a couple parts are becoming Superseded such as the note about not having a website!)

Hello Folks,
I would like to present TheSwagBay's free application hosting. If you have a forum, blog, cms site, or any other "database based" application, why not host it for free? Even if you are completely new to online applications, we still can set you up with any application! Heres what we can offer as far as applications go:

-Forums such as phpBB, SMF, XMB, MyBB, PunBB, and a slew more. If you own a Vbulletin licence, we also allow Vbulletin as well.

-Blogs including Joomla, Wordpress, necleus, Pixie and more (almost 15 more!)

-CMS of all types are allowed, as long as they comply with our TOU.

-Wikis are allowed.

-Estores are allowed

-Podcasts are allowed

-and actually, much more. There are so many open source apps out there, so to be clear, if it uses a database, and is classified as an "Web App", then we will host it! If you have questions about this, please PM us.

All hosting comes with email, domain, and managed file services (FTP, etc), as well as lots of webspace and bandwidth (we can't use the word unlimited, but we can assure you its very high).

Heres how we can offer free application hosting. Once you have our team install your web application, one of our Tech guys will contact you on where we can place an advert on your website. We offer a few different choices when It comes to adverts, such as text based ads, contextual ads, or even video based ads.

All free plans are subject to our Terms of Use (TOU), which can be viewed/read by contacting us (just PM us)


Finally, if by now you are wondering, we dont have a website (well, sort of, but not for hosting.) We have just found that most of our business comes from forums like this, and a website is not needed.

Thanks and enjoy!
-TheSwagBay Admin Team

-----------------------------------------

Elsewhere they noted that they plan to offer cPanel.

----------------------------------------

Over on the other thread, Scott from TheSwagBay remarked -


I understand TaoPhoenix,
Here is what I will do. I will make a website, with links to support, policies, the whole nine yards. As soon as that is complete, I will post the link here. Give me roughly a week to build the site (I'm going to do a full site, rather that just a small lander-page. After hearing from other people here, a website is the way to go. Sorry about any misunderstandings here.

Oh, and I will take you up on that offer. I would love for somebody from here to try out my services, and report back. I can either set you up now or after I set up the hosting site. That choice is up to you.

Anyway thanks all, hopefully I will hear from you soon!

-Scott
---------------------------

** Hallo Scott! I sent my opening note to your support email, which is also copied here. By all means, let's start working on the details while you work on the site in parallel. --Tao****

------------------------
Advisory remark from Tao on the other thread -

Let's look at this remark: "If you don't think we are up to par ... with our hosting and support, you may post that all over these forums. But I can assure you, we don't disappoint."

I'm game to give you folks a thorough test of that! I'm perhaps at the 70% mark on sternness when I put my Evaluation hat on, so if you get by me, I'd gander that you would be well on your way. I will remind you once of the consequences of your remark above, combined with the one in your ad that said, "Even if you are completely new to online applications, we still can set you up with any application!"

This means you must expect several educational tickets because you are purposely aiming for higher grades of content to be hosted than 75% of normal web sites!
-------------------------

This was my opening note to their designated email support address.

8-21-2011
Okay gang, here we go!

Please send me your Terms of Use. I am pretty tame in my interests, so I tend not to have many problems with Terms documents. I am also careful about Copyright, which is the new hotbutton of the last few years.

You wanted New users, so here I am! I have surveyed standard web hosting for a while now, but I purposely avoided the fancier applications out of nervousness of the unknown!

My initial interest are Forums, Blogs, and Wikis. Do you have any materials prepared on the plusses and minuses of the different apps per category? A new user will have heard *of* all kinds of things, but has no idea of the specific quirks of a particular program!

Category: Wiki
This feels like it should be the simplest. I collect all kinds of snips that aren't yet ready for coherent articles. If I started with a blank wiki, is there a way I can get a list of articles so I know what's in there?

Category: Blogs
Wordpress certainly is making the news, both in popularity, and in some recent hacks! I do like to be unusual, so have you made a complete list of the blogs you host? If not, I might dig one up from maybe Wikipedia, and you'd cross off the ones you don't know how to handle.

Category: Forums
Forums certainly sound like fun! One big plan I have is to have a legislation oriented site, and let users thrash around if they like the various provisions. Is there a forum/other that lets visitors/members both comment on and rate sentence by sentence of an entire article? A lot of key legislation comes down to make-or-break single sentences. Then a way to add the cumulative mods would show the overall opinion of the legislation, maybe subtotaled by legislative section.

So there's a lot to play with!

Other note: I would like a Subdomain if possible. I am treating this as the "lead development" account of a spread of host services, but hopefully would mirror it to some of my other hosts. To do that, it seems useful to get a subdomain of taophoenix.______.____

I will remark that if you change your branded name from TheSwagBay to something else, make sure FWS knows it because we get grumpy when hosts decide to get bored and say "well, our name is such&such now" with no preparation!

Regards,

--Tao

[TaoPhoenix]

Hallo Swagbay.

Here are a few notes on your Terms of Use.

Recall this opening line of your ad:
"Quote Originally Posted by theswagbayorg View Post
Hello Folks, I would like to present TheSwagBay's free application hosting. If you have a forum, blog, cms site, or any other "database based" application, why not host it for free?"

Unfortunately, your Terms of Use say this:
--------
4.) Payment Information
a. You agree to supply appropriate payment for the services received from us, in advance of the time period during which such services are provided. You agree that until and unless you notify TheSwagBay of your desire to cancel any or all services received, those services will be billed on a recurring basis.
b. We reserve the right to change the monthly payment amount and any other charges at anytime.
c. All payments that are due and not received on the specified date of invoice will have 3 days to pay invoice. If payment is still not received after the 1st late day then a $5.00 late charge will be added on to the total price for that month and a account suspension will occur. If payment is not received within 3 days then your account will be terminated with or without notice.

13.) Illegal Free Hosting
We reserve the right to terminate accounts where free hosting (defined as hosting that was obtained at a zero cost to the end user) was provided, as this provides a security issue for our servers, and it is in our best interest to look after everyone on the server. Free hosting accounts are setup by ‘hackers’ (“a programmer who reaches a goal by employing a series of modifications to exploit or extend existing code or resources”) who make as many attempts as necessary to destroy the server and its content, or escalate to root privileges and cause havoc for all of our end users.
------

I know what you are trying to say - however I recommend that you add some supportive language indicating that free accounts that you issue can be perfectly honorable clients as part of your sales package.

[TaoPhoenix]

Section 5 says this:
"5.) Backups and Data Loss
a. Your use of the service is at your sole risk. We are not responsible for files and data residing on your account. You agree to take full responsibility for files and data transferred and to maintain all appropriate backup of files and data stored on our servers."

I have perfect backups of my ordinary html files. However as a new user I have no idea how to backup database based sites, so I believe your service offer to new users ought to extend to assistance on making backups of this new type of data. Do you have a Backup-Test procedure in place where in a scratch directory the backup is reloaded to test it?

[TaoPhoenix]

These two sections together sound like they are meant to catch common abusive practices, however there is something in them that sounds like it would inhibit a lot of great clients. Let's revisit these portions of your ad again:

"I would like to present TheSwagBay's free application hosting. If you have a forum, blog, cms site, or any other "database based" application, why not host it for free? Even if you are completely new to online applications, we still can set you up with any application! ... so to be clear, if it uses a database, and is classified as an "Web App", then we will host it!"

However, the resource & use sections come through as:
-------
"7.) Resource Usage
Users may not initiate the following:
a) Use 15% or more of system resources for longer then 90 seconds. There are numerous activities that could cause such problems; these include: CGI scripts, FTP, PHP, HTTP, etc.
b) Run any type of interactive real-time chat applications that require server resources. Remotely-hosted services are fully allowed.
c) Run stand-alone, unattended server-side processes at any point in time on the server. This includes any and all daemons, such as IRCD.
d) Run any software that interfaces with an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) network.
e) Run any gaming servers such as counter-strike, half-life, battlefield1492, etc
f) Run any video/music/file sharing intensive site or penny auction websites.

8.) Fair Usage Policy
a. TheSwagBay service is designed to host websites. TheSwagBay does NOT provide unlimited space for online storage, backups, or archiving of electronic files, videos, documents, log files, file sharing intensive sites, reverse auction sites, illegal content of any kind, etc., and any such prohibited use of the Services will result in the termination of Subscriber's account, with or without notice. Accounts with excessive number of files negatively affect the performance of the server and TheSwagBay may request that the number of files be reduced to ensure proper performance at TheSwagBay's discretion. TheSwagBay does not set arbitrary limits on the amount of visitor traffic a web site can receive or on the amount of content a Subscriber can upload to his/her/its website in a given month, nor does TheSwagBay charge additional fees based on increased use of bandwidth, as long as the Subscriber's use of the Services complies with these Terms. In most cases, a Subscriber's web site will be able to support as much traffic as the Subscriber can legitimately acquire. However, TheSwagBay reserves the right to limit processor time, bandwidth, processes, memory, number of accounts a subscriber can create, or number of files in cases where it is necessary to prevent negatively impacting other Subscribers.

All of your web pages (html,php,htm, etc.) must be 'linked' with files (.GIF, .JPEG, etc.) stored on TheSwagBay's server. Web sites that are found to contain either/or no html documents, a large number of unlinked files are subject to warning, suspension or cancellation at the discretion of TheSwagBay management. Any customer who violates TheSwagBay's Policies in abusing either space/site transfer will be notified and given 2 days to remedy the problem. If the problem is not resolved within the allotted period, the client will be billed for the overages.

INODES The use of more than 50,000 INODES will result in account suspension. An INODE is the actual file or directory and not the size of that file or directory. For example your index.html file is 1 INODE. A directory called homework is counted as 1 INODE as well."
--------

"Policies are Policies, whatever they decide to be". However, there is some tricky wording. Of course there is "not unlimited space to host (stuff)" - because you would define the account space limits.

The "All of your files must be linked" part seems to cause concern for webmasters who build their source materials online and only link completed pages. I especially know that *prior* files which are no longer linked will quickly trip this policy. The world is moving towards cloud storage, so this policy feels a little aggresive towards many humble webmasters.

I'll leave it to my betters to know if database apps can produce a lot of subsidiary support files which would trip that 50k limit.

Overview: Your initial ad goes for high end clients, so this terms of use is a bit of a surprise.

[TaoPhoenix]

Swagbay wrote me some notes back. On the topic of forums:

-----
As far as forums, We offer over 10 different FREE applications. These include:
-phpBB
-AEF
-XMB
-UseBB
-MyBB
-Phorum
-PunBB
-SMF
-FluxBB
-bbPress
-Vanilla
-Simple Machines Forum
-Advanced Electron forum
-BBpress

There are also some other paid mediums out there, such as "Vbulletin". I would highly recommend this to all our clients, because it does not have many flaws, and offers much greater control over your boards. Just a standard licence will run you about $200, so only use this if you are serious about your forums.

Now, instead writing out all the ups and downs of each forum medium, Let me take a minute to ask you a few questions, so we can match you with the application best for you.

0) Do you want to learn more about Vbulletin? Please note you must buy a licence your self in order to use Vbulletin.

1) What is your experience level? Some Apps are more user-friendly than others. If we know your experience level, we can narrow down our search for the best forum app for you.

2) What kind of style are you thinking about for your forum? Were you going to create you own style, or download a pre-made one? Some forum apps offer more free styles than others.

3) Finally, How big of a community are you planning on building? Some forums have better member management than others, so this is quite important.

As soon as I receive the answers to the questions above, I can recommend the best forum apps for you.
------
I know I get excitable without following through, so I am not inclined to get the vBulletin license yet. And I am a representative of the class of clients with zero experience! So let's try one with the most user friendliness and safeguards and supportive tips built in! I don't yet know much about the style, but I'd probably download one. Initially I don't expect to have a big community at all. I'd be shocked to get over 1000 users! However if I managed to strike a gold mine, we'd evaluate and see what else there is to do.

P.S. In general I support the Open Source concept, so let's try to see if I can handle/stand one of the open source forums. I'll be looking whether the proprietary packages become must-picks or if I can do well enough maybe without some power feature.

P.S."If it uses a database" - what category do you put Slashcode in? (The back engine of Slashdot) Last I knew it was open source and available.

[TaoPhoenix]

Intro note - I'm not sure how databaseblogs work. Do I have to load the "component pictures and articles" etc, or does all that get mashed into a database?

Swagbay' notes:

-----------------
Next stop: Blogs. You expressed interest in Wordpress. Wordpress is a user friendly way not only to create a blog, but even a website! It has thousands of User-Made plugins and styles, so, I'd imagine this would be the best option for you. I may also note that the "Vbulletin" I talked about above also has a built in blog engine (if you but the correct licence).

But, if you still want to learn more about some of the other open source blogging applications we offer, please include the name of the application in your email. We offer:

-b2evolution
-Life Type
-Nucleus
-Pixelpost
-Wordpress
-Open Blog
-DotClear
-Pixie
-eggBlog
-Text Pattern
-Serendipity

As far as blogs go, it is more preference than anything (they all do the same thing, some just have built-in Content Management Systems for websites, such as wordpress). I suggest doing a "Google Search" on "Blog Applications".
--------------------------
This one feels tricky because of my lack of experience. I like to try unusual new things, so let's save Wordpress till near the end of the road. P.s. for all these applications try to recommend ones that have good data-export abilities, because I am sorta against "info sinkholes" where it's all fun and candy until you don't like it and then you can't get your data back out (or users getting their posts). I'll think on that a bit.

In a downloadable utility context I have downloaded tons of utilities and apps testing "look and fee" which is at first what will make and break my choice. Unfortunately I am frightened to ask you to install blank copies of each of them! Can we narrow the list down by skipping the ones notorious for being user unfriendly? I do feel you're going to see this kind of user question for new users, because this is asking someone who doesn't know how to ride a horse what breed he wants. ("Uh... really nice, shifts his body to try to keep me from falling off, and has one ferocious burst of speed available to win county races with!")

[TaoPhoenix]

Swagbay's notes:
----------
Finally, You wanted information on a Wiki. You expressed some concern on managing articles. I recommend Media Wiki. Media Wiki works (and looks) just like Wikipedia. It has a backend admin panel, user management, and is written in PHP.
There are some other mediums out there as far as wikis, but I strongly recommend you use Media Wiki. Other wikis we can host include:

-DokuWiki
-Medis Wiki
-PHP Wiki
-PmWiki
-TikiWiki
-WikkaWiki

Just let me know if you would prefer something other than Media Wiki, and I'd be happy to share the pluses and minuses of each app.

If you have any other questions I failed to answer in this email, feel free to ask.

Thanks,
Jared Welch
Sales Manager
----------------

Well, somehow this doesn't feel as quirky personal, so I'll try MediaWiki! I'm modestly practiced with Wikipedia from the end user side, so let's give MediaWiki a go.

Meanwhile chops to the detailed initial answer!

[masterbo]

I offer free hosting to interesting projects.
It would be kind of amusing to offer Web space to you - let me know if you would need it. I am no hoster, of course, I only own much hosting resources - more than I need.

[deeplist]

I only own much hosting resources - more than I need.

Then why are you constantly asking for hosting from others? I see request threads from you very often.

[oniscorp]

You are relatively new here, so let me explain to you a very important aspect of hosting - It is called service, also known as support. You say that the misunderstanding with Tao had nothing to do with the quality of your Hosting? I'm afraid that it very much so does. When you act hostile and confrontational with a client who requires assistance, the quality of your service, and therefor the quality of your hosting declines tremendously. And the fact that you have a special agreement with Tao about how he is being hosted is no excuse. When you take in client, no matter how you choose to do so, you are staking your reputation as a host that you will provide them with a certain things to the best of your abilities. The fact that you got so hostile about a simple change of subdomain - something that can be done in WHM or DA in under a minute, and can be done via SSH in under 5, sets a very bad precedent about how you will act when there is an actual problem of a larger scale. Just look at Decker Services, are they a great host because they have an exemplary track record of uptime? Yes, but that is only half the story. Decker Services is a great host because deeplist is very patient and helpful when it comes to his clients - often when his clients have done nothing to deserve it. Part of being a great host is being able to deal with people who will be rude, and in this incident Tao hasn't even been rude. He politely made a simple request.

A 4 month old host shouldn't even be making the claim that they are "great". The great hosts are the ones that are there for you every day, year in and year out. Maybe if you can stick around that might be hostalope one day, and this will all just be a bump in the road of experience. There is a reason that there are only 4 hosts on Tao's study page. Too many free hosts come and go, and screw over their clients in the process. Hopefully this won't be you.

Sir, you know very little about the situation between Hostalope and Tao, apparently. No one has acted hostile or confrontational towards him. We also never made the claim to be "great" previously anywhere in this thread, however I will go ahead and say it now: Hostalope is great ;)

Decker Services gets a lot of love here. Besides being around for a while, I'm going to go ahead and guess that they are somehow involved in the origins of this thread, or even have affiliation with the owners/moderators of the forum. That's all well and good, I'm not going to knock anyone's hustle. However, people do need to take one fact into consideration: Decker is offering paid services as well. It is of utmost importance to suck up to anyone you think might be cutting you a check in the future when doing so. Hostalope on the other hand does not offer paid services of any sort. If you require something that is not being freely offered to other clients, then *you* should be the one going out of your way to convince us that it should be done. Do not just tell us to do something for you, that we normally do not do, and expect it to get done. We do not have alterior motives in mind, such as converting the client to paid services, when handling our support tickets. So I guess the moral of the story is: if you want to be pampered and have your feelings cradled, go for someone that also offers paid hosting. If you need quality hosting with no BS, there is nothing better than Hostalope.

We've shown you 4 months of greatness, with years to come. Bet on it.

[TaoPhoenix]

Then why are you constantly asking for hosting from others? I see request threads from you very often.
(From elsewhere)

Done. I have bought enough reseller plans I was looking for - thanks to everyone for advice and offers.

So Masterbo you have paid resellers. My project doesn't work right with single-user private hosting, because there's "nowhere for the review to go". Deeplist, he's got the makings of some kind of turnover business, but I don't know the details.

[Tyler]

Sir, you know very little about the situation between Hostalope and Tao, apparently. No one has acted hostile or confrontational towards him. We also never made the claim to be "great" previously anywhere in this thread, however I will go ahead and say it now: Hostalope is great ;)

Decker Services gets a lot of love here. Besides being around for a while, I'm going to go ahead and guess that they are somehow involved in the origins of this thread, or even have affiliation with the owners/moderators of the forum. That's all well and good, I'm not going to knock anyone's hustle. However, people do need to take one fact into consideration: Decker is offering paid services as well. It is of utmost importance to suck up to anyone you think might be cutting you a check in the future when doing so. Hostalope on the other hand does not offer paid services of any sort. If you require something that is not being freely offered to other clients, then *you* should be the one going out of your way to convince us that it should be done. Do not just tell us to do something for you, that we normally do not do, and expect it to get done. We do not have alterior motives in mind, such as converting the client to paid services, when handling our support tickets. So I guess the moral of the story is: if you want to be pampered and have your feelings cradled, go for someone that also offers paid hosting. If you need quality hosting with no BS, there is nothing better than Hostalope.

We've shown you 4 months of greatness, with years to come. Bet on it.

No. No. No. And no. Decker is loved here because he's been providing rock solid shared web hosting for over ten years and in that time frame, he has never lost dedication to his clients and is always there to help out when needed. Your argument about "paid hosting" also falls flat because my understand is over half Decker's "clients" are being given free web hosting (could be wrong).

Frankly, your post just reeks of arrogance.

[deeplist]

Decker Services gets a lot of love here. Besides being around for a while, I'm going to go ahead and guess that they are somehow involved in the origins of this thread, or even have affiliation with the owners/moderators of the forum.

For the record: I was NOT involved with the origin of this thread in any way shape or form. I was not even involved with Tao's study in the beginning and was only offered an opportunity to jump in mid point. Also, I am in no way affiliated with FWS nor do I have any kind of connection to the staff here either personal or business wise.

[masterbo]

... Deeplist, he's got the makings of some kind of turnover business, but I don't know the details.

My suggestion is to ask me directly, instead of guessing.


Then why are you constantly asking for hosting from others? I see request threads from you very often.

There may be many reasons, one of it has been provided in one of my last thread you've also replied in.
Also: specific tasks can require specific hosting.

[oniscorp]

No. No. No. And no. Decker is loved here because he's been providing rock solid shared web hosting for over ten years and in that time frame, he has never lost dedication to his clients and is always there to help out when needed. Your argument about "paid hosting" also falls flat because my understand is over half Decker's "clients" are being given free web hosting (could be wrong).

Frankly, your post just reeks of arrogance.

Err...why do you sound like a Decker Services spokesman?

[deeplist]

Your argument about "paid hosting" also falls flat because my understand is over half Decker's "clients" are being given free web hosting (could be wrong).

Thanks Tyler. And also for the record, as of right now at the time of this post, 28% of my clientele are on some kind of free hosting plan in which I receive no monetary support.

[TaoPhoenix]

Here we go gang, hang on to your hats!

Hostalope, as a quick note, Decker Services is one of my official study hosts, which was open to all who wanted in and completed the basic setup account with standardized elements. Theoretically I could have been crushed with 100 host entries in a free-for-all. I got about 30. Of those, *3* survived. Deeplist collected a "Wildcard" slot from me based on his prior uptime and my judgement call that he would last as long as anyone. I talk up all the winning hosts of my project. That's the 3rd party testimonial that you once mentioned you wanted - they earned it. *That is the fundamental service my project provides* - a third party rating separate from everyone's ad in the ad sections. All of FWS watched while dreams were launched and faded.

But we have a far larger fundamental point arising here, which goes to the heart of all free hosting. It has to do with how much a business wants to become known for stellar custom service, *which generates referrals*. I will absolutely stress that this level of service is nearly standard in the modern host industry, and not "pandering". Of my current finalists, while I'd bet my lunch on Decker Services for raw horsepower and technical skill, Seraphim is who I recommend for exceptional service in custom situations. He's taking me through my first domain and the esoteric mysteries of nameservers and that whole adventure. Why did I pick him to launch a topic that terrifies me? Because he'll do his damndest to dig me out of the trouble I get myself into when the nameservers don't propogate right, etc. It turned out the original reason was compeletely my mistake when I bought the domain I missed the button to release the seller's nameservers ... or something. This is what great hosting is about - clients trying new adventures, scraping knees, and getting a first aid kit from the host. In the same vein, I am hoping that TheSwagBay can take me through the even more blood curdling complexities of blog software, custom private wikis, and open source forums.

This is why it came as a shock to "convince you that something should be done" - and those somethings were low level - a new panel and a subdomain with a couple of corrections. Despite some epic cases of Fly-By-Night, *all thirty* of my entrants gave me my standard setup in about 2 emails of trading details. About 75% had no plans to offer paid. Put the business-school way, your desire to be convinced hinders your service value in my opinion. When fundamental values are at odds, it plays out much as we saw.

Meanwhile, FYI, Tyler is an "Alumni" - he tried the competition himself, did okay for a while, then finally ran into some glitch and got stuck. He has since kept tabs in that fond way that "Been there" creates.

[theswagbayorg]

Ok Tao,

I'm really liking the thoroughness of your reviews! Much learned. So, let me start with the terms of use. First, please know these terms of use were adopted mostly for my paid clients with set limits on their accounts. I'm working on a TOU for free clients, and will get that up ASAP. I started by changing Illegal Free Hosting/Payment Information around a bit. The "payment" is the income from the adverts. Like I said, I'm adopting a free hosting TOU, and this will be more clear. Ill also change around some of the illegal free hosting wording. To finish off the TOU, I'll change the system resources limits around. Obviously running gaming servers, torrent trackers, etc is going to have to be against the rules, because it isn't fair to the other clients on the server. I have no real way of monitoring if clients break these rules, nor would I ask them to stop. Its more of a warning, that scares clients intending to build file sharing sites, etc. Like you said, it could be worded differently.

All in all, we do want high end clients. We make the money off of adverts on the site, and in exchange you receive "not unlimited, but very high" disk space and bandwidth. Think of it this way: If your site is generating more traffic (using more bandwidth and disk space)...we are making more money off of the adverts. We can then pay for any problems that may arise from bandwidth, disk, cpu, or memory overages. The bottom line is, we are not worried about free clients going over the limits, because, in most cases, we are reimbursed.

Ok, enough of that, everything below this line is going to be coming from me as an owner of a hosting company, Review business aside.
--------------------------------
Tao,
Lets get started with the forums. I received you answers and concerns. For users with zero experience, phpBB is the way to go. It has thousands of user-made plugins and styles, available for download here. (http://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/?sid=a2f49bdd85bb0633f2ca8397ebd60ca8) phpBB is great for new communities, and if your forums grow to be very large, they have a above-par member management system. PhpBB has a back-end admin panel, and is written in PHP. If you ever need support for phpBB, your covered. PhpBB has a very active support forum, so you can expect help when you need it fast.

As far as slashcode goes, that goes into the category of Other. We can install it, but our support for it would be limited. It is something we are not fluid with, therefor it is "at your own risk", in the sense that we can't provide support for it..

You asked for a subdomain, taophoenix. What application would you like for your main site? By that I mean your forums, blog, or wiki. I will make what you choose your main site and the other two subdomains (Ex: ______.taophoenix)


If you want to try something user-friendly (other than wordpress) for a blog application, why don't we start with dotclear. Its open source and written in PHP. Dotclear is an open-source web publishing software created in 2002. It was a one man's project at first, but Dotclear soon gathered a team comprising different personalities with various backgrounds. The project's purpose is to provide a user-friendly tool allowing anyone to publish on the web, regardless of their technical skills.

This is, in my opinion, the second best, user friendly blog engine out there (behind wordpress). I think it would be a wise choice to go down this road of user friendly blogs.

You said you wanted to save wordpress for last, but for more entry level users, I strongly recommend this. There is better support via their forum and more plugins/styles to choose from. But, that choice is up to you.


Now for the wiki. I can install/configure this as soon as you let me know if it will be installed on your subdomain, or on a subdomain of your subdomain. I will await your reply.

After I receive your reply, I will setup the account, install the requested applications/configure them, and I will send you your acount information VIA EMAIL, to avoid any password theft here.

Thanks so much!
-Scott Murray
Owner

[theraptor]

Sir, you know very little about the situation between Hostalope and Tao, apparently. No one has acted hostile or confrontational towards him. We also never made the claim to be "great" previously anywhere in this thread, however I will go ahead and say it now: Hostalope is great ;)

Decker Services gets a lot of love here. Besides being around for a while, I'm going to go ahead and guess that they are somehow involved in the origins of this thread, or even have affiliation with the owners/moderators of the forum. That's all well and good, I'm not going to knock anyone's hustle. However, people do need to take one fact into consideration: Decker is offering paid services as well. It is of utmost importance to suck up to anyone you think might be cutting you a check in the future when doing so. Hostalope on the other hand does not offer paid services of any sort. If you require something that is not being freely offered to other clients, then *you* should be the one going out of your way to convince us that it should be done. Do not just tell us to do something for you, that we normally do not do, and expect it to get done. We do not have alterior motives in mind, such as converting the client to paid services, when handling our support tickets. So I guess the moral of the story is: if you want to be pampered and have your feelings cradled, go for someone that also offers paid hosting. If you need quality hosting with no BS, there is nothing better than Hostalope.

We've shown you 4 months of greatness, with years to come. Bet on it.

I know more than you think, I've Tao has informed me about the whole situation via PM. You have disregarded the free advice I gave you entirely (advice, coincidentally, that most companies have to pay me for) regarding the importance of good service in this industry, free or paid. Your actions have consistently proved that you are not great, merely average. You haven't even passed the magic 7 month mark. Service isn't BS, it is an essential part of this industry. So, rather than getting all pissy and defensive, you should listen to the people here who know what they are talking about and who have given you some very important advice. You wonder at why deeplist is thought so well of here? Its something called respect. Deeplist has earned the respect of most people here, both as a person and as a corporation, through his consistent actions over a long period of time. Maybe if you take a good hard look at how you've been representing yourself, you could have that respect someday too.

[TaoPhoenix]

Tao,
Lets get started with the forums. I received you answers and concerns. For users with zero experience, phpBB is the way to go. It has thousands of user-made plugins and styles, available for download here. (http://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/?sid=a2f49bdd85bb0633f2ca8397ebd60ca8) phpBB is great for new communities, and if your forums grow to be very large, they have a above-par member management system. PhpBB has a back-end admin panel, and is written in PHP. If you ever need support for phpBB, your covered. PhpBB has a very active support forum, so you can expect help when you need it fast.

As far as slashcode goes, that goes into the category of Other. We can install it, but our support for it would be limited. It is something we are not fluid with, therefor it is "at your own risk", in the sense that we can't provide support for it..

You asked for a subdomain, taophoenix. What application would you like for your main site? By that I mean your forums, blog, or wiki. I will make what you choose your main site and the other two subdomains (Ex: ______.taophoenix)
...

Thanks so much!
-Scott Murray
Owner

Okay then! Let us go with phpBB!

Please do an install for me, and I have selected some of the addons that look fun. I will probably do more at some point, but I don't want to exhaust you guys all at once!

Here is a list of the addons I would like. The basic theme is making things a little easier for users and just a dash of fun.

Full Quick Reply Editor
http://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/mod/full_quick_reply_editor/

Avatar on Memberlist
http://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/mod/avatar_on_memberlist/

NV advanced last topic titles
http://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/mod/last_post_topic_title/

Preserve Post Spaces
http://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/mod/preserve_post_spaces/

Forum prune move
http://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/mod/forum_prune_move/

Warning Reasons
http://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/mod/warning_reasons/

Edit profile link
http://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/mod/edit_profile_link_2/

phpBB Statistics
http://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/mod/phpbb_statistics/

(phpBB3) Super Quick Reply
http://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/mod/%28phpbb3%29_super_quick_reply/

Prime Trash Bin
http://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/mod/prime_trash_bin/

Latest Topic Title
http://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/mod/latest_topic_title_2/

[TaoPhoenix]

You asked for a subdomain, taophoenix. What application would you like for your main site? By that I mean your forums, blog, or wiki. I will make what you choose your main site and the other two subdomains (Ex: ______.taophoenix)


If you want to try something user-friendly (other than wordpress) for a blog application, why don't we start with dotclear. Its open source and written in PHP. Dotclear is an open-source web publishing software created in 2002. It was a one man's project at first, but Dotclear soon gathered a team comprising different personalities with various backgrounds. The project's purpose is to provide a user-friendly tool allowing anyone to publish on the web, regardless of their technical skills.

This is, in my opinion, the second best, user friendly blog engine out there (behind wordpress). I think it would be a wise choice to go down this road of user friendly blogs.

You said you wanted to save wordpress for last, but for more entry level users, I strongly recommend this. There is better support via their forum and more plugins/styles to choose from. But, that choice is up to you.


Thanks so much!
-Scott Murray
Owner

So dotclear it is! I'll live with proprietary software when necessary, but sometime it is useful to start with things like the open source program because of the ideology, and then if absolutely necessary, going proprietary. (I reluctantly did that with cPanel because of the file manager situation.)

I'll live with the "second best user friendly engine" if the only contender is Wordpress vs ideology! So let's try dotclear.

[TaoPhoenix]

Ok Tao,

I'm really liking the thoroughness of your reviews! Much learned.

You asked for a subdomain, taophoenix. What application would you like for your main site? By that I mean your forums, blog, or wiki. I will make what you choose your main site and the other two subdomains (Ex: ______.taophoenix)


Now for the wiki. I can install/configure this as soon as you let me know if it will be installed on your subdomain, or on a subdomain of your subdomain. I will await your reply.

After I receive your reply, I will setup the account, install the requested applications/configure them, and I will send you your acount information VIA EMAIL, to avoid any password theft here.

Thanks so much!
-Scott Murray
Owner

By a subdomain, I typically use taophoenix._____.___/______ where the first two dashes are your company url and the last is SomeFile.html etc.

So because at the moment these are all "equal value" let's install them as

taophoenix._____.___/wiki
taophoenix._____.___/forum
taophoenix._____.___/blog

and whatever file extension stuff is necessary. I don't really plan to mod the wiki much yet.

[Seraphim]

Oniscorp, Deeplist was not involved with the origins of this thread at all. In fact, he didn't even join until a few months ago when he slipped under the closing bell for the final round of entries. And to date there has been no evidence of unfair connections or conspiracies around him explaining his popularity. He's just that good that everyone likes him, and I hope that in time I will be able to gather a similar reputation for my own services. I'm working on it, but trust is something that has to be hard won and is easily lost.

He's well earned his position as the top host on this spread, and I'm going to make sure he has to keep working at it if he intends to stay there. I've rebounded from dead last in the past 6 months, and am never giving up on retaking the lead as I continue to improve with experience and time.

However you really should take a closer look at the marketplace conditions. Right now, there are some hundreds of thousands of free hosts all of which are as capable of hosting a given site as any other. One of the few places where a free host can possibly make a real difference for their clients and for their reputation is in customer service quality. Free hosting is your job, your boss is your clients. If they want something that you can reasonably provide them without risking security or the stability of your business, you should make every effort to give it to them. Otherwise they'll not be satisfied with your service, and not only will they not refer others to you but they would be far more likely to go find someone else that shows they care about their clients.

Paid hosting isn't really some magically higher level of quality either. What you are paying for is the resources you consume when you go paid- a free host instead pays for these by displaying ads on the client site or using a post2host arrangement to cover the operating expenses. That's all it really is at it's core is that the client compensates the host in money directly instead of through ad revenue or posts. The quality of service should be near-identical, and the only other advantage is the possibility of getting larger site capabilities or extra features only available to paid clients- usually intended as an incentive to go paid.

[theswagbayorg]

I have installed each app under the requested directories. I am now installing the prescribed mods onto the forums. As soon as that is complete, I will PM you your login details for each app.

Your domain is located at http://taophoenix.hostmything.com. You may see your site at any time during the installation process.

NOTE TO TAO: I did change my name from theswagbay to HostMyThing.com, and am setting up HostMyThing.com as my hosting site. I hope this isn't a problem, as you said people get mad here when hosts decide to change their name...xD.
-Scott

[oniscorp]

I know more than you think, I've Tao has informed me about the whole situation via PM. You have disregarded the free advice I gave you entirely (advice, coincidentally, that most companies have to pay me for) regarding the importance of good service in this industry, free or paid. Your actions have consistently proved that you are not great, merely average. You haven't even passed the magic 7 month mark. Service isn't BS, it is an essential part of this industry. So, rather than getting all pissy and defensive, you should listen to the people here who know what they are talking about and who have given you some very important advice. You wonder at why deeplist is thought so well of here? Its something called respect. Deeplist has earned the respect of most people here, both as a person and as a corporation, through his consistent actions over a long period of time. Maybe if you take a good hard look at how you've been representing yourself, you could have that respect someday too.

Again, twisting words. Is it that you simply cannot read, or do you always have to be such a kaniving person? Who called service 'BS'? No one, it was implied by you. Previously you also accused us of calling ourselves great, which we again did *not* do except in mocking the situation. You can't take people's sentences and mix them around however you want...you might as well have a conversation with yourself.

Good customer service is important, and that is what we have always provided. We do not bend over backwards to give everyone everything they desire; if you want this, find a paid host because they have money to take from you and therefore incentive to put up with anything you throw at them. What we do is provide a small number of users with free services they can use to reach out the world. We keep the websites up pretty much 24 hours per day and provide technical support on the same schedule. Our support staff is very accommodating and have yet to see anyone else disappointed.

[TaoPhoenix]

(Reversing the order slightly)

Hi Scott! Let me see if I have this straight -



I did change my name from TheSwagBay to HostMyThing.com, and am setting up HostMyThing.com as my hosting site.
Your domain is located at http://taophoenix.hostmything.com.
((From the other thread))...all sites come with Cpanel Access.
-Scott

Hostalope, if you ever had any more questions about our efforts together, this is my final exhibit. It contains precisely all the elements:
1. Public thread announcement of Host Branding Name change.
2. Subdomain on the current brand, spelled as requested
3. cPanel

Good luck with your other clients.

[TaoPhoenix]

My suggestion is to ask me directly, instead of guessing.

There may be many reasons, one of it has been provided in one of my last thread you've also replied in.
Also: specific tasks can require specific hosting.

Sure! What type of web services network are you building out of your components?

[Tyler]

Good customer service is important, and that is what we have always provided. We do not bend over backwards to give everyone everything they desire; if you want this, find a paid host because they have money to take from you and therefore incentive to put up with anything you throw at them. What we do is provide a small number of users with free services they can use to reach out the world. We keep the websites up pretty much 24 hours per day and provide technical support on the same schedule. Our support staff is very accommodating and have yet to see anyone else disappointed.

Out of curiosity, what makes you believe anyone would sign up with you and continue using you as their provider if this is the way you treat them?

[oniscorp]

Seraphim: Thank you sincerely for your suggestions. You clearly have a better understanding of the customer service side of things than we do. We'll try to keep them in mind when operating in the future. It is entirely believable that deeplist is not involved in any funny business, I'm not trying to throw around accusations, however with the onslaught of followers it does raise an eyebrow. We all know how easy it is to register with multiple usernames behind a proxy. 'Course, we are also new here and are not familiar with the familiars.

Tao: As previously mentioned, you are always welcome. Your data is still present on the server. We would be willing to provide you with the subdomain taophoenix.hostalope.com. I am not sure what you mean by item #1. Our name was changed a while back and making an announcement now is just going to confuse people. Please let us know. Thanks and best of luck to you and your studies.

Tyler: I believe because they do. We are offering a quality service at no cost to the user, without even a link back. We are not in this turn a profit, which is why it's not all "numbers, numbers, numbers!" with us. The fact that we keep the number of users to a lower number than many hosts is also why they see the improved performance. I'm not sure what to make of your "the way you treat them" shot...

[deeplist]

with the onslaught of followers it does raise an eyebrow. We all know how easy it is to register with multiple usernames behind a proxy. 'Course, we are also new here and are not familiar with the familiars.

I resent this. I've been on this forum for about 9.5 years longer than you have. That might just have a little bit to do with it. I also suggest that you focus on your own business rather than trying to worry about mine. I've done nothing to you and I have not interacted with you in any way, so I don't completely understand what your beef is with me. Now run along.

[oniscorp]

No beef and no runnin. I respect your seniority, but your personality I could do without. No comments were made to you, I simply commented on an observation. It's a forum, people do that. Deal with it.

[Logan1999]

All I can say is... -_-

[deeplist]

No beef and no runnin. I respect your seniority, but your personality I could do without.

First of all. You know nothing about my personality. I've neve spoke directly to you or interacted with you in any way.


No comments were made to you, I simply commented on an observation.

Maybe so, but you drug me into this for no apparent reason and made comments ABOUT me.


It's a forum, people do that. Deal with it.

You're really showing your --- here lately. I feel sorry for all of your clients who need help with something and receive a ----ty email saying. "Sorry you don't pay. Deal with it."

You've been on here, what? 3 months?? You think your ---- doesn't stink like everybody else? GTFO! -rep delivered.

[TaoPhoenix]

I feel sorry for all of your clients who need help with something and receive a ----ty email saying. "Sorry you don't pay. Deal with it."

Like this one?


--- On Mon, 8/15/11, root <root@hostalope.com> wrote:

> From: root <root@hostalope.com>
> Subject: Re: Fw: New Message: Old account
> To: "TaoPhoenix" <taophoenix@yahoo.com>
> Date: Monday, August 15, 2011, 6:56 AM
> Hello, Tao,
>
...
>
> For the subdomain, again I am sorry, but I must ask you to
> submit your request in the form of a request. For example,
> "May I please have my subdomain changed?" is a good format,
> notice how this is introduced as a question. I cannot
> guarantee approval even then, but if asked in the correct
> manner, it will at least be considered. We are not trying to
> nitpick here, but a certain amount of respect is expected.
> This is not something we do for very many people -- you are
> actually the only person outside our party who has a domain
> of Hostalope allocated to them.
>
> Please let us know if you have any questions.

[deeplist]

Like this one?

Precisely.

[theswagbayorg]

Wow, this is heated.

[TaoPhoenix]

Nah, not for too much longer. I want to welcome you HostMyThing to my monitoring pages! Just indicate if you agree to report temporary outages so that you can enter the "original competition rules" category. What that does is show users that business is business, sure blips happen, but that overall you are responsive.

To summarize an aphorism being worth a thousand words, what used to happen is the first warning sign of a host in trouble was that they clammed up when their servers started to blink, until one day they vanished. Some ten of my original 25 Alumni fell into that trap. So by reporting blips, it says that you are involved and focused on your clients. Most blips are weekly server reboots etc, say 7 minutes at a time, but even if you do a botch and mis-link some setting or whatever, ... just say so! Most clients don't really expect 100% uptime, we just get grumpy when the server goes down and the owner vanishes.

[TaoPhoenix]

Seraphim, when you get a moment, I'd like to try out your beta install of cPanel. Please send me my panel info with a copy here in PM and an email.

[deeplist]

Most blips are weekly server reboots etc, say 7 minutes at a time, but even if you do a botch and mis-link some setting or whatever, ... just say so!

If people actually knew how to effectively manage their boxes, restarts are rarely ever necessary. So if your host claims that they went offline for a few moments every week for a "server reboot", then they're doing something wrong.

[Tyler]

If people actually knew how to effectively manage their boxes, restarts are rarely ever necessary. So if your host claims that they went offline for a few moments every week for a "server reboot", then they're doing something wrong.

I would say a good 97% of the people out there don't even know how Linux manages memory. It's possible the "reboots" are to "lower the memory usage" :|

[Seraphim]

If people actually knew how to effectively manage their boxes, restarts are rarely ever necessary. So if your host claims that they went offline for a few moments every week for a "server reboot", then they're doing something wrong.

This completely. Linux does not require periodic reboots to keep it stable like Windows. Even at that though, my day job has a Windows 2008 Server that I tend to that has over 200 days without a reboot or serious problem.

A properly set up system that has no serious issues such as memory leaks or stability problems should not ever actually require a reboot other than when performing a kernel update in the absence of ksplice.

17:15:26 up 187 days, 17:14 is currently the longest of my own machines. The others have all had provider-induced outages or in the case of the CPanel machine were recently reinstalled.

PM coming shortly with that info Tao. I've got your account set up and your files copied, but have not yet changed over the DNS. I will do so now.

[TaoPhoenix]

Decent notes there guys. I'm flexible to give new host owners the benefit of the doubt if their skills are a little fuzzy! Then when they chime in like that, someone can drop them a tip, which is a nice side effect of my system.

[TaoPhoenix]

PM coming shortly with that info Tao. I've got your account set up and your files copied, but have not yet changed over the DNS. I will do so now.

I see it now, and my quick glance says it looks good! I'll do some real uploading in a few-ish days.

[Seraphim]

DNS changed. taophoenix.seraphimlabs.net should switch within the hour, while your domain name is going to take as many as 48 hours because the TTL is still counting down the changes from a few days ago.

[TaoPhoenix]

DNS changed. taophoenix.seraphimlabs.net should switch within the hour, while your domain name is going to take as many as 48 hours because the TTL is still counting down the changes from a few days ago.

What is the TTL / Time To Live? I thought that other domain info was all set because I was visiting it. And wasn't it like a week ago?

[TaoPhoenix]

HostMyThing, I see the cPanel install, and I threw some files up there along with a password change. I have to make a new version of my board but you're officially in by now on the duration timer.

[Seraphim]

Your main site was shortened to a 5 minute TTL several days ago. But I had apparently forgotten to prepare the TTL for your domain name, it is still showing a roughly 48 hour TTL that it picked up by default from one of the templates. I don't normally run them that long for any reason and need to search my templates to see why it got such a long ttl on it.

As a result I'll just run your account on both servers until all of the DNS has transferred, it should do so within a few days.
All of the currently visible records though have been corrected.

[lunny12]

I agree with your post. i need a host mail. It is very good for us when we are working on Internet.

[TaoPhoenix]

Your main site was shortened to a 5 minute TTL several days ago. But I had apparently forgotten to prepare the TTL for your domain name, it is still showing a roughly 48 hour TTL that it picked up by default from one of the templates. I don't normally run them that long for any reason and need to search my templates to see why it got such a long ttl on it.

As a result I'll just run your account on both servers until all of the DNS has transferred, it should do so within a few days.
All of the currently visible records though have been corrected.

Hmm. I'm getting a bounce NotFound on the old paths though Seraphim, so if you're running it on both servers I don't think that was supposed to be the result.

Both of these bounce for me.
http://taophoenix.seraphimlabs.net/ReVisionMobile.html
http://www.freevoteusa.com/index.html

[TaoPhoenix]

I agree with your post. i need a host mail. It is very good for us when we are working on Internet.

Hi lunny. Have you looked at Gmail? That is the US best webmail, so a useful piece of info is why that is not suitable for you before a host offers private webmail.

[Seraphim]

Hmm. I'm getting a bounce NotFound on the old paths though Seraphim, so if you're running it on both servers I don't think that was supposed to be the result.

Both of these bounce for me.
http://taophoenix.seraphimlabs.net/ReVisionMobile.html
http://www.freevoteusa.com/index.html

FreevoteUSA is actually working. I didn't find any files in it on the old server, so nothing was moved. If there should be let me know where you put it so I can copy it over.

taophoenix.seraphimlabs.net should be fixed now as well. For some reason my nameservers were not propagating it correctly to other nameservers.

Incidentally they both seem to have switched over and are running correctly on the new server.

[TaoPhoenix]

Hmm - I'm still confused, so I sent you a PM.

[TaoPhoenix]

Okay everyone,

Here is the latest board. The big new entry is HostMyThing, who will be my leadoff into the world of web apps, including some wikis, a (wide version) blog, and a forum! All that is still under development, so that's news for some other time.

However, the basic dashboard is up, and here is HostMyThing's copy.

http://taophoenix.hostmything.com/ReVisionMobile.html

(Edit - slight glitch on the order - first is Decker and 2nd is Seraphim - this was due to my misaligned versions.)

[deeplist]

At the time of posting this message, hostmything.com is not available.

[TaoPhoenix]

At the time of posting this message, hostmything.com is not available.

It looks back to me by this point. Scott, did you have a blip?

[deeplist]

It looks back to me by this point. Scott, did you have a blip?

Yeah, it's up for me now also.

[oniscorp]

> For the subdomain, again I am sorry, but I must ask you to
> submit your request in the form of a request. For example,
> "May I please have my subdomain changed?" is a good format,
> notice how this is introduced as a question. I cannot
> guarantee approval even then, but if asked in the correct
> manner, it will at least be considered. We are not trying to
> nitpick here, but a certain amount of respect is expected.
> This is not something we do for very many people -- you are
> actually the only person outside our party who has a domain
> of Hostalope allocated to them.
>
> Please let us know if you have any questions.

quote from deeplist:


Are you serious? Aside from the fact that nobody is going to just give you a dedicated server for nothing, nobody is going to be willing to "spunser" anything of yours if you can't even take a little time and make a decent request without making it look like a 3rd grader typed it out for you.

Precisely. Bias, bias, bias. This guy goes around saying stuff like this all day in threads around here in response to people's requests. Why is Hostalope being targeted?

[deeplist]

quote from deeplist:


Precisely. Bias, bias, bias. This guy goes around saying stuff like this all day in threads around here in response to people's requests. Why is Hostalope being targeted?

Bias? He agreed to take on Tao as a client and THEN acted like that. Please explain how that has anything to do with me? And in regards to the above post that I quoted of yours, I am simply giving these teens around here a reality check on their unrealistic offers.

[Seraphim]

Precisely. Bias, bias, bias. This guy goes around saying stuff like this all day in threads around here in response to people's requests. Why is Hostalope being targeted?

Because it is a new host that has a lot of talk but isn't backing it up with the same quality that other hosts are providing. I've been checking and re-checking Tao's sites on my equipment to make absolutely certain that I didn't lose any of his files while moving it to my new CPanel server. I actually did find out what happened just now, and PM'd him an explanation so he can decide if he wanted it to be re-set like it was on my other server or if I should set it up differently this time. I don't get anything from Tao at all other than a little bit of publicity, but I will still happily spend hours providing support to him if he needs it that way his site works the way he wants it to.

Plus the brief DNS issue showed me another flaw in my setup that I will have to watch for in the future. This time rather than risking data loss I was doing the DNS by hand to avoid clashing. What was happening was for some reason the zone wouldn't replicate out to all of my servers. Google in turn wouldn't pick up the data for it, causing the errors we were seeing. A quick check of the zone data revealed the reason why, it then replicated out and worked correctly.

Survive for 10 years and earn the same respect deeplist has, then try calling him out on these things. Because right now everyone else listens to what he is saying, recognizing him as an expert in the business even if he is a little harsh at times.

[TaoPhoenix]

At the time of posting this message, hostmything.com is not available.

Scott at HostMyThing sent along this note.

"That was my fault. I needed to reset the DNS zone for www.hostmything.com, and without thinking you were on a subdomain, I did it. Sorry about that. Next time I will post prior to doing such things.

-Scott "

He has some commitments to attend to for a couple of days, and then he hopes things to be smoother next week.

[deeplist]

Reset the DNS zone? That doesn't make any sense, but okay. If the zone template was reapplied, that would explain why your subdomain may have been inaccessible, but not the main site. And resetting the DNS server only takes less than 5 seconds, literally.

[TaoPhoenix]

Reset the DNS zone? That doesn't make any sense, but okay. If the zone template was reapplied, that would explain why your subdomain may have been inaccessible, but not the main site. And resetting the DNS server only takes less than 5 seconds, literally.

My dash does pull from my subdomain accounts, which is *often correlated* with a main site going down, but twice in a day we have some domain-move edge cases. Deeplist, did you happen to see if the prime site from HostMyThing was down earlier?

However, Scott has been making solid efforts at setting my apps up, so we're still doing fine so far. Even if he bumped something else while switching the domains, remember gang that the back half of my project is a learning experience for the hosts. That's why the reporting rule is there - It's only like "0.1" point off if a blip happens and the owner reports in. It's when cascading problems occur and the owner hides is when the big penalties start to show up.

[deeplist]

Deeplist, did you happen to see if the prime site from HostMyThing was down earlier?

Yes, it was down too. Tried your subdomain. Nothing. Tried their main site, nothing. Pinged it, no answer. Then 30 to 40 minutes later, both were accessible again.

http://i55.tinypic.com/akbiv5.png

[TaoPhoenix]

Hrmph. I'm getting another blip right now.
But I agreed to give Scott about a week because he's finishing up something else, and probably isn't really on top of his servers. But fair warning Scott, two blips on day 1 is a bit shaky!

[TaoPhoenix]

HostMyThing looks back, (could have been a while), though to be fair Seraphim has been having glitches, but he reports them fast.

[Seraphim]

What you're seeing from me is entirely coming from my unfamiliarity with CPanel based services. I'm still getting used to the way CPanel's controls are, and I must say I really don't like how CPanel is set up at all. It is hard to move around in it, and at the administrative levels it really doesn't give a lot of flexibility for configuration of clients. It's as if CPanel is designed for clients who know how to do things entirely on their own.

Webmin I can login and have access to everything i need to move sites around as necessary. So unless I am missing a key feature in CPanel it really seems to be complicating things needlessly.

My services are there, I am just getting a real crash course in working with CPanel is all.

[wswd]

cPanel is very easy to figure out and use, on both the admin and user side. Webmin still gives me the creeps. Maybe we could trade secrets. :) ha ha!

Seriously, if you need any help with something, I'm sure the majority of us here use cPanel and would be hapy to help.

[Seraphim]

cPanel is very easy to figure out and use, on both the admin and user side. Webmin still gives me the creeps. Maybe we could trade secrets. :) ha ha!

Seriously, if you need any help with something, I'm sure the majority of us here use cPanel and would be hapy to help.

In Webmin/Virtualmin, I pull up Taophoenix.seraphimlabs.net from the dropdown menu and it has all of his domain settings including subs aliases and addons right there with it.
Click that and give it a moment to load, and the menus update to show all of the options for his account. Doesn't matter if I am logged in as him directly or if I am logged in as root.

In CPanel, first off it won't let me do anything with his account at on the cpanel side unless I log in directly as him- which is inconvenient, but not impossible, and on the WHM side of it other than when logged in as him I don't see the options to manage the addon domains for the account. It only barely lets me modify the account at all, whereas I am used to being able to login as root and make whatever changes are needed in only a few clicks.

[deeplist]

I'm still getting used to the way CPanel's controls are, and I must say I really don't like how CPanel is set up at all. It is hard to move around in it, and at the administrative levels it really doesn't give a lot of flexibility for configuration of clients.

Don't worry. It will become 2nd nature eventually. After solely running Plesk for many many years, I experienced the same "culture shock" when I was new to cPanel.

[wswd]

In CPanel, first off it won't let me do anything with his account at on the cpanel side unless I log in directly as him- which is inconvenient, but not impossible, and on the WHM side of it other than when logged in as him I don't see the options to manage the addon domains for the account. It only barely lets me modify the account at all, whereas I am used to being able to login as root and make whatever changes are needed in only a few clicks.

To log in as the user, you can use his username and your root password (easy). You can also click on the cPanel logo under "list accounts" and it will log you in automatically to whatever user's cPanel. What are you trying to do with the add-on domains? It should be right in his cPanel account. You aren't going to find add-on domains in WHM. Also, what exactly are you trying to do as far as modifying the account is concerned?

[oniscorp]

Because it is a new host that has a lot of talk but isn't backing it up with the same quality that other hosts are providing. I've been checking and re-checking Tao's sites on my equipment to make absolutely certain that I didn't lose any of his files while moving it to my new CPanel server. I actually did find out what happened just now, and PM'd him an explanation so he can decide if he wanted it to be re-set like it was on my other server or if I should set it up differently this time. I don't get anything from Tao at all other than a little bit of publicity, but I will still happily spend hours providing support to him if he needs it that way his site works the way he wants it to.

Plus the brief DNS issue showed me another flaw in my setup that I will have to watch for in the future. This time rather than risking data loss I was doing the DNS by hand to avoid clashing. What was happening was for some reason the zone wouldn't replicate out to all of my servers. Google in turn wouldn't pick up the data for it, causing the errors we were seeing. A quick check of the zone data revealed the reason why, it then replicated out and worked correctly.

Survive for 10 years and earn the same respect deeplist has, then try calling him out on these things. Because right now everyone else listens to what he is saying, recognizing him as an expert in the business even if he is a little harsh at times.

Understood and well put :). I can see why your support has been praised: your messages actually make sense and do not sound like an attack :). If you are around as long as "the person in question", I can see you gaining much greater respect.

Good luck with cPanel. It gives me headache sometimes still as well, and I have a bit of experience from the admin's POV. Just remember that it does you the "favor" of overwriting pretty much every config file you change (apache_conf_distiller is a blessing at times, but it also doesn't seem to work sometimes either). I have thrown together a few scripts to make it compatible with nginx, so if you are planning on running that sort of setup, just let me know if you run into any trouble and I may be able to assist.

[deeplist]

If you are around as long as "the person in question", I can see you gaining much greater respect.

Thanks again for referencing me. You're too kind. :)

[oniscorp]

Much different response than I expected. Maybe you're not so bad after all, old timer...

[deeplist]

Much different response than I expected. Maybe you're not so bad after all, old timer...

If I'm considered to be an old timer at age 25, then you must be like 9 or 10 years old. I'm not so bad. Ask Seraphim, he's even called me a couple of times on the phone. :)

[theswagbayorg]

Quick Note:
HostMyThing.com is under construction, and will be down during the weekend. No clients will be affected. Clients can continue to log into cpanel, at www.hostmything.com/cpanel.
Thanks,
Scott Murray

[deeplist]

No clients will not be affected.

Double negative. So all clients will be affected?

[TaoPhoenix]

Hmm. Deeplist, I think it was a typo and he's saying either "no clients will be affected" or "No, clients will not be affected." That's one fun part of my public dash - If I am affected or not as a "quasi-typical" client.

He's really trying hard to report in, and on that track he's getting some early cred' towards any problems he may have later. Plus I have a string of solid tech support answers behind the scenes on install matters, so I really am rooting for him!

[theswagbayorg]

Sorry about that folks! That's not correct. Correction: No clients will be affected.
That was posted at ~2:00 am, my head must have been elsewhere :)
Sorry about any inconvenience this may have caused!
-Scott

[TaoPhoenix]

HostMyThing is loading up a big project for me! I hope for it to be a Revisionist Wikipedia with dramatically different principles, especially longer articles. (Making it harder to delete stuff "just because", and more!)

So it's an uncertain world, but he's making a ferocious start!

[TaoPhoenix]

Here we go!

Courtesy of HostMyThing, my first new project is up! It's a Law wiki I am calling LawPedia.

It's barebones right now, with only one sample article on it.

The basic Wiki is at
http://taophoenix.hostmything.com/lawpedia/index.php?title=Main_Page

My sample article is at
http://taophoenix.hostmything.com/lawpedia/index.php?title=Simon_Glik_Appeals_Decision

I haven't practiced wiki formatting yet, and a lot of these materials will be coming from PDFs so I later hope to get a formatting expert excited.

I am also pondering redesigning my "jump page" to have those content bars point to major projects, using the blog software HostMyThing is loading for me. Y'all can comment on that when I get around to that change. Though for my backups reasons, I'll probably have soft copies of the articles on other hosts too.

[Tyler]

http://dsservers.net/images/Screenshot-2011-08-29_23.48.29.png

[TaoPhoenix]

Heh -
Saw that coming Tyler, so I put in a question.

Yes,
the problem is your account is uploading Wikipedia! (lol) So, yes, the file is still uploading (its at 40%). Once it is uploaded, it will need to be decompressed, and then dumped into a mysql database. During this process, you might have a few blips, due to the resource limiter kicking in. Out of respect for my other clients, I can not not remove those limits.
Please bear with me, as this process is beyond resource intensive, Expect 1 more day for the upload, and at least 2 days for the decompress. After that, I will dump all those articles into the mysql database. I don't know how long this will take, but a lot of people say it takes a while. Either way, I will do my best!

Thanks for bearing with me!
-Scott Murray

[Tyler]

Heh -
Saw that coming Tyler, so I put in a question.

Yes,
the problem is your account is uploading Wikipedia! (lol) So, yes, the file is still uploading (its at 40%). Once it is uploaded, it will need to be decompressed, and then dumped into a mysql database. During this process, you might have a few blips, due to the resource limiter kicking in. Out of respect for my other clients, I can not not remove those limits.
Please bear with me, as this process is beyond resource intensive, Expect 1 more day for the upload, and at least 2 days for the decompress. After that, I will dump all those articles into the mysql database. I don't know how long this will take, but a lot of people say it takes a while. Either way, I will do my best!

Thanks for bearing with me!
-Scott Murray

What? Do you realize how little sense that made..... one day to upload and then two days to decompress?

Wow. I would bail now.

[TaoPhoenix]

What? Do you realize how little sense that made..... one day to upload and then two days to decompress?

Wow. I would bail now.

I'm not gonna start getting fierce until he slips bad.

My fault for posting his note without the right context.

In case you hadn't heard, he's doing a custom copy of Wikipedia for me besides the LawPedia which starts small. (Yes, two days to deal with a 3 meg blank wiki would be bad!)

I think he's using this file as his start -
"pages-articles.xml.bz2 – Current revisions only, no talk or user pages. (This is probably the one you want. The size of the 3 August 2011 dump is 7.0 GB compressed, approximately 31.2 GB uncompressed)"

So does that make any more sense now?

So since a 35 Gig account is more than the usual run of the mill free account, I'm okay with a few blips until he signs off as being all set. Given the tone over at Request X, if I'd "asked for it" cold, the crew would have slammed me.

He's getting serious support creds and has promised to help me with monthly backups, so even if one day a hurricane wipes him out, I'd have a backup left for someone else to try again - if anyone else chose to offer that size account!

[Tyler]

Oh, wow. 31GB? That's quite a bit!

[TaoPhoenix]

Oh, wow. 31GB? That's quite a bit!

Service. It's a Good Thing. And the company that is bringing it is HostMyThing. BaDing!

(Terms and Conditions apply, see Scott for details. Not available in Luxembourg.)

[deeplist]

I really think there's a flaw in your system. As long as folks report any downtime, it's forgiven. That's not how the real world works. If my electric company called me and told me that my service was going to be cut off for a while for "maintenance" I think I would be pretty pissed. Granted, transferring and decompressing 31 GB of data is quite a bit, but I fail to see how that justifies downtime. Any decent web server would be able to handle this without flinching. One client of mine has over 60GB of data in his account. He was transferring hosts because he's getting kicked off PAID hosts left and right for "using too much" resources. (Yeah, paid hosts kicking him off for using too much space. Go figure.) I decided to transfer the 60+ GB tarball and extract it late at night because of course it would be resource intrinsic. It was complete within a few hours. No downtime.

I'm glad to see a new guy on the field, but downtime because he "reset the DNS zone" or because he's "decompressing a file" seems more like excuses rather than actual reasons for downtime. Tao, I think you're being played on your ignorance, no offense.

[Schmarvin]

I really think there's a flaw in your system. As long as folks report any downtime, it's forgiven. That's not how the real world works. If my electric company called me and told me that my service was going to be cut off for a while for "maintenance" I think I would be pretty pissed. Granted, transferring and decompressing 31 GB of data is quite a bit, but I fail to see how that justifies downtime. Any decent web server would be able to handle this without flinching. One client of mine has over 60GB of data in his account. He was transferring hosts because he's getting kicked off PAID hosts left and right for "using too much" resources. (Yeah, paid hosts kicking him off for using too much space. Go figure.) I decided to transfer the 60+ GB tarball and extract it late at night because of course it would be resource intrinsic. It was complete within a few hours. No downtime.

I'm glad to see a new guy on the field, but downtime because he "reset the DNS zone" or because he's "decompressing a file" seems more like excuses rather than actual reasons for downtime. Tao, I think you're being played on your ignorance, no offense.

I agree. My small hosting server can still hold and access data with large transfers and operations. Just to test decompressing a 30GB file, I setup a 1GB VPS and tried it on a base setup of linux and apache. Everything worked fine with no downtime. Barely used any of the resources of the server.

It did take about 2 hours though.

[Seraphim]

I really think there's a flaw in your system. As long as folks report any downtime, it's forgiven. That's not how the real world works. If my electric company called me and told me that my service was going to be cut off for a while for "maintenance" I think I would be pretty pissed.

It must be nice to live in the city then. Out here in the hills I have to deal with this on a regular basis, the power will go out without warning and usually remains off for 8-10 hours at a time before a technician arrives in the area to inspect the lines and replace the fuse at the end of the street. I keep telling them that some of the trees keep touching it and they need to be trimmed, but of course the decision to do that comes from far higher up in the company. They do eventually get it working again every time, so it becomes just a nuisance not a serious problem. Now if I called for said technician and was in the dark for several days without a reason I'd be ever so slightly pissed.

It's not a good thing when outages happen, but as a smart consumer I come prepared for such things with UPSs protecting my equipment and a decent sized generator out in the garage. Running hosting is no different- outages are bad no matter what, but if you expect and prepare for them you aren't left in the dark for hours on end.

Reported outages are not completely forgiven. You do still lose points for it. Just you lose far less when you report the outage than if you try to cut and run, it's a difference of roughly .1 lost vs 1.0 lost if I remember Tao's numbers right.


As for the setup time, this concerns me greatly. Wikis tend to be very resource intensive, intensive enough that a mediawiki running on a quad core dedi against several thousand MMORPG fans is regularly driven to high CPU load and thermal shutdown by brute force overload. If he has to resource limit your account just to set the thing up, I wouldn't be surprised if you very quickly run into the resource limits again during actual usage of this wiki. I too have dumped large files as well, a roughly 2GB .tar took maybe 10 minutes max to unzip. Several days set up time means he's oversold and resource limiting to hide that fact.

Not only that, but the filesize reported is very unusual as well unless it includes a ton of templates. And I mean TONS of templates, they're usually tiny. One of my existing clients already hosts a wiki that they brought with them and has several years of data in it. Their entire account, containing both a PHPBB3 forum and this mediawiki for their written works, is only about 700MB. 35GB seems unreasonable for a new setup.

[deeplist]

It must be nice to live in the city then. Out here in the hills I have to deal with this on a regular basis, the power will go out without warning and usually remains off for 8-10 hours at a time before a technician arrives in the area to inspect the lines and replace the fuse at the end of the street. I keep telling them that some of the trees keep touching it and they need to be trimmed, but of course the decision to do that comes from far higher up in the company. They do eventually get it working again every time, so it becomes just a nuisance not a serious problem. Now if I called for said technician and was in the dark for several days without a reason I'd be ever so slightly pissed.

I understand what you're saying. Maybe that was a bad analogy on my part. The point that I was trying to make was that scheduled maintenance is one thing, but downtime caused by "applying a DNS template" or "extracting files" doesn't sit right with me. Nothing against the guy personally, but these seem like excuses for poor server management rather than anything else.

It hasn't been just a few times that this guy's server has been offline when I attempt to access Tao's page, there's been multiple times. I think there's some other underlying issue(s) here that shouldn't just be brushed off as "reported maintenance".

[TaoPhoenix]

...

Reported outages are not completely forgiven. You do still lose points for it. Just you lose far less when you report the outage than if you try to cut and run, it's a difference of roughly .1 lost vs 1.0 lost if I remember Tao's numbers right.


As for the setup time, this concerns me greatly. Wikis tend to be very resource intensive, intensive enough that a mediawiki running on a quad core dedi against several thousand MMORPG fans is regularly driven to high CPU load and thermal shutdown by brute force overload. If he has to resource limit your account just to set the thing up, I wouldn't be surprised if you very quickly run into the resource limits again during actual usage of this wiki. I too have dumped large files as well, a roughly 2GB .tar took maybe 10 minutes max to unzip. Several days set up time means he's oversold and resource limiting to hide that fact.

Not only that, but the filesize reported is very unusual as well unless it includes a ton of templates. And I mean TONS of templates, they're usually tiny. One of my existing clients already hosts a wiki that they brought with them and has several years of data in it. Their entire account, containing both a PHPBB3 forum and this mediawiki for their written works, is only about 700MB. 35GB seems unreasonable for a new setup.

Mashing up several notes, 32 Gigs is a direct quote from Wikipedia - it's a full copy of them with articles-only (no user pages) but supposedly with full revision history which I absolutely need. So if Wikipedia says 32 Gigs, I'll believe them. I rounded up for fun.

Going back up to the first line, it is roughly in line - these are in that 0.1 type category and even then I'm effectively batching a few of them during setup. Seraphim is right that my harshest marks go to the hosts who go silent because the early rounds were designed as early warnings against crash&burn hosts.

Back to the resource limits, I am playing a fine line here because elsewhere he began to collect Red-Reps by offering various phrases of Lots of Bandwidth. So I'm staying neutral during setup, I figured that would be worse than actual use. If it turns out you're right, he will indeed incur a few slightly higher penalties because it starts to stray into advertising issues etc.

Deeplist, I'm not positive I'm hearing 100% of everything either, but he's in that category of "strong charismatic starts" so there's a reason no one can touch you Green hosts for a long time - I have a good % chance calculated that this may be no more than "a learning experience plus some backups". He's not really fumbling badly yet, but there's definitely a missing link, whether he has no failover server, or some such.

For the early stages I'm banking the account size hard against these blips to see where it all shakes out. He's at least attempting everything I am asking, which includes the standard Study account plus three apps and he is reporting "most of the story" so this is far from a closed book. It's putting my scoring through the ringer!

[deeplist]

Deeplist, I'm not positive I'm hearing 100% of everything either, but he's in that category of "strong charismatic starts" so there's a reason no one can touch you Green hosts for a long time - I have a good % chance calculated that this may be no more than "a learning experience plus some backups". He's not really fumbling badly yet, but there's definitely a missing link, whether he has no failover server, or some such.

Understood. I'm just saying from another hosts' perspective, there's undoubtedly some issues going on behind the scenes here that are being covered up with excuses. Good luck though.

[TaoPhoenix]

Understood. I'm just saying from another hosts' perspective, there's undoubtedly some issues going on behind the scenes here that are being covered up with excuses. Good luck though.

Sure, let's hold onto this quote a a nice summary and see what rolling the clock forward does.

[wswd]

If you would like a suggestion TaoPhoenix, I personally think you should be doing your "research" anonymously. I can almost guarantee you that if some guy off the street tried uploading 30GB to most free providers, he'd be shown the door in short order. In fact, I've heard the stories of just that happening regularly, and with far less than 30GB.

The preferential treatment you're receiving from some hosts (i.e. special notifications of downtime, 30GB of data, etc.) really begins to taint any legitimate research.

Just an observation...

[TaoPhoenix]

If you would like a suggestion TaoPhoenix, I personally think you should be doing your "research" anonymously. I can almost guarantee you that if some guy off the street tried uploading 30GB to most free providers, he'd be shown the door in short order. In fact, I've heard the stories of just that happening regularly, and with far less than 30GB.

The preferential treatment you're receiving from some hosts (i.e. special notifications of downtime, 30GB of data, etc.) really begins to taint any legitimate research.

Just an observation...

Hiya!

Last I recall you had a ... "complicated" ... reply to my efforts last time! However a 1-Gig Standard Study slot is still open if you wanted it!

Research can do a lot of things. I draw heavily off not simply being one more anonymous twerp who can be brushed off like a bug. My standard study is hysterically easy. "Keep your server up". Since you're pretty good, you'd have nothing to report, right? By now it's mostly agreed that 1Gig is certainly sensible as an emerging standard, some hosts can do okay offering less, but it's far from the Taj Mahal. It was my early heuristic against oversellers - in general there's no specific benefit to be gained by offering 2 Gigs, or 5 Gigs - while nice, at that point it's a non-measured data item. No Ads, No Posting. It's my universal standardizer to hopefully avoid being dragged into managerial bartering. Everyone starts with essentially the same initial study account. Then we just let the clock tick.

The fun begins when loud talking new hosts take their chance. My fundamental marketing "service" is a semi-objective third party rating service which is mostly separate from the noise of the ad columns. "I don't care what you say in your ad, just keep your dashboard light up for FWS". As has happened a few times, anyone else in FWS is free to chime in when they see a host blip. That's what public monitoring is. So while you think it sounds soft-shoed, if I don't call it someone else will, and then the host is still stuck explaining why they have blippy service. The day they suddenly run and hide is generally some 3 months from them folding altogether. But don't believe me! Check the results. Graph them and make a nice fairly sloping line. The "dark side" of my service is when a host decides to fold, I/Thread Spectators catch it first, and then all of FWS knows. So I have had my part in demonstrating that starting a hit and run host for the infamous 7 months will eventually catch up to the owner, so they can't just count on collective forgetting anymore. A few wheeler-dealers know that and "turnover" new hosts, but so be it. Take your average lost new client who says "I want a durable host" and I have some answers to produce. Remember, those were the only entrance requirements. 1 Gig account, No Ads, No Posts. Pretty easy right? I only got 30 out of 500 hosts here. Why? Because some 300 of the rest didn't trust themselves to be around in a year. Let's call the other 170 "other reasons", of which you were one, once.

Now, can build in some auxilliary objectives! Did you happen to closely read some of (now called) HostMyThing's early ads? Combined they read "Just let us put an ad on your pages and you can have lots of resources! If it has a database, we will host it!" I said, "Sure." Therefore that is essentially not preferential treatment because that was how he stumbled into his current red rep rating - by over-offering - so I called him on it, and here I am. Now, there have absolutely been some quality comments from the "Interested Observers" that there is a piece of this puzzle I do not get, and I have already remarked on the early blips in service. Those "blips are not preferential" - no one really voluntarily damages service provided. I am like a pressure cooker. HMT took a "gambit" - if he can hold it together and add more resources he will succeed brilliantly; if he gets stuck, the results will show up here in the eval metrics long before the final last gasp.

Sure, my accounts are "Owner-Couponed" higher than normal specs because they are marketing showcase accounts. I do give hosts a foot or two of wiggle room, but not forever, as the trail of Alumni shows. Only four hosts out of the entire cadre here have passed the test in the Green rounds. That is why I really don't care much about the usual micro critiques in the Ad columns - because I stand by my methodology. "Keep your dashboard up without a blip for 7 months and the world will notice. Fail to hold your business together and nothing else you advertise matters."

Lastly, I have demonstrated what the process for Fly By Nights looks like, and by now after about four complete iteration cycles, the Spectator gang is starting to catch on to the humor of it all. "Hi WatermelonHost, Welcome to the study! ... Hmm, you're blipping. Any comments? ... Watermelon Host has closed. No Green Badge for you. Next!" While other factors contributed to the prevailing mood of the time now, the flurry of starter hosts is no longer here. And by this point, neither am I interested to repeat the early rounds. Now I am looking for fewer hosts who have something extra about them to explore.

Then after discovering the difficulty buried in the simplicity, my Alumni then often become the Spectators for future rounds.

[wswd]

Hiya!

Last I recall you had a ... "complicated" ... reply to my efforts last time! However a 1-Gig Standard Study slot is still open if you wanted it!

No, no. Not quite yet. My last answer still stands for now. I have nothing to prove.

Just thought though, that anonymous testing might provide a more objective comparison...that's all. If someone reading through the reviews notices, for example, that "Wow! This free host allowed Tao to use 5TB of bandwidth!" only to find out that most users are cut off or terminated at 20GB, what good is the review? I know that's not all you're trying to prove, but it certainly is a factor when reading reviews.

I was quite impressed with the 32GB, especially for a free host providing the great unattainable "unlimited" disk space and bandwidth. What I would be interesting in seeing, is whether or not every user can get away with that...or using hundreds of terabytes worth of bandwidth.

[theswagbayorg]

I was quite impressed with the 32GB, especially for a free host providing the great unattainable "unlimited" disk space and bandwidth. What I would be interesting in seeing, is whether or not every user can get away with that...or using hundreds of terabytes worth of bandwidth

I promise you I provide the same amount of resources for ALL of my clients. The only thing that is different in Tao's case is the fact that there is no ad on his homepage. Other than that, he is being treated as a normal client.

If you would like proof, I can provide you with an account for review purposes, or, even just to keep! Let me know,
-Scott

PS Tao: The Wikipedia upload is at 90%. I will start the process of decompressing the file when it is complete.

[TaoPhoenix]

No, no. Not quite yet. My last answer still stands for now. I have nothing to prove.

Just thought though, that anonymous testing might provide a more objective comparison...that's all. If someone reading through the reviews notices, for example, that "Wow! This free host allowed Tao to use 5TB of bandwidth!" only to find out that most users are cut off or terminated at 20GB, what good is the review? I know that's not all you're trying to prove, but it certainly is a factor when reading reviews.

I was quite impressed with the 32GB, especially for a free host providing the great unattainable "unlimited" disk space and bandwidth. What I would be interesting in seeing, is whether or not every user can get away with that...or using hundreds of terabytes worth of bandwidth.

What you're missing is that HostMyThing created a brand new additional category, which is Ads for Educational Services plus Extended Hosting. We've already seen HMT's rate limiter kick in, which has been discussed and speculated on. The standard design uses virtually *NO* bandwidth, as well as modest disk use. All it does is pull the dashboard graphic. That is why it has worked fairly well so far - "If the host can't even manage to keep Tao's dashboard up, check their homepage - look it's down!"

What you're describing is Bandwidth Cheating, which is noted, though it has only happened about twice in 30 and I took a strong stance to prevent it in a third. The two times hosts did try it, they messed up another telltale and by that point they were folding anyway. It hasn't been required yet but I'd welcome other clients reporting in disturbing results. Remember my base metric is (host) Life Or Death, not really performance. If a host is so tightly balanced that they have to micromanage 500 megs per month of bandwidth, then they eventually show the strain and the rest rolls downhill.

[deeplist]

In all honesty, I completely agree with wswd here. Hosts who know they're being studied can (and will) treat the test accounts differently or provide them with preferential treatment, whether it's admitted or not. For example, the host logs into their support panel and sees 12 new support tickets, 2 of which are from the "test" account. The host reviews those tickets first. Even if he doesn't act upon them, or do anything with them right away, just the fact that he reviewed them first shows bias. That's just an example, but do you see what I mean?


Blind Experiment: a scientific experiment where some of the persons involved are prevented from knowing certain information that might lead to conscious or subconscious bias on their part, invalidating the results.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_experiment

Is this a "scientific" experiment. No, but you get what the point that I'm trying to make?

Just the fact that you're doing this wiki project on one host and not the rest has ruined the results. Why? Because the tests are no longer uniform across the board. Does it put somebody at an advantage because they're doing additional work for you? Maybe, maybe not... BUT what if one of the "test subject's" server configuration could not support the wiki? Would that affect the outcome? How would you know this unless you're performing the same test across the board?

Just my 2 cents worth and my psychology lessons coming back to me from my freshman year of college.

[Seraphim]

Just the fact that you're doing this wiki project on one host and not the rest has ruined the results. Why? Because the tests are no longer uniform across the board. Does it put somebody at an advantage because they're doing additional work for you? Maybe, maybe not... BUT what if one of the "test subject's" server configuration could not support the wiki? Would that affect the outcome? How would you know this unless you're performing the same test across the board?

The study itself was purely a matter of could the hosts not croak. In that regard the current set of hosts has been successful and should continue to be.
Now Tao is learning what these hosts can do for him. The study itself is pretty much over unless people start disappearing again.

By your logic though the study has actually been over for several months- Tao has a domain name that is currently pointed at me only. I don't think it matters at this point, he has the study files and continues to monitor the participants, while also trying out other services these hosts can offer.

I'll say this right out, there is no way I could put up a 30+GB Wiki for free. That would require me to make an account even larger than the largest of my paid plans. I'd have to sit down and figure out what it would actually cost to offer such a thing, but it would probably run more than $20 a month. The wiki itself isn't the issue though unless it gathers magnitudes of traffic, it's just the raw size of the content.

But very few sites ever actually see that much content at once, even highly active ones. To date most of the active sites I've gotten stats for end up around 700MB grand total for well-aged active sites. Their bandwidth consumption though depends entirely on traffic and content.

[TaoPhoenix]

In all honesty, I completely agree with wswd here. Hosts who know they're being studied can (and will) treat the test accounts differently or provide them with preferential treatment, whether it's admitted or not. For example, the host logs into their support panel and sees 12 new support tickets, 2 of which are from the "test" account. The host reviews those tickets first. Even if he doesn't act upon them, or do anything with them right away, just the fact that he reviewed them first shows bias. That's just an example, but do you see what I mean?


Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_experiment

Is this a "scientific" experiment. No, but you get what the point that I'm trying to make?

Just the fact that you're doing this wiki project on one host and not the rest has ruined the results. Why? Because the tests are no longer uniform across the board. Does it put somebody at an advantage because they're doing additional work for you? Maybe, maybe not... BUT what if one of the "test subject's" server configuration could not support the wiki? Would that affect the outcome? How would you know this unless you're performing the same test across the board?

Just my 2 cents worth and my psychology lessons coming back to me from my freshman year of college.

I just as strongly but politely disagree with you gentlemen. "Hosts who know they're being studied can (and will) treat the test accounts differently or provide them with preferential treatment..." Great! Please do! Regular policies of hosts are filled with aggressive anti-abuse measures which produce Artificial Negatives. Login requirements, Managerial policies that change at whims, "Post or Lose", and more. I want none of that complicating things. "Gimme an account, turn off all the timers, and then let it ride."

There are all kinds of science designs that don't involve Blind. This isn't medicine. It's more like "Pressure of the Spotlight". All the little warning signs that never get noticed when clients are interchangeable are what I specialize in. "When the host can't keep the Flagship Account up, then there are problems". Right now I essentially have a 100% success rate with 0% False Positives. IsMyWebsite is struggling, but so far they're still up. The other three of all are cruising happily. Of the rest some 20 entrants failed, and some seven more became disqualified through penalties.

HostMyThing has essentially two experiments going. They're still in their first month of the standard level, so quite literally "no meaningful results are in". Meanwhile they are practicing a fairly strong support level for advanced install services. If my example leads them to revise their ad copy down, great! That was that goal, against the aggressive ads that earned them the Red Rep. Once again, Experiment Succeeded. To be sure, they're taking on a dangerous gambit - the undertone here "Wants them to fail for their hubris", but "see y'all at Christmas", if they pull it off fair and square, they will have rewritten the bar of hosting. The Superpedia is a Special Purpose Item. The ones I consider normal are the smaller LawPedia, the Blog, and the Forum, and even those are higher end.

Sure, there's 20% missing from the story we haven't heard yet from HostMyThing, but that's what the 4 months are for.

[deeplist]

There are all kinds of science designs that don't involve Blind. This isn't medicine. It's more like "Pressure of the Spotlight".

I understand. It's your study and by all means conduct it how you see fit. I'm just throwing down my view on it. Take it for what it's worth. I'm just saying that when the scales are tipped in your favor over the other clients that are using the same service, the validity of your results could be questionable.

[TaoPhoenix]

I understand. It's your study and by all means conduct it how you see fit. I'm just throwing down my view on it. Take it for what it's worth. I'm just saying that when the scales are tipped in your favor over the other clients that are using the same service, the validity of your results could be questionable.

I appreciate the discussion! Since my primary metric is total life or death of a host, everything below that is heuristics. To all of FWS, I will buy a "medium" lunch worth $12 for the first three clients who sign up to any of my top 3 hosts or RLS Hosting by the end of Labor Day Weekend and posts a hello thread here, only to find that host completely closed for business by the end of the month. (IsMyWebsite is under a cloud, so I am thinking about them.) (Artificially Launched DDOS attacks do not count.)

[TaoPhoenix]

Oho! Here we go!

http://taophoenix.hostmything.com/cgi-sys/suspendedpage.cgi

HostMyThing, you took a gambit/gamble shooting for the moon! Unfortunately, you might have overplayed your hand!

I just got an Account Suspended note, which means that you were at least two layers down, which was why the hosts a level up observing here were remarking on the technics of your upload process!

Unfortunately, you now have a bad penalty that speaks against your "Large Bandwidth" claim!

Any comments? You're in the category of Charismatic Overseller. Remember, failure to report NOW is a disqualifying Grand Slam.

Meanwhile to my discussants, that is also the Spotlight effect - produce the end results months ahead of the standard trickle into oblivion.

[TaoPhoenix]

(Repost of DeepList's comment - For some reason I am having trouble viewing it in the normal thread.)

All that shows us is that he's not in control of the servers and is merely a reseller somewhere. Somebody higher up the chain must have decided enough is enough.
Time to rebuild my host spread

[theswagbayorg]

Wow, there is quite the discussion going on here!
Deeplist + Seraphim, I know you think I am only providing these services "exclusively" for Tao, but that is far from the case.

You need to view this from my perspective to understand why I offer such services.

-On all of my free accounts, I request my clients to add our advert code to their site. It must be visible on all of their pages, either in the header or footer.

-When I help clients build quality sites, That results in more traffic to their site, and therefor my company makes more $$$

-If a client's website is larger, that results in more ad impressions/clicks, more $$$

With my current clients, I am able to pay for my server, and make my profit margin each month. And, in all Honestly, its easier than running a paid web host (which I have done in the past). I think you should seriously reconsider your views on free web hosting. I believe ANYONE should have access to free web hosting, maybe for a family site, or even a community homepage. That's what inspired me to start my free web hosting quest in the first place. And, thus far, I have been able to deliver. Yes, like you guys mentioned, I have had a few blips, and go ahead and give me a penalty for it. I deserve it. But, please, do not give me grief for providing free, quality hosting. If you seriously do not believe me, try it out for yourself.

Now, I have no hard feelings for anyone, I just hope we can get by this whole "he offers all those resources for free" thing. If you seriously can't understand why I can offer this, try out my hosting and see for yourself! :)

[deeplist]

And Tao's page being suspended? I am curious about this one...

[TaoPhoenix]

Wow, there is quite the discussion going on here!
Deeplist + Seraphim, I know you think I am only providing these services "exclusively" for Tao, but that is far from the case.

You need to view this from my perspective to understand why I offer such services.

-On all of my free accounts, I request my clients to add our advert code to their site. It must be visible on all of their pages, either in the header or footer.

-When I help clients build quality sites, That results in more traffic to their site, and therefor my company makes more $$$

-If a client's website is larger, that results in more ad impressions/clicks, more $$$

With my current clients, I am able to pay for my server, and make my profit margin each month. And, in all Honestly, its easier than running a paid web host (which I have done in the past). I think you should seriously reconsider your views on free web hosting. I believe ANYONE should have access to free web hosting, maybe for a family site, or even a community homepage. That's what inspired me to start my free web hosting quest in the first place. And, thus far, I have been able to deliver. Yes, like you guys mentioned, I have had a few blips, and go ahead and give me a penalty for it. I deserve it. But, please, do not give me grief for providing free, quality hosting. If you seriously do not believe me, try it out for yourself.

Now, I have no hard feelings for anyone, I just hope we can get by this whole "he offers all those resources for free" thing. If you seriously can't understand why I can offer this, try out my hosting and see for yourself! :)

Hang on tight though Scott, your nice note came in one minute too soon - An Account Suspended is more than a blip! What is your position?

[theswagbayorg]

Also, Tao,
That's my bad, as I am decompressing the file now. The file is 100% uploaded.

[TaoPhoenix]

Also, Tao,
That's my bad, as I am decompressing the file now. The file is 100% uploaded.

Stay with me Scott, that's not the question. You are the "Owner" at "Your Level", therefore you would never do such a thing. As has been suggested, there are several higher steps up, such that a 35 Gig file blew out your capacity. I need a lot of detail, right now, for you to hold your place and not get skunked.

Welcome to the Spotlight!

I only ask this next question once these red zones are reached. Who is your upstream?

[theswagbayorg]

Ok,
I uploaded a 7.2 GB file over 3 days. Just an hour ago, I started to decompress the file. Obviously, the resource limiter kicked in again, resulting in account suspension. I can't really say more than "its my fault, I shouldn't have used file manager to decompress the file. I should have used SSH, to avoid the limiter". I really hope you do not drop me for this, but if you do, I understand. I will continue to offer my services.
I will revert the account suspension ASAP. I need to take a trip to my provider, It shouldn't be long. But, I guess what I need to know is, do you still want to be my client? If so, I will continue the SuperPedia quest. I just need to see the words, "lets do this" in a reply.
-Scott

[deeplist]

I call BS. What did you do, upload 7.2GB with FTP under the client's login details? If so, then you fail as a server admin. I don't understand why you wouldn't have used SFTP and uploaded it on your side of the realm so the client's resources wouldn't have been consumed... if that's really what happened.

[TaoPhoenix]

Hi Scott,

Your humility is noted by one and all. However, this is where I put on my fierce Host Rating hat on. What this episode shows is that your upstream doesn't "throttle activity for as long as it takes", but instead "threatens account suspension" when any sufficient resource is used. The Gallery has remarked that using a Wiki will also spike resource usage, so that we now have a lingering suspend threat even from ordinary usage. What are the Per-user stats you are allowed to offer and who is your upstream? In my role of reviewer, you unfortunately walked right into my study design of the "Flagship" - if I got suspended from one good resource hit, how do we know that regular clients won't see that either?

I will advise that your original ads *specialized* in high end applications, and those apps are *more likely* to produce resource spikes. What can you do to put in a Guaranteed Throttle so that no client will be suspended for innocent usage, and only slowed according to well published specs, and what are those specs?

[Tyler]

Ok,
I uploaded a 7.2 GB file over 3 days. Just an hour ago, I started to decompress the file. Obviously, the resource limiter kicked in again, resulting in account suspension. I can't really say more than "its my fault, I shouldn't have used file manager to decompress the file. I should have used SSH, to avoid the limiter". I really hope you do not drop me for this, but if you do, I understand. I will continue to offer my services.
I will revert the account suspension ASAP. I need to take a trip to my provider, It shouldn't be long. But, I guess what I need to know is, do you still want to be my client? If so, I will continue the SuperPedia quest. I just need to see the words, "lets do this" in a reply.
-Scott

I have two issues with this reply.

1) Why would excessive CPU usage (when you decompressed the file) cause a suspension? Would it not make more sense to simply hard cap CPU usage per process?

2) Why do you need to "take a trip to your provider". As far as I know, SoftLayer/100TB.com wouldn't care at all for your HDD/CPU usage leading me to believe you're reselling off another host... and if so, do they even allow you to give out free hosting?

[Tyler]

Actually, I'm more curious about why his account is still suspended... I'm going to take a wild guess and say it's related to number 2.

[deeplist]

As far as I know, SoftLayer/100TB.com wouldn't care at all for your HDD/CPU usage leading me to believe you're reselling off another host... and if so, do they even allow you to give out free hosting?

Bingo.

[TaoPhoenix]

I have two issues with this reply.

1) Why would excessive CPU usage (when you decompressed the file) cause a suspension? Would it not make more sense to simply hard cap CPU usage per process?

2) Why do you need to "take a trip to your provider". As far as I know, SoftLayer/100TB.com wouldn't care at all for your HDD/CPU usage leading me to believe you're reselling off another host... and if so, do they even allow you to give out free hosting?

Are we looking at a 4-level chain like the one you were involved with Back In 'Da Days there Tyler? So this SoftLayer/100TB.com is say the second level, Master Reseller below the data center, then he has some third level above that? I'm starting to become a little sad though, I assumed he was a level higher where he had the resources to spare. And now his replies are a bit thin.

[deeplist]

1) Data Center
2) Server Administrator
3) Alpha Gamma Master Omega (whatever) Reseller
4) Standard Reseller
5) End User


Levels 1, 2 are always present no matter what. Level 3 and/or level 4 can SOMETIMES be present depending on the situation.

As an end user, you'd want to deal with level 2 directly whenever possible. It cuts out the middle men, and removes unnecessary links from the chain and therefore removes points of failure. Ideally, you would have a 3 tier structure:

1) Data Center
2) Server Admin
3) End User

[Tyler]

Are we looking at a 4-level chain like the one you were involved with Back In 'Da Days there Tyler? So this SoftLayer/100TB.com is say the second level, Master Reseller below the data center, then he has some third level above that? I'm starting to become a little sad though, I assumed he was a level higher where he had the resources to spare. And now his replies are a bit thin.

Well, based on his responses (and the fact he went offline after I mentioned that..) I'm going to assume this is his setup:

SoftLayer (server provider) - Reseller Host - Hostmything - You

Although, if you want to just go out there -- sometimes you get a chain like this:

SoftLayer - Reseller Host - Reseller - Hostmything - You

Or even:

SoftLayer - Reseller Host - Master Reseller - Reseller - Hostmything - You.

[TaoPhoenix]

Well, based on his responses (and the fact he went offline after I mentioned that..) I'm going to assume this is his setup:

SoftLayer (server provider) - Reseller Host - Hostmything - You

Although, if you want to just go out there -- sometimes you get a chain like this:

SoftLayer - Reseller Host - Reseller - Hostmything - You

Or even:

SoftLayer - Reseller Host - Master Reseller - Reseller - Hostmything - You.

I'm thinking it's as bad as the last two scenarios. It's like that Dr. Who puzzle from Tom Baker's era, "If I were to ask your cohort his statement, what would he say" - and if *either side* wasn't telling the truth, the final answer comes out false. Here, "Account Suspended" smells like an emotional reaction if there were two layers above him, because then his Next-Level-Up would be "running scared". If he was high enough up his answers would be different.

This looks worse the longer it stews because he either he didn't know, or if *he* was lied to, then "what would your upstream say" then is something he can't control, ... which also makes it hard to recommend him.

[theswagbayorg]

I am in fact a Alpha Reseller, based out of Dallas, TX. I do have a plan that provides me with unlimited diskspace and resources. My host takes 20% of my ad income. That was the deal I got out of them. Space for ads. They were very happy with my request, an thought it I was a pioneer in the hosting industry. Obviously, they cannot provide me with unlimited CPU or memory, as I do not have a dedicated server yet. That what got Tao's account suspended in the first place, as there is a cap placed on stand alone processes (such as a decompress).
I just talked to my server Admin, via live chat, and he said they would be willing to decompress the file from their end. They like your idea, and said they will need to move a few of their clients off of the server I am on in order to provide. I need the green flag to do this.

I don't want to lose my reputation because I I had a blip providing a free client with a wikipedia mirror!

[deeplist]

I am in fact a Alpha Reseller

^ And HERE is the missing piece to the puzzle.

[theswagbayorg]

What? How is that the missing piece of the puzzle?

[TaoPhoenix]

^ And HERE is the missing piece to the puzzle.

I am dying to know too.

[deeplist]

What? How is that the missing piece of the puzzle?

Read thoroughly back through the last couple pages in the thread.

By the way. This is proof that "unlimited" BS isn't really unlimited, and it'll just get you ----canned.

[TaoPhoenix]

I am in fact a Alpha Reseller, based out of Dallas, TX. I do have a plan that provides me with unlimited diskspace and resources. My host takes 20% of my ad income. That was the deal I got out of them. Space for ads. They were very happy with my request, an thought it I was a pioneer in the hosting industry. Obviously, they cannot provide me with unlimited CPU or memory, as I do not have a dedicated server yet. That what got Tao's account suspended in the first place, as there is a cap placed on stand alone processes (such as a decompress).
I just talked to my server Admin, via live chat, and he said they would be willing to decompress the file from their end. They like your idea, and said they will need to move a few of their clients off of the server I am on in order to provide. I need the green flag to do this.

I don't want to lose my reputation because I I had a blip providing a free client with a wikipedia mirror!

Yes please, go ahead and do this! This is enough of a reply to keep you from quite getting SuperSkunked out. However, fair warning, that you have essentially a double penalty right now, both that your ads were aggressively promoting "as much as you want", followed by some kind of mix of bad communication and bad skills on your upsides to let it go all the way to a suspension.

So patch it back up, load it all, and let's go. You squeaked by this round! Quick guess is you have a 1.8 penalty on a 3.2 point scale. Translated, one more big goof and more of those local blips will sink you. Good Luck!

[TaoPhoenix]

Read thoroughly back through the last couple pages in the thread.

By the way. This is proof that "unlimited" BS isn't really unlimited, and it'll just get you ----canned.

Yep, and I factored that into my grading. It's not quite fatal for him yet, but this was pretty ugly.

[deeplist]

they will need to move a few of their clients off of the server I am on in order to provide.

This is NOT okay because what that shows is that you're already on an overcrowded and oversold server. This is only going to make more headaches down the road.

[TaoPhoenix]

This is NOT okay because what that shows is that you're already on an overcrowded and oversold server. This is only going to make more headaches down the road.

Noted for future discussion! So this event is mostly resolved by now, but a lot of new info came to light! Scott I would still like some hard info from you on how we can avoid future spikes to any and all clients from getting Suspended notes.

[theswagbayorg]

Tao. I'm really sorry about all this, actually, I'm sorry to all the fellow web hosts here. I am going to get this resolved the right way. I am talking to my team (friends that take part in helping me, plus funding) About purchasing a dedicated server. I am working on it now.
If anybody knows of any good hosts, please let me know.
Thanks,
-Scott

[deeplist]

Tao. I'm really sorry about all this, actually, I'm sorry to all the fellow web hosts here. I am going to get this resolved the right way. I am talking to my team (friends that take part in helping me, plus funding) About purchasing a dedicated server. I am working on it now.
If anybody knows of any good hosts, please let me know.
Thanks,
-Scott

Scott, I would suggest purchasing your dedicated server directly from SoftLayer. They're the best provider out there, hands down. If you can't afford premium services from SL, check into LimeStone networks.

If you have any other questions, contact me via PM again and I'll help you out.

[Tyler]

Tao. I'm really sorry about all this, actually, I'm sorry to all the fellow web hosts here. I am going to get this resolved the right way. I am talking to my team (friends that take part in helping me, plus funding) About purchasing a dedicated server. I am working on it now.
If anybody knows of any good hosts, please let me know.
Thanks,
-Scott

I think what you need to be concerned about is if you have a system administrator that is capable of fully securing your server, and not money.

[deeplist]

I think what you need to be concerned about is if you have a system administrator that is capable of fully securing your server, and not money.

^ Also a very good point.

If you're not proficient in Linux server administration (or at least have somebody on your team who is) I wouldn't go this route just yet.

[Seraphim]

Wow, there is quite the discussion going on here!
Deeplist + Seraphim, I know you think I am only providing these services "exclusively" for Tao, but that is far from the case.


That wasn't what I intended to seem like at all. Originally Tao's account with me was in fact special, as it was precisely double my free plan at the time in order to meet his entry requirements. I later on standardized his plan as my DoubleFree plan, which has gone on to be quite popular. But in fact he actually still is my only free client to be ad-free, everybody else that isn't paid has one or more google ads on their site.

My point was that you're taking a big risk giving away such large amounts of capacity. Normally that will get attention- at first you'll be the talk of the town blowing the competition out of the water. But very quickly it becomes negative as others with experience realize that it isn't economical most of the time without overselling it in some way or risking incidents like what has happened.


Tao. I'm really sorry about all this, actually, I'm sorry to all the fellow web hosts here. I am going to get this resolved the right way. I am talking to my team (friends that take part in helping me, plus funding) About purchasing a dedicated server. I am working on it now.
If anybody knows of any good hosts, please let me know.
Thanks,
-Scott

I'll PM you some info to the people that I got my first dedi from on the Netelligent network. They still do offer them, I just changed providers so as to see what else is out there. But to this day I've never seen such a clean network.

Lately though I've been enjoying the capabilities of DimeNoc Orlando for my new CPanel machine that Tao was moved to. You might want to look into what they have to offer as well.


^ Also a very good point.

If you're not proficient in Linux server administration (or at least have somebody on your team who is) I wouldn't go this route just yet.

This would be a good idea. It's not horrible to learn if you're savvy with google, but you do have to be careful out there.

As for the account suspended issue, always have to watch out for that kind of thing. Resource limits like that are most often used by oversellers to micromanage their services for maximum profitability, and encounters like this one just give away their presence. Under normal circumstance only abusive activity should ever hit it, and to that end you as the administrator need to take care not to create such activity under a limited user's account.

[theswagbayorg]

Ok, HostMyThing is getting a makeover.
Same name, different policy, and maybe (most likely) even a different website look.
Dedicated server coming too.
I have nothing else to say but stay tuned, and thanks everyone for your support!

Tao, you will be hearing from me asap. I'm figuring out this whole account suspension thing, and negotiating with my current web host. I will keep you in the loop. At this point, I personally believe I have failed you as a client, and, for that matter, your experiment. I will get this figured out, and post updates in real time. You decide if you want to keep me as a host, but, I can assure you, there will be some "delays in service". Your 1 GB account will work fine, as for the applications though, they will need to be put on hold, while my friends (employees, or what ever you want to call them) set up our new site/server. Support will be available through FWS Pms, since our site will be down.
Let me know whenever you get the chance!
-Scott

[TaoPhoenix]

I think what you need to be concerned about is if you have a system administrator that is capable of fully securing your server, and not money.

I'm starting to think a really solid company needs both a Sales Guy and a SysAdmin at a minimum, just so one talented guy doesn't overreach both angles.

[deeplist]

I'm starting to think a really solid company needs both a Sales Guy and a SysAdmin at a minimum

Not necessarily.

[TaoPhoenix]

That wasn't what I intended to seem like at all. Originally Tao's account with me was in fact special, as it was precisely double my free plan at the time in order to meet his entry requirements. I later on standardized his plan as my DoubleFree plan, which has gone on to be quite popular.

Yes, I pushed a little, but I am thinking deep and long-term. 1GB/Free/No-Ad/No-Post/Linkback is the baseline of the future. That's an easy to remember plan, and if I had a two-T-1 lines my equipment on hand could handle 1500 clients. The only reason I don't is because I save money with a cheap DSL line and I am a Humanities fella not a legit Techie, so I leave my hosting to my betters. But Woe behold the Industry when some fella with $2000 to burn spends $1000 on hardware and $100/month, it's all over.

Back at the Ranch, 1GB etc is the new Universal base plan. If not in Sept 2011, it will be by Mayan Dec 2012. Get used to it. Moore's Law and all that.

What HostMyThing offered was Ad for *education*, which is a cutting edge new field - until he misfired, I was learning a lot because I didn't fear asking "dumb" questions of hosts who would "answer X much and no more". So the Base plan is free, Ads are certainly deserved when the host sends you 7 update messages in 2 weeks and installs 4 apps. Gentlemen, we're hard on Pioneers because we want the effciency of 3rd Generation Markets, but HostMyThing just blew the market wide open. If they recover properly, they'll be deadly.

[TaoPhoenix]

Not necessarily.

Deeplist, and Seraphim, you rule. But sorta no one else doing Generic companies has been able to do it right without two people or even more.

[TaoPhoenix]

Ok, HostMyThing is getting a makeover.
Same name, different policy, and maybe (most likely) even a different website look.
Dedicated server coming too.
I have nothing else to say but stay tuned, and thanks everyone for your support!

Tao, you will be hearing from me asap. I'm figuring out this whole account suspension thing, and negotiating with my current web host. I will keep you in the loop. At this point, I personally believe I have failed you as a client, and, for that matter, your experiment. I will get this figured out, and post updates in real time. You decide if you want to keep me as a host, but, I can assure you, there will be some "delays in service". Your 1 GB account will work fine, as for the applications though, they will need to be put on hold, while my friends (employees, or what ever you want to call them) set up our new site/server. Support will be available through FWS Pms, since our site will be down.
Let me know whenever you get the chance!
-Scott

Okay, Scott.

For all the critics who yelled at me yesterday for not "being objective", this is where you make out. Because I am more than a ruthless governmental observer. Can I simultaneously study and mold good hosts? The Molding part ruins the objectivity. Been there, dismissed that. My rating scale does what I want it to do. Today, that is, "if I can make you into a new and better host, the whole world wins!".

That gang, is why I don't do cold blind hosting. I want to PRODUCE great hosts. HMT would have drifted happily for 4 months if I hadn't given him a swimming pool and asked if he could swim.

I produce good hosts, ... or. ... I dispose of them fast. It's 180 degrees from Blind. It's pushing the Flaship to the hilt. If the host fuks up the Flagship, they're screwed. Lights Out 5 months faster than normal.

So Chops to you Scott for taking my deadly test, failing miserably, and trying to recover! Let's see what HostMyThing 2.1 can do!

[TaoPhoenix]

It's getting tight Scott.

I'm down as of 8:30PM Eastern. If this was "Oh yeah, I talked to my upstream" I would have been up by now. You're at between 2.1 and 2.3 on a 3.2 scale. You can BARELY survive one more major goof and a blip, and that's it.

[TaoPhoenix]

At this point, I personally believe I have failed you as a client, and, for that matter, your experiment. I will get this figured out, and post updates in real time. You decide if you want to keep me as a host, but, I can assure you, there will be some "delays in service". Your 1 GB account will work fine, ...
-Scott

Nope. My "easy" 1Gb account is chained to the rest because you failed to separate it, so it's on the Fast Clock until you fix it. You have until tomorrow morning at Eastern US 10AM to fix it. After that it gets harder. -0.1for blatant bad data. If you loaded my page you would have seen it.-2.2 out of -3.2

[TaoPhoenix]

This is why no host since 2010 or so has passed my test. It looks easy, until they fall on rocky shoals.

Both recent new entrants are effectively failed. I remain with only 3 pure winners.

I stand by my study design because no fake host has escaped their own hall of mirrors long enough.

The other 430 of you 500 hosts are welcome to try. But you haven't in 2 years, have you? I am still waiting for my three Lunch Promotion clients signing up to my top three winners, hoping to prove me wrong.... which you won't. You'll get great hosting. Sorry.

Defense Rests. Lights Out. End Of Line.

[TaoPhoenix]

...
Tao, you will be hearing from me asap. I'm figuring out this whole account suspension thing, and negotiating with my current web host. I will keep you in the loop. At this point, I personally believe I have failed you as a client, and, for that matter, your experiment. I will get this figured out, and post updates in real time. You decide if you want to keep me as a host...
-Scott

Yes you have.

However, you have once chance left. You need to make a stunning recovery that leads no chance of doubt for three months of solid performance, no blips, no excuses. In a way, my Alumni have left and gone on to better things - but I give you as I did them fair tries at the time they entered.

Right now you need two grand slams of excellence in a row to get back to normal. Can you do it?

[theswagbayorg]

Tao,
I'm game. I accept. I contacted my superiors and requested your account be reverted from suspension (may I add over 6 hours ago...). I am also ordering a dedicated server. I don't want hostmything to be a failure, its not like me, to accept failure, that is. I'm going to do this the right way. No excuses. Promise, or you can have my head. xD

[Seraphim]

Yes you have.

However, you have once chance left. You need to make a stunning recovery that leads no chance of doubt for three months of solid performance, no blips, no excuses. In a way, my Alumni have left and gone on to better things - but I give you as I did them fair tries at the time they entered.

Right now you need two grand slams of excellence in a row to get back to normal. Can you do it?

This is where if you've got any tricks up your sleeve, now would be a good time. I stand before you as someone who faced nearly the same challenge and pulled through a few months back. I'd have to check my PMs to get exact figures, but I'm pretty sure at one point I was only a few .1s away from being out of the running.


Deeplist, and Seraphim, you rule. But sorta no one else doing Generic companies has been able to do it right without two people or even more.

The difference is that Deeplist and I have experience. He's got at least a decade's experience in hosting, knowing how these things are done and what one has to do to stick around. It shows in that he knows how to handle his servers and his clients to maintain a stable rock-solid service and command the respect he gets. And that shows in him every time he spots an obvious flaw made by someone relatively inexperienced, odds are he's made similar mistakes before and learned from them.

For me, while I am by far newer in the hosting world with a mere two years practice, I am a bit older personally than a lot of startups and can draw on my experiences in other things to know what to do. I've been building and fixing computers since I was 14, that part is easy enough. But I also have the experience of helping people in scouts and on my own as well as several years now at my day job. Working for a living becomes a real drag when you've got 20+ coworkers breathing down your neck to get that server back up that very instant. I stayed with that server that day until it was repaired, around 1AM after several rounds of data recovery. And in the hosting world it's even worse, because each server can handle thousands of clients and client guests that are all depending on you to get their site back right away. Plus I'm used to wearing all the hats. I wear a lot of hats at work too, being entrusted with so many functions of the factory I work for. Working like that is something that is learned in time.

[TaoPhoenix]

Tao,
I'm game. I accept. I contacted my superiors and requested your account be reverted from suspension (may I add over 6 hours ago...). I am also ordering a dedicated server. I don't want HostMyThing to be a failure, its not like me, to accept failure, that is. I'm going to do this the right way. No excuses. Promise, or you can have my head.

Well, at the moment I'm getting "Server not found- Firefox can't find the server at www.hostmything.com " so you're officially an unconscious host. (Edit - now it looks like someone is installing from Temp.)

Okay, you're probably pretty tired out by now! If you ever wanted to know why we jump on OverSelling, now you know! So you need to do a few more things to hold your new HostMyThing 2.0 together. You're doing the first one right, which is getting your own equipment so it's only you and the hard resources to deal with.

I have to get in a couple more pokes before all the residual of this falls away. Next up is, you need to rethink your style of ads and the entire way you do business. Maybe it's a Texas thing, Sell Big or something. But you dived off the rocky ledge right into one of my study designs which is - you tried to OneUp everyone else by promising the moon. But when it came time to sell me my little piece of it, "NASA got pissed". Turns out the Moon is not so easy to sell. Before our other adventures happened, I long ago settled on a basic 1Gig standard account so that OverSellers wouldn't really get credit for promising orbiting planetoids. You just found out why.

Okay, let's simplify. I no longer need a second LawPedia. I can add those articles back into SuperPedia because they're just articles, and other specialized Law databases exist. I will also hold off with the DotClear Blog, because I'd like to hone in more on the Forum. My articles would simply be Topic posts, and based on user feedback I'd revise and update them. Blogs tend to be Flash & Forget. When you get a moment, we should customize the forum to add really powerful topic/category features and have the user be able to edit original posts forever but if possible tag the reply posts to "this post replied to This_Version of the topic".

So take a few days, regroup, and let's see what happens!

[TaoPhoenix]

This is where if you've got any tricks up your sleeve, now would be a good time. I stand before you as someone who faced nearly the same challenge and pulled through a few months back. I'd have to check my PMs to get exact figures, but I'm pretty sure at one point I was only a few .1s away from being out of the running.


Nice analogy. I didn't keep hard records either Seraphim, but you have the gist right. It's even tighter than you think Scott because you WILL have a "company-reboot" glitch *somewhere*, it's When Not If. So even if I was generous and gave you back a couple tenths for your recent couple of apologies, let's say you're at 2.1 out of 3.4. (I know, it's still just a heuristic.) What it all means is that when the inevitable booboos show up, you'll be ticking away at your reserves. You can BARELY survive EITHER one more disaster or a smaller string of blips like the one I posted a few minutes ago where the site simply isn't available - but not both. What the endgame looks like is that I'd no longer be able to recommend you as a rock solid host, and you'd move on to either HostMyThing 3.0 which might finally be Third Time's the Charm, or maybe blow out the brand as unusable after all this stuff - post your official brand name change and then hope your lessons here took.

[deeplist]

So for the record, who was the mystery company that you purchased this "unlimited alpha reseller" from?

[wswd]

Ahhhh...sorry I'm late to this latest brouhaha. I was without Internet access yesterday.

Another "unlimited" host who can't actually provide "unlimited"? Who would have thought? Don't need a study to figure that one out, but I'm glad Tao got to the bottom of this one in short order.

Guess those "unlimited" super alpha master omega reseller thingees just aren't as promising as they lead you to believe. Hmmmmm...never would have guessed.

[deeplist]

I knew something was up nearly a week ago when I started calling him out on this nonsense. Several of his excuses for downtime just didn't sit right with me. Everything blows up and the "host" agrees to move some other clients off the server to make room for the project? WHAT? Wait, you mean to tell me there's isn't 30 GB of space left as wiggle room to transfer and decompress files? Whoa, aren't you on the "unlimited alpha beta delta gamma master reseller" plan? Hummm.... The whole thing was a ticking time bomb. I just want to know who this mystery host is who was one rung up above Scott on the ladder.

[TaoPhoenix]

I knew something was up nearly a week ago when I started calling him out on this nonsense. Several of his excuses for downtime just didn't sit right with me. Everything blows up and the "host" agrees to move some other clients off the server to make room for the project? WHAT? Wait, you mean to tell me there's isn't 30 GB of space left as wiggle room to transfer and decompress files? Whoa, aren't you on the "unlimited alpha beta delta gamma master reseller" plan? Hummm.... The whole thing was a ticking time bomb. I just want to know who this mystery host is who was one rung up above Scott on the ladder.

Sure - Deeplist had some good instincts. I expected as a reseller he'd go over quota, but I didn't expect that the box above him was already over-crushed.

This is also now the second time in a row that the new hosts have been telling me "strange" responses, though in opposite directions. It's interesting, "Swag" is a southern word for "bravado", and in fact, that's what we saw!

I start out trying to give resellers the "dignity of being their own business", but we're uncovering that a client never knows if he's dealing with a top level host or a reseller in a chain.

[deeplist]

we're uncovering that a client never knows if he's dealing with a top level host or a reseller in a chain.

That's why it's important to do your homework ahead of time. If your "host" can't provide information on the machines that you're being hosted on, then he probably has no control over them. If you visit the server's IP address and it goes to some other place, or a default page for another host, it's probably not their server. Scott was running dedicated IPs with this own nameservers, so he did a decent job of coving up the fact that the hardware wasn't in his control. (Aside from not having rDNS set for them, but that's another issue entirely.)

[theswagbayorg]

For the record everybody, my host was http://bluebayhost.com.
They do offer great customer services, but I guess as everyone stated, they offer unlimited BS (I now agree with you! Thanks for opening my eyes!)

I'm Planning on making today a "dedicated server shopping day". I have gotten quote upon quote from companies, some great, some "eh". I am also making sure they offer maybe 1 hour of managed services a month. Now, I have been using linux for 5 years, so I'm no "newbie" to shell commands. I just worried something will come along in my first month that I can't handle in a short period of time. (I could most likely fix the problem, but they could do it faster, provided I get quick customer support)

So far, I looked into softlayer, 100tb, and a few others, which I had to email to get pricing. I'll keep everyone in the loop!

Tao, after a "Support Battle" with my host, its all over. I got the site back up, provided I don't attempt any more "erratic decompresses" (that's what they called it...?)

And as for the HMT website, it looks as we are going to integrate WHMCS. So, we'll be hard at work on that!

thanks everybody for the direction, and have a splendid day!

[theswagbayorg]

Out of my quests to find a dedicated server, arose Hostgator.com. They offer fully managed dedicated servers, Cpanel/WHM, free WHMCS, and 8 dedicated IPs. The server is a quad core, 4 GB ram, 2 X 250 GB HDDS, and 10 TB monthly transfer, which is more than enough for me. I think this is what I will start off on, unless there are any objections here?
The price seemed right as well, and there is a 99.9% uptime guarentee.

[deeplist]

Out of my quests to find a dedicated server, arose Hostgator.com. They offer fully managed dedicated servers, Cpanel/WHM, free WHMCS, and 8 dedicated IPs. The server is a quad core, 4 GB ram, 2 X 250 GB HDDS, and 10 TB monthly transfer, which is more than enough for me. I think this is what I will start off on, unless there are any objections here?
The price seemed right as well, and there is a 99.9% uptime guarentee.

For what price. If it's anything more than $100 or $130 per month, you're paying too much. This isn't that great of a setup.

[theswagbayorg]

It was over 100/Mo. But, I looked into softlayer, and Couldn't find anything cheaper than $125. I think I am looking in the wrong place than. Where should I be looking?

[deeplist]

Everything is negotiable. If you pay the price advertised on the site, then you're a sucker. It's just like buying a used car. Sticker prices are for those who don't know what you're doing. You can easily jew them down 20% or more. If they won't budge on the price, then ask them if they have any specials going on, like double the hard drive to dual 500GB drives instead. Or Double the RAM to 8 GB. They'll work with you if they want your business bad enough. If they won't budge on that either, go somewhere else.

[theswagbayorg]

Wow thanks for the advice. I appreciate it! I will see what I can come up with...

[TaoPhoenix]

I'm getting a site wide blip on cWahi.

We'll have to see later if it was another DDOS, or the rare possibility they're down. They have been solid as a rock for years, moving from slot 1-2 on my chart for years.

Edit - and it does look like only a blip.

[theswagbayorg]

Deeplist, I can't thank you enough for your suggestion! Softlayer gave me a quote 20% off, more bandwidth, extra hdd, and more ram! I'm a happy camper =)

[deeplist]

Deeplist, I can't thank you enough for your suggestion! Softlayer gave me a quote 20% off, more bandwidth, extra hdd, and more ram! I'm a happy camper =)

Remember, sticker prices are for suckers. I'm glad you took my advice. Also, congrats on choosing a box at SoftLayer. Although they're slightly more expensive than other datacenters, their network is absolutely the best available, IMO. Well done. Your future customers will thank you too.

[wswd]

Next on the agenda, registering your business, becoming a legitimate business owner, and paying taxes on all those earnings that are sure to roll in. :D

[TaoPhoenix]

Deeplist, I can't thank you enough for your suggestion! Softlayer gave me a quote 20% off, more bandwidth, extra hdd, and more ram! I'm a happy camper =)

But *not* Unlimited Bandwidth, right there, Scott!? :)

[theswagbayorg]

Lol, nope. BECAUSE THERE IS ALWAYS A LIMIT :) I guess I learned that the hard way....but, they do offer "unmetered 10, 100, or 1000 mbps dedicated ports" (for an extra $400...). May I ask, is that legit? Deeplist, wswd, tao, comments on that?

I just got my welcome email from softlayer, let the server administration begin....

[deeplist]

They do offer "unmetered 10, 100, or 1000 mbps dedicated ports" (for an extra $400...). May I ask, is that legit?

Yes, it's legit. Unmetered bandwidth on a dedicated server is perfectly fine. This is NOT the same as just "unlimited" because there's a port speed cap imposed. For example, an unmetered 10Mbps port (if used 24/7) can transfer 105.4GB per day, or 3164 GB per month, roughly 3.2 TB. So there is still a physical limit on exactly how much you can transfer per month, but the limit is the SPEED in which you can transfer. This isn't something you would need to consider at this point because you're going to be slow to begin with and you'll have ample bandwidth for now. Trust me.

[theswagbayorg]

Yes I agree. 6000 GB bandwidth is perfect for me, and of for some strange reason I exceed that limit, I will just purchase more. That won't be a problem. All of my packages are going to have set limits anyway, no unlimited crap. That way, I won't oversell my server.
Lots of good things are in store for HostMyThing! I really happy with the way this is turning out. Like always, I will use this thread to post updates about the "official" release of HostMyThing 2.1! :P
Thanks all, and goodnight,
Scott

[wswd]

Good for you for doing it the right way. Shame you had to learn things the hard way, but you know what...how that's people learn in an industry like this. A lot of it is trial and error and seeing what works and what doesn't.

As deeplist said, unmetered is definitely legit, and his explanation was perfect. 6 TB of bandwidth is plenty to start with, and is easily upgraded later on, so you certainly shouldn't worry about that.

Good luck with the business!

[theswagbayorg]

Tao,
It seems BlueBayHost Suspended my account AGAIN. this time, my WHOLE account. All of my clients are down, with that "You account has been suspended" crap. And this time, I didn't even do anything wrong! Hmmmm, at least now I have a dedicated server, and won't have to deal with reseller again.....

There will be downtime this week. That's for sure, as I have to change my domain's nameservers (hostmything.com, you have a subdomain), as well as tansfer the physical accounts to my server. This will take place in the next few days.

Sorry about any inconvenience!

[theswagbayorg]

Tao, everything is back up. I am moving the account right now to our dedicated server. Please bear with me as we make the switch.
Thanks,
-Scott

[Seraphim]

By chance what did they suspend you for this time?

Congrats on your new server though, although it is indeed a rush to get everybody back up on the new arrangements make sure you revisit the setup later to make sure it is secure and stable.

[colorhost]

Wow, this has gotten bigger since the last time i was on it!

Hope everyone is doing well, i know i am :)

[TaoPhoenix]

Tao, everything is back up. I am moving the account right now to our dedicated server. Please bear with me as we make the switch.
Thanks,
-Scott

Sure, I'll peel back for a few days to let stuff settle.

[TaoPhoenix]

Okay, here is a new wrinkle gang.

I got an email from HostMyThing ... wait for it ... with a *spoofed header* to "claim it was from my own email box"

That is NOT cool! Scott, do you have any advice? Is this your nasty upstream again?

is running out of disk space.
------------------------------
Please remove some files from this account, or ask the administrator to increase your disk quota.

This account has used 845.86% (8560.10/1012.00 MB) of its allocated disk space.

!! Do not respond to this message. Your reply will go nowhere. !!

[oniscorp]

You should include all headers of the message, Tao. Am somewhat curious myself :)

[Seraphim]

Could it have come from the forum setup that hostmything was making for you?

Most forum setups use the email address of the forum owner (UID 1) as their from address, giving the appearance of a spoofed header and the potential for mailing yourself.

What strikes me as most odd about that message is the fact that you are so far over your space limit. I would think they would have enforced a hard limit at like 105% or the overage would have been noticed far sooner.

I've seen your files, and I've seen the typical forum install sizes. Unless there's something strange going on in your account, there's no way it should have used up that much disc space already.

Could you show the full header in the hopes it shows the mail server that it came from?

[TaoPhoenix]

You should include all headers of the message, Tao. Am somewhat curious myself :)


Could it have come from the forum setup that hostmything was making for you?

Most forum setups use the email address of the forum owner (UID 1) as their from address, giving the appearance of a spoofed header and the potential for mailing yourself.

What strikes me as most odd about that message is the fact that you are so far over your space limit. I would think they would have enforced a hard limit at like 105% or the overage would have been noticed far sooner.

I've seen your files, and I've seen the typical forum install sizes. Unless there's something strange going on in your account, there's no way it should have used up that much disc space already.

Could you show the full header in the hopes it shows the mail server that it came from?

Hi gang, I deleted half the full email proper because it had about half my account info in it as well. (Not sure what to make of that, but it did tell me that it wasn't pure spam). Seraphim seems to be on to something - it's my first attempt at owning a forum, though it still is eerie because if that was a "forum auto email" I don't get why that kind of limit wasn't turned off during setup. I thought it was something from the upstream.

Meanwhile, depending who "they" is/are, they definitely noticed! I think it's related to all the outages - temporary blocks etc. But on "the account" Seraphim, assuming it is from the upstream reporting down, they're probably referring to my fork of Wikipedia - 8 gigs is about right for the compressed files.

Like a court, I'm going to try to keep this down to "why was the email spoofed from me" - I "don't have an opinion" on a space usage message - by now we know that Scott is going through growing pains and doesn't know the tricks of the trade, so having already been suspended from upstream-down, an "over quota" message isn't news of itself. In a sense I'm ignoring almost everything and not even putting the bar up until he says "I am up, start over, go." I am just irritated at this security aspect of this note.

[theraptor]

Hi gang, I deleted half the full email proper because it had about half my account info in it as well. (Not sure what to make of that, but it did tell me that it wasn't pure spam). Seraphim seems to be on to something - it's my first attempt at owning a forum, though it still is eerie because if that was a "forum auto email" I don't get why that kind of limit wasn't turned off during setup. I thought it was something from the upstream.

Meanwhile, depending who "they" is/are, they definitely noticed! I think it's related to all the outages - temporary blocks etc. But on "the account" Seraphim, assuming it is from the upstream reporting down, they're probably referring to my fork of Wikipedia - 8 gigs is about right for the compressed files.

Like a court, I'm going to try to keep this down to "why was the email spoofed from me" - I "don't have an opinion" on a space usage message - by now we know that Scott is going through growing pains and doesn't know the tricks of the trade, so having already been suspended from upstream-down, an "over quota" message isn't news of itself. In a sense I'm ignoring almost everything and not even putting the bar up until he says "I am up, start over, go." I am just irritated at this security aspect of this note.

MediaWiki sends emails out as being from the email address set for the primary admin account. Several forum softwares (including phpbb), do this as well. It's honestly not something to be worried about. If a different user had gotten an email from the wiki software, it would show as being from you, the admin, so that they know to look at it.

[theswagbayorg]

Tao, could you please forward the email to scott.murray@theswagbay.org? I am also curious as to how it could have had a spoofed header. I haven't configured your account's package yet. The "Temp" package you have now only allows you to have 1 GB Webspace, when in fact, you are using about 34 GB! (I decompressed that file already, on our server) I think I need to configure WHM/Cpanel's automatic email notifications. Let me take a look, and I will report back. If any other hosts here have any "tips" on what you think happened, please reply to this thread. I'm almost 99.98% sure its WHM/Cpanel, but its better to be safe than sorry!
-Scott

[theswagbayorg]

Just turned off the automatic email notifications. If my guess was correct, this should fix the problem. But, as theraptor said, its most likely nothing to be worried about. To be safe, please forward me the email.

Update: The server is almost completely configured. Just installed Fantastico. Like I said, I am going to redesign HostMyThing.com....Just started that...

Thanks all,
Scott

[TaoPhoenix]

MediaWiki sends emails out as being from the email address set for the primary admin account. Several forum softwares (including phpbb), do this as well. It's honestly not something to be worried about. If a different user had gotten an email from the wiki software, it would show as being from you, the admin, so that they know to look at it.

I just sent it over to Scott. Meanwhile I found the headers. (only one deleted is the long junk-looking xy-sig). As I was saying to Scott in the flip, per below, I would have preferred the from be something like root@alpha.hostmything.com or even E1R03ID-0007P4-0L@alpha.hostmything.com - just not spoofed from me. So my broader complaint goes to the forum default behavior. Even if "I" were "managing" the forum, emails from "me" should be "from ___.hostmything.com" and not spoofed from any random email address entered.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

X-Apparently-To: taophoenix@yahoo.com via 209.191.125.110; Sat, 03 Sep 2011 20:22:46 -0700
Return-Path: <root@alpha.hostmything.com>
Received-SPF: none (domain of alpha.hostmything.com does not designate permitted sender hosts)
X-Originating-IP: [50.22.237.138]
Authentication-Results: mta195.mail.sp2.yahoo.com from=yahoo.com; domainkeys=neutral (no sig); from=yahoo.com; dkim=neutral (no sig)
Received: from 127.0.0.1 (EHLO alpha.hostmything.com) (50.22.237.138) by mta195.mail.sp2.yahoo.com with SMTP; Sat, 03 Sep 2011 20:22:46 -0700
Received: from root by alpha.hostmything.com with local (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from <root@alpha.hostmything.com>) id 1R03ID-0007P4-0L for TaoPhoenix@yahoo.com; Sat, 03 Sep 2011 23:22:45 -0400
To: TaoPhoenix@yahoo.com
From:
TaoPhoenix@yahoo.com
View contact details
Subject: Disk Usage Warning full
Message-Id: <E1R03ID-0007P4-0L@alpha.hostmything.com>
Date: Sat, 03 Sep 2011 23:22:45 -0400
X-AntiAbuse: This header was added to track abuse, please include it with any abuse report
X-AntiAbuse: Primary Hostname - alpha.hostmything.com
X-AntiAbuse: Original Domain - yahoo.com
X-AntiAbuse: Originator/Caller UID/GID - [0 0] / [47 12]
X-AntiAbuse: Sender Address Domain - alpha.hostmything.com
Content-Length: 348

[theswagbayorg]

Yes, thats my server's IP! I will see what I can do about "who" its sent from. When I get the notifications sent to my email and phone, they come up as from info@alpha.hostmything.com....Like I said, I'll work towards a solution to this problem. Thanks!

[theraptor]

I just sent it over to Scott. Meanwhile I found the headers. (only one deleted is the long junk-looking xy-sig). As I was saying to Scott in the flip, per below, I would have preferred the from be something like root@alpha.hostmything.com or even E1R03ID-0007P4-0L@alpha.hostmything.com - just not spoofed from me. So my broader complaint goes to the forum default behavior. Even if "I" were "managing" the forum, emails from "me" should be "from ___.hostmything.com" and not spoofed from any random email address entered.


Allright Tao, I just had time to check on an expiriment I setup, and it confirmed my suspicions. The email you recieved was automatically generated by cPanel, and is the result of your host checking the Disk Usage Warning option in notifications in WHM. The fact that it was spoofed as to being from yourself is the default WHM setting, and there is no apparant or obvoius way to change it to being from a different address. Might be something I'll be asking the cPanel devs about.

Like I said, it's nothing to worry about, just cPanel letting you know you are out of space.

[TaoPhoenix]

Allright Tao, I just had time to check on an expiriment I setup, and it confirmed my suspicions. The email you recieved was automatically generated by cPanel, and is the result of your host checking the Disk Usage Warning option in notifications in WHM. The fact that it was spoofed as to being from yourself is the default WHM setting, and there is no apparant or obvoius way to change it to being from a different address. Might be something I'll be asking the cPanel devs about.

Like I said, it's nothing to worry about, just cPanel letting you know you are out of space.

Sure, I it was way too clean to be a spam/hack email, but I didn't know it went all the way to software core settings. Yes please, can someone post a bug/comment to cPanel for me indicating less than desirable behavior? Some days I am sharper than a marble, but it's distracting to get emails "from you" that you didn't send and my real concern is that as "Beta Tester" other clients could be really upset.

[TaoPhoenix]

Hi Scott, do you have an update for HostMyThing? Looks like my basic page is up for a day or two, but I haven't pushed farther than that because I wanted you to be ready.

[theswagbayorg]

Yes, we are building the main site now. Your site is indeed up. Let me just have tomorrow, and we can start. Obviously, "hostmything.com" will not be done so fast, but at least your account will be fully active.
Let me know if you want to start after or before Hostmything.com's completion.
Thanks,
Scott

[TaoPhoenix]

Yes, we are building the main site now. Your site is indeed up. Let me just have tomorrow, and we can start. Obviously, "hostmything.com" will not be done so fast, but at least your account will be fully active.
Let me know if you want to start after or before Hostmything.com's completion.
Thanks,
Scott

Hi Scott.

As far as my side, I'll even be happy to give you the whole weekend as a shakeout. We'll probably trade notes on my install setup, although that does not count against the "uptime" aspect. Figure on about Monday at 10AM to see if you're ready for me to "turn the fierce eye" your way. A tip is to take a few hours if you need it, because once we "restart the clock" you can't afford any more blips.

However I purposely don't place any evaluation at all on the host homepage designs, because those always move around. A combination of your root hostmything.com resolving to *something* and my dashboard page is how I do the grading. Here we go!

[Trel]

Hi TaoPhoenix,

Send me a PM if you would like to review our services.

[TaoPhoenix]

LP-Trel, I sent you a note.

[TaoPhoenix]

Well okay, here is a surprise!

RLS Hosting was a *paid* host who offered me some free space if I posted a review to their forum.

However, I am getting http://rlshosting.com/ as being down! (Anyone see my position about post2host yet?)

Now, they weren't actually in the official category because they declined to report - I just took a chance on them. But, if y'all ever thought my official reporting rules were too harsh, this is why gang - because it's all Fun & Ads until they fold and slink away into the darkness!

RLS Hosting , you ARE the weakest link ... goodbye!

[deeplist]

I was watching this for a while now and it appears they're now back up at the time of posting this message. So about an hour of downtime??

[TaoPhoenix]

I was watching this for a while now and it appears they're now back up at the time of posting this message. So about an hour of downtime??

Apparently so - which is one thing for a free host, something else for a Paid Host.

However despite my TV-land quote there, my data still seems to be there, so it really resolves to more like a Blip event. However a quick look at their site didn't yield any info on why they were down.

[deeplist]

However a quick look at their site didn't yield any info on why they were down.

Just a though, but a lot of the time, things like this aren't reported on the main site. Be sure to check in your client area. Sometimes, there's an "announcements" section or something similar where outages (both planned and unplanned) are reported.

[TaoPhoenix]

Just checking in - there are some new developments brewing, but it will take a few days for them to all shake out.

[M Bacon]

rlshosting.com is hosted on a different vps server than where the customers are located.

[TaoPhoenix]

rlshosting.com is hosted on a different vps server than where the customers are located.

Thanks for the note! Did the customer side have a matching outage too? I think I saw it as a blip on my dash before I checked the central rlshosting.com.

[M Bacon]

It's a possibility. They are both located in the same datacenter.

[TaoPhoenix]

Well so far it's "just a blip" so that's not a crisis. Otherwise you are doing very well!

So with other matters settling down for a bit, I will be updating this side of things again starting this weekend.

[TaoPhoenix]

(Repost)

pm me some ftp details so i can work on it. Would you be willing to switch to wordpress?

Thanks for offering! Even easier is go ahead and give me a tracking account and then you can just upload stuff!

I'm old school, I will say that I think there's a deep flaw with the flashy new blog programs, in that "it's all wrapped up in the database" so that unless I'm mistaken it's both harder to have multiple versions to synch and also harder to keep granular 100% stage backups. What kind of magic can you do in straight html?

P.s. let's continue this in my thread, to keep it out of harm's way for FWS.

[JJW]

what is a tracking account?

[TaoPhoenix]

The standard vanilla hosted account that I run with all of the hosts in my project. Typically 1Gig space with no timers, and bandwidth is pretty low. The reason those dashlights work is that they are directly hosted on the hosts, it's like an analog version of an uptime monitor. Up to you if you want to be in the "reporting" category, I did make a silver option without it, but I'd say might as well go for the "certification".

[TaoPhoenix]

Hi JJW, what are you thinking today? Do you want to try an HTML refresh of my page or were you banking on wordpress as your killer app?

Also let me know if you wanted to put 24khost in the limelight with a dashboard slot. I haven't yet sorted out my synch order yet so I need to know if you're in at either of the type levels (full with reporting or silver without).

[TaoPhoenix]

After a bit of a lull some things are happening. Risto3 made it back again to send me a note, and I received a nice offer from him so he's starting at silver unless he decides to add reporting.

I have a question into JJW & 24khost, and LP-Trel is in the wings. HostMyThing has been collecting clock time for a week now, again, my update speed or lack thereof isn't held against hosts if for some reason the times need to come down to the wire.

[TaoPhoenix]

As a place marker here is HostMyThing's copy, which for a few hours/days is the Best Known.

http://taophoenix.hostmything.com/ReVisionMobile.html

This is the current FAQ page.

http://taophoenix.hostmything.com/Science/ScienceArticle2c.html

[TaoPhoenix]

I got a "Coupon" for a very strong account wih Flyhosts.net

So here they are!

http://taophoenix.flyhosts.net/ReVisionMobile.html

They are currently in the Like category, which until any first incident starts off the same as the official rules category.

They also claim to have a lot of bandwidth, so we'll see! (Though I have no specific test lined up for them at this time.)

[TaoPhoenix]

Here we go!

After a little of setup logistics, my board has stabilized with the freshest news. L2p.net, previously Lifelesspeople.com, is on the board.

Some info:

This is L2p's copy of the basic page.
http://taophoenix.l2p.net/ReVisionMobile.html

They also put up a twitter page which remarks on the brand changes as well as a cPanel bug I ran into.
http://twitter.com/#!/L2P/

[TaoPhoenix]

Masterbo, L2P's copy is right now the Best Available Copy.

Since I think that is all the fresh news, when I settle down I'll have to do a synch because now the first string of hosts are way behind!

I'm not sure who my dev lead is right now either. It might still be Seraphim because I slowly have my eyes on a "Rated G" and "Rated PG" twin version of my site concept.

I have a couple of big projects underway with HostMyThing too, though I'm leaning towards a rough-ready version of a 2-layer "Google-Monkey" traffic absorption pattern perhaps with Flyhosts' copy before the "serious visitors" get far-linked to the serious content.

Edit: Scott (HostMyThing) , Please talk to Risto3 over at Flyhosts because his Coupon also came through at High Capacity, so it would be interesting and useful to have him/them be the backup mirror of my big database projects so that I don't have to download copies weekly on my slow dsl line. Please advise when you learn something. Maybe he can also help you on the tech side.

[theswagbayorg]

Tao,
Sent him a PM. That would be good, I could use some help on this whole "SQL Dump" thing. 32 GB is a lot to dump into a database! Maybe he has some bright ideas I didn't think about.

[masterbo]

Masterbo, L2P's copy is right now the Best Available Copy. ...

Thanks, I appreciate your updates and efforts. Even if I don't immediately comment/respond, I read updates as often as possible.

[couponsitescript]

I got a "Coupon" for a very strong account wih Flyhosts.net

So here they are!

http://taophoenix.flyhosts.net/ReVisionMobile.html


They are currently in the Like category, which until any first incident starts off the same as the official rules category.

They also claim to have a lot of bandwidth, so we'll see! (Though I have no specific test lined up for them at this time.)

I entered the link you provided ... but did not found any coupon. Can you write it on this forum?

[TaoPhoenix]

I entered the link you provided ... but did not found any coupon. Can you write it on this forum?

No. That's because the quotes mean it was a private coupon. It is my current word for describing the packages I get which are different from generic offerings to mass market customers.

You seem to have an interesting business idea, however it might just be the absolute opposite to what I do!

[TaoPhoenix]

I got a "Coupon" for a very strong account wih Flyhosts.net

So here they are!

http://taophoenix.flyhosts.net/ReVisionMobile.html

They are currently in the Like category, which until any first incident starts off the same as the official rules category.

They also claim to have a lot of bandwidth, so we'll see! (Though I have no specific test lined up for them at this time.)

Well, this is interesting. This copy of my page / account is down, though I have used virtually nothing for bandwidth. The main site Flyhosts.net is up, so it's not a "global" outage, but this is irritating. He was only at "Like" level because I didn't expect anything great based on my early chats with the owner/rep.

[Trel]

Well, this is interesting. This copy of my page / account is down, though I have used virtually nothing for bandwidth. The main site Flyhosts.net is up, so it's not a "global" outage, but this is irritating. He was only at "Like" level because I didn't expect anything great based on my early chats with the owner/rep.

www.flyhosts.net is using Cloudflare which means their website will load even if the server is down. (You can see the intoDNS results here (http://intodns.com/flyhosts.net).)

[TaoPhoenix]

www.flyhosts.net is using Cloudflare which means their website will load even if the server is down. (You can see the intoDNS results here (http://intodns.com/flyhosts.net).)

Can y'all confirm that their server is indeed down? I always admit my lack of tech skills and I try to separate a managerial decision such as deleting my account vs the host server being down.

Meanwhile there are big page design improvements coming - I am tightening the categories even more, as a couple of the topics have stalled far too long, and also might be a bit of audience mismatch. (Notably the Buddhist section, which is in fact far harder to write than it may seem, and the computer section because the days of "Skip Vista - Keep XP" are over. They are also "less exciting" topics for me right now than the forward-looking other categories.)

JJW is working on something for the visual front end too.

[Trel]

I don't know if their server is down, but http://flyhosts.net/ (no www) doesn't resolve to Cloudflare and it is loading at the time of this post.

[TaoPhoenix]

I don't know if their server is down, but http://flyhosts.net/ (no www) doesn't resolve to Cloudflare and it is loading at the time of this post.

I saw that too, which was why I was asking. Meanwhile, they are off the board unless they visit here and fix things.

[TaoPhoenix]

Okay gang, I put through a fairly important layout update this morning!

My new brand is FreeVoteUSA!

Here is the semi-final ordering of the topics. None of the second stage links to menus work yet, and there's lots of visual work to do. But I wanted to drill in on the topics that I am working on these days, because I have a bad habit of wishing I could get to something and then tons of time goes by. At least I have a chance at getting something done on these topics.

This is L2P's copy, because I have a question into Seraphim on a glitch, but soon I will be using my first ever domain (!!) FreeVoteUSA.com

Speaking of whom, Trel from L2P has posted some notes here, and RLS had a couple, so I moved them up into the full New Host category. Based on today's annoyance I dropped Flyhosts, so the entire "Like" category went away for now.

http://taophoenix.l2p.net/FreeVoteUSA.html

P.s. I have a couple of choices of colors - does everyone like the yellow for topics, or should they be the blue used in a couple of the host links? I had some idea that the yellow "popped" but is it like staring into the sun?

JJW, please use this copy for the stuff you are doing.

Masterbo this is a significant update to become the Best Known Version, and early results are in for the Second Tier hosts that I can begin to recommend them by now.

Plus I just added a 4th Freedom category and worked on the spacing so that at least on my machine it prints nicely outlined on two pages.

[theswagbayorg]

Tao!
If you look at SuperPedia's SQL Database in Cpanel, you will see it is growing in size by the minute!
The dump is in progress! Just thought I'd leave a note here.
Take care,
Scott

[Logan1999]

Tao, I can access my account on flyhosts no problem, and I don't use cloudflare. So the server is running, Ristone3 must have mis-configured your domain or something, I'll let him know soon.

Thank you.

[CS Squad]

Tao, I can access my account on flyhosts no problem, and I don't use cloudflare. So the server is running, Ristone3 must have mis-configured your domain or something, I'll let him know soon.

Thank you.

Are you sure that flyhosts.net is not using cloudflare?
Then can you please explain what is this?


Trying "flyhosts.net"
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 53429
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;flyhosts.net. IN ANY

;; ANSWER SECTION:
flyhosts.net. 86400 IN NS paul.ns.cloudflare.com.
flyhosts.net. 300 IN A 173.245.61.119
flyhosts.net. 300 IN A 173.245.61.43
flyhosts.net. 86400 IN NS leah.ns.cloudflare.com.
flyhosts.net. 86400 IN SOA leah.ns.cloudflare.com. dns.cloudflare.com. 2011100122 10000 2400 604800 3600

Received 157 bytes from 8.8.8.8#53 in 38 ms

[Trel]

Are you sure that flyhosts.net is not using cloudflare?
Then can you please explain what is this?


As of last night, http://flyhosts.net/ did not resolve to Cloudflare using Google's DNS. They might have changed the DNS records of flyhosts.net to resolve both http://flyhosts.net/ and http://www.flyhosts.net/ to Cloudflare.

[CS Squad]

It seems like their ordering page "sales.flyhosts.net", is also protected under cloudflare...


Trying "sales.flyhosts.net"
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 53105
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;sales.flyhosts.net. IN ANY

;; ANSWER SECTION:
sales.flyhosts.net. 234 IN A 173.245.61.43
sales.flyhosts.net. 234 IN A 173.245.61.119

Received 68 bytes from 8.8.8.8#53 in 14 ms

[wswd]

Ahhhhh...CloudFlare...that's what all these fledgling companies use to claim 99.99% uptime. Flyhosts wouldn't be the first ones to do it.

I'm getting the same tracerts from 5 different servers plus my house. They are very clearly using CloudFlare.

[Logan1999]

Ok, I talked to Ryan earlier and what happened is he transferred flyhosts to a new server, which uses cloudflare. Then what happened is sense he is keeping the old server, tao's account was left on the old server, which is still there. But it was rendered useless because flyhost's nameservers have changed thus breaking the link, rendering the site dead. I will have to get a hold of him later and get this straightened out Tao. Sorry for the inconvenience.

[TaoPhoenix]

Ok, I talked to Ryan earlier and what happened is he transferred flyhosts to a new server, which uses cloudflare. Then what happened is sense he is keeping the old server, tao's account was left on the old server, which is still there. But it was rendered useless because flyhost's nameservers have changed thus breaking the link, rendering the site dead. I will have to get a hold of him later and get this straightened out Tao. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Well, at least I appreciate the update. However, I am a bit disturbed because it feels like an elementary error with a big impact. Also, why would I be left on the old server - is that where all clients still are? P.S. Remember that before I "chopped it down" to "just me" this was supposed to be a "Master Reseller" account, so if I'd had two-chain clients they would have been hosed, right? Am I missing something?

[wswd]

Ok, I talked to Ryan earlier and what happened is he transferred flyhosts to a new server, which uses cloudflare. Then what happened is sense he is keeping the old server, tao's account was left on the old server, which is still there. But it was rendered useless because flyhost's nameservers have changed thus breaking the link, rendering the site dead. I will have to get a hold of him later and get this straightened out Tao. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Extremely amateur mistake, from someone who should clearly not be running a hosting "company". How do you move to a new server, but forget to transfer all the accounts? Then you don't do any testing to make sure all the accounts made it over, no comparison of accounts, no comparison of data, and then you just flip the final switches?

[TaoPhoenix]

Extremely amateur mistake, from someone who should clearly not be running a hosting "company". How do you move to a new server, but forget to transfer all the accounts? Then you don't do any testing to make sure all the accounts made it over, no comparison of accounts, no comparison of data, and then you just flip the final switches?

I'm not back up yet either. How many layers down of Chinese Turtles am I? (Old folklore reference.)

I'm glad I didn't actually resell any of it!

P.S. Logan I'm not sure how you two are related party hosts, but they're just about skunked on my rating scale. The chief difference that HostMyThing has done differently is that owner has kept in touch posting notes. Risto has always been taciturn but that's the dealbreaker when facing a cascade penalty.

[Logan1999]

Ok, I misunderstood, it wasn't a new server, it was actually just cloudflare screwing it up, everything should be resolved now. Sorry for the inconvenience.

[TaoPhoenix]

Ok, I misunderstood, it wasn't a new server, it was actually just cloudflare screwing it up, everything should be resolved now. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Well, okay let's see. I was down for three days, so that's a pretty big hit and the trail of info was a little strange. But I guess the company is up, so it's another of those "heavy penalties but just this side of safe for now".

[TaoPhoenix]

Okay, here we go!

With my first domain, and a solid UI update, here I am with FreeVoteUSA.com!

http://www.freevoteusa.com

I figured out the colors - Yellow is now a placeholder, instead of those awful "posted" graphics, and Blue is Posted. Later on I want to add dates when last updated.

The hosts are up too. HostMyThing, RLS, L2P, and Flyhosts are all in.

(P.s. It's a freight train crash in IE, but that's not today's problem. It was built in Firefox and lightly tested in Opera and Safari.)

JJW, please use this copy.

[TaoPhoenix]

Here we go!

My first couple of articles, commenting on a business book.

http://www.freevoteusa.com/Culture/CultureSubMenu1.html

http://www.freevoteusa.com/Culture/Culture-Article1a.html
http://www.freevoteusa.com/Culture/Culture-Article1b.html

[TaoPhoenix]

Hmm. Scott, I'm getting a blip on my board and the root page of www.hostmything.com isn't loading. Do you have any news?

[deeplist]

Down here also.

[theswagbayorg]

Yes,
I purchased 2 more HDDs from softlayer, and one was faulty. It was also set as "the default boot point" for the system by Softlayer Techs. Softlayer just replaced the faulty HDD, and I am restoring accounts now from an offsite backup.
Sorry for any downtime. I am working hard to fix the problem in the shortest amount of time possible.
Scott

[deeplist]

I purchased 2 more HDDs from softlayer, and one was faulty. It was also set as "the default boot point" for the system by Softlayer Techs. Softlayer just replaced the faulty HDD, and I am restoring accounts now from an offsite backup.

Something about this doesn't sit right. If you purchased two MORE hard drives, how would that have anything to do with the existing data or existing drive(s)? Why would you have to restore anything? The only downtime would be when they power the box off to physically put the drives in, which would be less than 5 minutes.