Website/Hosting

As I posted before, nothing is perfect …
I was frustrated back in January by repeated down time from 1and1 and a lack of support feedback. MotoringFile is hosted on PowWeb and always seemed reliable (checking with Gabe confirmed that) so I switched. Apparently I chose the exact moment to switch when PowWeb decided to go for broke … and break things 😦
First, PowWeb had many issues with their recent “load balancing” which caused server problems and PHP issues (see here). Then more recently their MySQL server has been sick for more than a week, causing delays and failures to post on my weblog – both for me and for people trying to comment.

So I am moving GBMINI once again 😉
This time I have chosen InMotionHosting; I found some good indications of very low downtime from them, and they have an interesting Virtual Private Server package which offers me nearly my own computer on the web.
So far, it has been extremely quick during testing. There were a couple of issues that stumped me for a while, but tech support has been fast and accurate in its replies – this gives me great encouragement!

For example, There was no ImageMagick or NetPBM image libraries, so I could not run Gallery; I contacted them and after a discussion, they provided GCC (a compiler) so that I was able to install ImageMagick by compiling the source (first time I have ever done such in a Unix environment – and relatively pain-free!)
So perhaps the image libraries should have been available already, but the quick & useful support largely makes up for that …

Anyway, hopefully I have made the right decision in switching hosts again. I am paying more per month but maybe you get what you pay for. Readers will be the judge.
The name servers will be propagating over the next few days – when you see the InMotionHosting logo bottom right (instead of the PowWeb one) you know you are on the new hosting …

Oh well.
Switching from 1and1 to PowWeb did not prevent outages on GBMINI 😦
Today GBMINI was down for at least an hour – but so was most of PowWeb, including MotoringFile and even PowWebs own site.

From the PowWeb site:
Take advantage of our new technology and avoid embarrassing downtime! There are multiple paths for your client to hit your website at every given point through our “Zero Downtime Hosting” platform. PowWeb is one of the few companies that offer this technology!

At least PowWeb does tell you what is going on – from the PowWeb forum tonight:
We had some http service interruptions caused by a DOS attack earlier this morning. The attack was targeting one of the sites we host on a specific cluster. It also maxed out our load balancer limits which cause problems on all clusters. The problem has been resolved and we apologize for the inconvenience. Please note that email service was not interrupted. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

I recently set up a free monitor on WebSitePulse … it sent me an email alert when GBMINI vanished, and also told me when it came back; the free service only checks every hour so I don’t know exactly how long it was down – I guess for a business paying for the more frequent monitoring would be very worthwhile.

I have always had GBMINI set up so that posts & comments are listed “most recent first” – but it seems that everyone else has the comments listed “most recent last”.
That order makes more sense when you want to scroll down through the page and read the comments in order – generally comments have been limited and it did not make much difference but with the discussions recently it is awkward to scroll down to the end (oldest comment) then scroll back up to read the comments in order.

So I have switched the ordering of comments to match everyone else – oldest comment now appears first with the rest following in order below.

I also looked into integrating the comment entry onto the page, but I have not got there yet without ruining the page layout – so for now comment entry remains “pop-up” …

Thank you for your comments 😉