07-03-2007, 06:45 AM
June was kind of a disaster month. I moved the server to dot5hosting.com back in October of 2006. I was paying way too much at the previous place, so I took a chance to see what would happen. dot5 promised 50GB of storage space, and 750GB of bandwidth. More than enough to put up all kinds of media, and even the Al Fry videos.
However, by April 2007, dot5 increased storage to 300GB, and 3000GB of bandwidth. What's the catch?
The catch is, that they are in a scummy price war with all the web hosting crooks. What does this mean? Well, it means that if you sign up with liars for web hosts, they have to monkey wrench you if you try to use even a PARTIAL amount of what they promise you. Essentially, they want simple people, with small sites to sign up.
People who start using the resources run into "technical problems". It appears that dot5's sleazy administrators erased the Al Fry videos on June 4, and then again on June 16. I called the company, and they lied profusely. Once they realized that their outsourced admins in India had erased non-pirate material... they restored from backup and acted "very concerned". They said it was an XSS "cross site scripting" attack.
Al's videos used to disappear from the mail back in the old days... so I wasn't sure if they were being erased by zealous fed/weirdos of some kind. As it turns out... there is so much stuff on the internet that the feds don't have time to erase stuff anymore. The sleazy company appears to have been saving disk space by pruning anything they could get away with.
I was also running phpBB for the first forum test. It was a beta version, and I was waiting for the phpBB final that was supposed to be excellent. I thought the site might have been hacked due to the flaky software. So, it took me most of the month to figure out what had gone wrong, then what to DO about it.
Anyway, to make a long story short, I found a realistic web hosting company and their servers are running more modern software. The only "drawback" is that I can't host the entire Al Fry >video< library all at once. I think I'll put up a video per week for download instead. This isn't really a "download" site anyway... not like google video.
So, the site is on a new server... and so far so good. I have also installed MyBB, which appears to be the best board on the internet... (certainly the best value) It is very similar in design to the very expensive vBulletin which is touted as the leading commercial board. MyBB is also much more secure than phpBB... The old phpBB board on this site crashed on at least 2 occasions which added to the June 2007 fiasco.
The good news about all of this is that the learning curve is over, and I think the site/server combination is now workable. I didn't know anything about forums just a few months ago, and knew too little about servers and mysql databases. Now I am way ahead of where I was. Fortunately, the old board was relatively small during the learning process. Everything can be rebuilt and improved now. The platform is SO much better.
Everyone is welcome to sign up for the new board. I am very, very, very happy with this new software... and I think it will be around for the long term. I'll see if I can get a better color scheme up and running over the next few days. The default blue look is kind of bland. Other than that...it seems to be great. We'll have to see how it performs in the field. Special thanks to faxkid for helping me in the search for the software.
July 2, 2007
tkra@honesty.org
However, by April 2007, dot5 increased storage to 300GB, and 3000GB of bandwidth. What's the catch?
The catch is, that they are in a scummy price war with all the web hosting crooks. What does this mean? Well, it means that if you sign up with liars for web hosts, they have to monkey wrench you if you try to use even a PARTIAL amount of what they promise you. Essentially, they want simple people, with small sites to sign up.
People who start using the resources run into "technical problems". It appears that dot5's sleazy administrators erased the Al Fry videos on June 4, and then again on June 16. I called the company, and they lied profusely. Once they realized that their outsourced admins in India had erased non-pirate material... they restored from backup and acted "very concerned". They said it was an XSS "cross site scripting" attack.
Al's videos used to disappear from the mail back in the old days... so I wasn't sure if they were being erased by zealous fed/weirdos of some kind. As it turns out... there is so much stuff on the internet that the feds don't have time to erase stuff anymore. The sleazy company appears to have been saving disk space by pruning anything they could get away with.
I was also running phpBB for the first forum test. It was a beta version, and I was waiting for the phpBB final that was supposed to be excellent. I thought the site might have been hacked due to the flaky software. So, it took me most of the month to figure out what had gone wrong, then what to DO about it.
Anyway, to make a long story short, I found a realistic web hosting company and their servers are running more modern software. The only "drawback" is that I can't host the entire Al Fry >video< library all at once. I think I'll put up a video per week for download instead. This isn't really a "download" site anyway... not like google video.
So, the site is on a new server... and so far so good. I have also installed MyBB, which appears to be the best board on the internet... (certainly the best value) It is very similar in design to the very expensive vBulletin which is touted as the leading commercial board. MyBB is also much more secure than phpBB... The old phpBB board on this site crashed on at least 2 occasions which added to the June 2007 fiasco.
The good news about all of this is that the learning curve is over, and I think the site/server combination is now workable. I didn't know anything about forums just a few months ago, and knew too little about servers and mysql databases. Now I am way ahead of where I was. Fortunately, the old board was relatively small during the learning process. Everything can be rebuilt and improved now. The platform is SO much better.
Everyone is welcome to sign up for the new board. I am very, very, very happy with this new software... and I think it will be around for the long term. I'll see if I can get a better color scheme up and running over the next few days. The default blue look is kind of bland. Other than that...it seems to be great. We'll have to see how it performs in the field. Special thanks to faxkid for helping me in the search for the software.
July 2, 2007
tkra@honesty.org