Archive for the ‘Hosting’ Category

All posts in Hosting category.

Mar
09
2009

Dealing With Tech Support is Rarely Pleasant

Posted by: Jen | No Comments »

Categorized: Hosting, Serenity Now!

I should have known the second I had to spell out “help” to the tech support representative that this was going to be a rough call, but I tried to stay calm. It blows my mind that some companies put such incompetent people in a position to “help” (which they cannot even spell) people with little or no skills beyond reading a tree of “if this then that”.

I have to say – if anyone would like advice on which web hosts to choose or stay away from – please let me know. I would be happy to give you the names of a few good ones v. the ones to stay away from because of nightmarish configurations and even worse tech “support” people.

Really – did I have to spell out “help” to someone that clearly repeated it to me….really??

Serenity now!!

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Jan
04
2008

Jappler Recommends: CPsafe.

Posted by: Jen | No Comments »

Categorized: Hosting, HOWTOs, Jappler Recommends, Web Development

Start the year of right – set up a backup system! A few years ago, I documented how to backup your web sites, databases, email, etc when your host uses CPanel to a remote FTP server. Since then, there have been several CPanel updates and Perl updates that the script no longer works so I have been looking for another option and finally found it. The new script is called: CPsafe (if that does not work, check out the cached version. Within 5 minutes, you can have your home directory backup set up and ready to run. I think the hardest part of this process was figuring out where to turn on FTP access in my Mac OS X 10.5 new install. (System Prefs > Sharing > File Sharing > Options > FTP)

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Dec
17
2007

apache, mysql, php update.

Posted by: Jen | No Comments »

Categorized: Apache, Content Management Systems, Hosting, jappler.com, Web Development, Wordpress

Finally after two years of contemplating the updates to Apache 2.x, MySQL 5.x, and PHP 5.x, I finally updated my server to the latest version os Apache, MySQL, and PHP. I was not too concerned about custom work or any of my WordPress sites, but I was concerned XOOPS and/or XOOPS modules would have some problems, but it is now a week later and everything is running smoothly. Why finally? Well, as of the end of this month, support for PHP 4 will be discontinued. Better late than never. Time to update your servers too?

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Oct
23
2007

Out of Disk Space

Posted by: Jen | No Comments »

Categorized: Business, Hints, Hosting, jappler.com, Serenity Now!

If you all the sudden get database errors (select, cannot login, cannot write, etc) – and everything looks ok (from the database end of things) check to make sure you have not run out of disk space. How do I know? Well – let’s say last night I had to do a major fall clean-up. If you know me and my monitoring habits, this will sound a bit confusing because one of the many things I monitor is disk space, but when your hosting company accidentally halves your disk space – trouble can occur, and quickly. I have not had many issues at all with Liquid Web – but this was major…and handled a little slower than I would have liked.

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Oct
16
2007

Jappler Recommends: Do Not Use iPowerWeb Hosting

Posted by: Jen | No Comments »

Categorized: Hints, Hosting, Jappler Recommends

I have a lot of hosting companies – thanks to my clients who come in with all kinds of hosting companies. I have found that some hosting companies are better than others in terms of support and I just found another horrible support company that I wanted to mention: iPowerWeb. I was on hold multiple times today for over 30 minutes and I waited to “Live Chat” with someone for over 20 minutes. When someone actually got on and tried to help, after 1 hour, they told me they could not help me and had to escalate the issue. Yikes. (other hosting posts)

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Aug
13
2007

Jappler Recommends: Liquid Web

Posted by: Jen | No Comments »

Categorized: Hosting, Jappler Recommends, jappler.com

It has almost been two years since I moved all my sites to Liquid Web for my hosting needs and am still very happy with them. If you take a look at my hosting category, you can see I have been around the block a few times. I have had a few issues, BUT, everyone who I have spoken with is very knowledgeable, helpful, and always been on top of the issue. If you are interested in a new web host, I highly recommend Liquid Web.

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Jun
29
2007

Not Yahoo! Over yahoo! Web Hosting

Posted by: Jen | 1 Comment »

Categorized: Hosting, Jappler Recommends, Web Development

I have enjoyed looking at multiple hosting options through clients in the last few months. Yesterday I worked with Plesk on one account and another who uses Yahoo! for hosting. Just as I was getting ready to write a positive blog post on Yahoo’s web hosting I ran into a snag when uploading and preparing the WordPress site for my client…Yahoo! does not allow you to use mod_rewrite Permalinks. So instead of having nice URLs like /services/ and /contact/ you have to use ?page_d=4. Gross. So in short – if you are using WordPress and want to maintain it yourself (always have the latest, most secure version, etc) I do not recommend using Yahoo! for WordPress sites.

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Jun
18
2007

jappler recommends: do not use godaddy.com for hosting.

Posted by: Jen | 2 Comments »

Categorized: Hints, Hosting, Jappler Recommends

Over the past few months I have had the chance to look at a number of hosting companies and their “control panels” by working with a number of clients. It seems as a number of people flock to godaddy.com because of it’s price (really cheap), but I have learned – once again – that you get what you pay for. If you want to have a very simple 1-5 page static web site, go for it – use whatever host you want. If you want anything else, after working with over 20 hosting companies, I can easily say that I would not go with godaddy.com. Why?

  • The admin area (control panel) is horrible in general. Not intuitive at all.
  • No backup on demand (or scheduled) available
  • Working with .htaccess files is a pain – as they do not work right away, there is a “wait time”.
  • The admin area (control panel) is slow and sometimes even times out
  • Free support is almost non-existent
  • Creating a database is not instantaneous
  • Paid support (talk to someone) is a joke (at least in my experience)
  • I am not alone in my recommendation

I could go on, but I have a busy day ahead of me. What would I recommend? First of all, I have found that working with cPanel is very nice and easy to use control panel. After that, there are a number of good and bad hosts you can weed through. Personally, I have had excellent uptime and support from Liquid Web, but anything is almost better than the godaddy.com hosting.

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Feb
06
2006

mysql database corruption.

Posted by: Jen | No Comments »

Categorized: General, Hosting, jappler.com

What got me up early Saturday and then up at 1am on Sunday? Server hardware failure…which led to some database corruption. I have never had to deal with database corruption, so I did not even know my problem was database corruption until after calling the helpful tech guys at Liquid Web. (I am not one to usually call tech support, but at 136am on a Sunday…I did not feel like spending time at mysql.com or google.com.)

I first noticed something on Saturday morning, but after restoring a database table from a backup, everything was golden. I told myself…it had to have been from some user error. Monday morning, after my Nagios server paged me, I noticed that jappler.com had several mysql fetch_row () errors after the server came back up. I decided that this problem was not user error and something else was going on. As soon as I told the tech guy the error that I was seeing onjappler.com and other web sites I manage, he asked me if I had tried “repairing” the databases. I had not even thought about it (especially so early in the morning). Once he “repaired the databases”, everything was perfect.

This was a stressful lesson to learn, but I am always happy to learn new things. The lesson I learned was about database corruption. (All my tables are MyISAM)

[tags]MySQL, database corruption, CPANEL, MyISAM[/tags]

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Dec
08
2005

web hosts, the journey continues once again.

Posted by: Jen | No Comments »

Categorized: General, Hosting

Well, after multiple outages in the last few weeks, I think it is once again, time to move to another host. I had high hopes for Host Gator but I cannot handle too many more conversations with the tech support people because of outages. Next up: another go at a VPS account at Liquid Web. The conversion begins tonight.
[tags]web hosts, jappler.com, Host Gator, Liquid Web[/tags]

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