Web Hosting: credit where credit is due

Posted on by Ian C.

I know this might be tempting fate, but …

After my extreme upset with Site5 a while ago, I’m pleased to say that since that awful period of unreliability & excessive downtime, my hosting with Site5 has been trouble free.

I notice that Site5 have removed a few features – they apparently no longer offer guaranteed uptime, and a host status page they used to have for each host machine is no longer accessible.
There are some new features offered instead which might interest some people – their latest special offer on hosting is impressive ($5/month for 55GB storage! Pre-paid for two years though)

So, Site5: Well Done! But please keep the service as good as it is now, and not like it was for a while!

MINIsOnTop on WordPress

Posted on by Ian C.

I”ve spent some amount of time this last week experimenting with WordPress, achieving my goal of moving the MINIsOnTop site over:

Why? Well …
In the past, one person has been in charge of updating MINIsOnTop; unfortunately that person is sometimes busy with “real life”! By moving over to WordPress, we can have it set up so that a number of “authors” can post to the site – this will spread the load and should make for quicker updates.

I’m reasonably impressed by WordPress so far, compared to MovableType which I use for GBMINI & GPMINI.
When I started with weblogs, I used Blogger because it was very easy to get started. After reaching limits, I switched to MovableType which was a great choice.
Now though, WordPress is probably better than MovableType – primarily because of the huge amount of users supporting it with adaptions and extensions. There’s also a couple of features I particularly like that are available in WordPress but not MovableType:
– the ability to have “pages” as well as posts;
– the ability to “click back in time”.

“Pages” are any page that isn’t a time-related weblog entry, but you want it to look like the rest of your site. In MovableType, I use a “server side include” to fill in the right hand banner, so I get my “pages” to look similar to the weblog, but with WordPress it’s automatic and not just similar but the same.

With my weblogs, you can see the recent posts on the main page, you can click one of the “recent entries” links, or you can click “all entries”. With WordPress, there is an “earlier posts” or “next page” type of link available, which takes you “back in time” page by page through the posts. This feature works particularly well on weblogs with lots of regular updates, like Motoringfile (which is also running on WordPress).

There’s some stuff I’d still like to improve on the new MINIsOnTop – in particular it would be nice to integrate the Gallery – but it’s running so that’s good enough for now.
Will I change GBMINI & GPMINI? I don’t know – there’s no particular reason to change since everything works quite well; it would be nice to have that “earlier posts” feature though, and it looks like WordPress might be better for fighting spam comments these days …

(and thanks to DB for encouragement!)

Site5.com hosting is poor

Posted on by Ian C.

Sorry everyone.

Site5 hosting has been poor over the last week or so – I noticed last week that my sites were down every morning for an hour or two; Site5 eventually claimed that it was a motherboard issue which they claimed to replace – but the hosting kept failing.
A week ago they sent this long message, promising all sorts of updates to sort issues:
Step 1: Our upcoming mail server software upgrade will result in a overall load average decrease and a nice bump up for server stability and website performance. Moiras is set to be upgraded tonight so you should be seeing results as early as tomorrow. This conversion has already happened on a handful of other servers for testing purposes and we have been very impressed with results thus far. Servers that were towards the top of our list for outage incidents have now stabilized and are running very smoothly.
Step 2: We will be upgrading our servers to MySQL 5 in early October which will result in yet another performance boost for the Moiras server and all the others. This upgrade will correct several bugs that remain unfixed in the MySQL 4.1 tree. The upgrade to MySQL 5 will show speed improvements due to a newly built engine as well as increased reliability and stability. MySQL 5 can also allow us to track usage much more easily and be able to alert intensive users as issues arise.
Step 3: At the end of these software upgrades we will then decide on which servers, if any, need to be moved to a SCSI/RAID 5 hardware setup to get their overall uptime/performance levels to where we all want them to be.

I’ve no idea if they did any of this – the hosting was actually OK for two days but got worse again.

Now, Site5 no longer respond to technical support requests – they just ignore them. And today, my hosting (on their “moiras” server) was down for more than 8 hours. They claim that a hard drive failed and it apparently took them that long to “copy data” and get everything working again (see this report).
Clearly there’s no such thing as mirrored backups 😦

So finally this evening my websites are back – but changes done by Site5 have broken them in ways I can’t fully diagnose yet.
Firstly, new comments don’t appear! They are emailed to me as normal, but they don’t get posted to the website. I can edit posts and comments successfully so it’s not a database issue.
Secondly, they’ve apparently omitted the graphics engine ImageMagick so that Gallery is broken – it can’t make thumbnail images any more.
Probably there are other issues too; these are just what I’ve found in the last hour.

Site5 seem to be turning into a poorer quality higher priced company – they used to offer a good package at a good price, with an “uptime guarantee”; they no longer have that guarantee, they don’t respond to technical support, they’ve put their prices up …
You can bet that I will NOT be recommending them 😦

UPDATE:
I still can’t post comments 😦
But I just got this message from Site5: “I am installing this now it should be done within 5 minutes” so maybe there’s some hope …
… and now I can again post pictures.

Funny thing – someone sent me a comment upset about the terrible language I used; shame they didn’t bother to read and notice that comments aren’t working any more!