Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Hosting Plan Improvements
We have upgraded all of our shared hosting plans to include more disk space and bandwidth. You can see the new packages on our web hosting page. We will be upgrading existing accounts over the next 5-7 days. If your account is not upgraded by then, please let us know.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Free Unfuddle Account With All Hosting Plans!
Beginning May 1st, 2008, we are now offering free Unfuddle accounts (Subversion and bug tracking) with all of our hosting plans. Each free account comes with the ability to manage 1 project and includes 1 Subversion repository. You can upgrade in the Unfuddle control panel at any time to manage more projects and for SSL support.
We use Unfuddle ourselves and are very pleased with this wonderful product. Our team finds it easier and more productive than Trac. We think you'll agree that it's the best hosted source code management and software project collaboration tool on the market!
Just to be clear, we aren't abandoning Subversion or Trac hosting. You can still use our Subversion and Trac services that come free with every account. We are simply recommending now that you give Unfuddle a try before you commit to Trac.
If you're an existing customer, we'll be setting up your accounts soon and sending you more information on this exciting new offer. You can also sign up for your free account now on the Unfuddle website.
We use Unfuddle ourselves and are very pleased with this wonderful product. Our team finds it easier and more productive than Trac. We think you'll agree that it's the best hosted source code management and software project collaboration tool on the market!
Just to be clear, we aren't abandoning Subversion or Trac hosting. You can still use our Subversion and Trac services that come free with every account. We are simply recommending now that you give Unfuddle a try before you commit to Trac.
If you're an existing customer, we'll be setting up your accounts soon and sending you more information on this exciting new offer. You can also sign up for your free account now on the Unfuddle website.
Saturday, March 1, 2008
Network Solutions Violates Visitors Trust
In the 11 years we've been in business, we've always had a policy that we never said anything negative about our competition or anyone else in the field. Many other colleagues of mine in other companies have the same policy, and it is the cornerstone, I believe, in running a good business.
I'm writing today though not to dish dirt on a competitor or to speak poorly of someone else in the business. I'm writing to warn our readers, customers, and friends that using the Network Solutions website to search for a domain is a bad idea.
Why? Well, when you do so, your domain will be locked for a period of up to 4 days, where you can only register the domain through Network Solutions. Network Solutions admits this is true and says that this is to "protect the interests of the users of its WHOIS service, to prevent malware or hackers from obtaining the content of domain searches and registering before the user can". Ironically, if you use Network Solutions to search for a domain, the only one you have to fear of "front-running" the domain (industry term for registering it before you can) is Network Solutions itself.
So why would they do this? Network Solutions is tired of people using their website to check on domain availability and then going to register them somewhere else. This is quite common because Network Solutions still, for some unknown reason, charges $35.00 per year for the registration of a domain, and their WHOIS is quite easy to use to search for available domains. Network Solutions has had its head in the sand about its pricing for nearly 10 years. You can purchase a domain through us for $9.20 a year, and there are places where domains can be had for less than that.
In short if you us Network Solutions to search for domains, your privacy will be violated and the domains you search for will be stolen from you, guaranteed. Is stolen too harsh? No, not at all. It would be the equivalent of you asking a patent lawyer about searching on a patent for your new invention, and then that lawyer turning right around and filing for a patent on it before you can. It's unethical, it's probably against ICANN regulations (they have yet to respond to this, but many are pushing for an investigation), its borderline illegal, and must be stopped.
Network Solutions has been loosing customers in a slow bleed for nearly 10 years since they refused to come down on their registration prices, and an outraged market will likely prevail it upon them to stop their stealing. Baring that, (Network Solutions has been known to be completely obvious to the market and public opinion), regulatory action by ICANN will end the mess.
I'm writing today though not to dish dirt on a competitor or to speak poorly of someone else in the business. I'm writing to warn our readers, customers, and friends that using the Network Solutions website to search for a domain is a bad idea.
Why? Well, when you do so, your domain will be locked for a period of up to 4 days, where you can only register the domain through Network Solutions. Network Solutions admits this is true and says that this is to "protect the interests of the users of its WHOIS service, to prevent malware or hackers from obtaining the content of domain searches and registering before the user can". Ironically, if you use Network Solutions to search for a domain, the only one you have to fear of "front-running" the domain (industry term for registering it before you can) is Network Solutions itself.
So why would they do this? Network Solutions is tired of people using their website to check on domain availability and then going to register them somewhere else. This is quite common because Network Solutions still, for some unknown reason, charges $35.00 per year for the registration of a domain, and their WHOIS is quite easy to use to search for available domains. Network Solutions has had its head in the sand about its pricing for nearly 10 years. You can purchase a domain through us for $9.20 a year, and there are places where domains can be had for less than that.
In short if you us Network Solutions to search for domains, your privacy will be violated and the domains you search for will be stolen from you, guaranteed. Is stolen too harsh? No, not at all. It would be the equivalent of you asking a patent lawyer about searching on a patent for your new invention, and then that lawyer turning right around and filing for a patent on it before you can. It's unethical, it's probably against ICANN regulations (they have yet to respond to this, but many are pushing for an investigation), its borderline illegal, and must be stopped.
Network Solutions has been loosing customers in a slow bleed for nearly 10 years since they refused to come down on their registration prices, and an outraged market will likely prevail it upon them to stop their stealing. Baring that, (Network Solutions has been known to be completely obvious to the market and public opinion), regulatory action by ICANN will end the mess.
Friday, December 7, 2007
Introducing Custom Rails Hosting and Rails 2.0
We've been proudly hosting Ruby on Rails for quite some time. We were one of the first 5 web hosts to offer Ruby on Rails support officially, and use it constantly in our day to day operations. We're also delighted to be hosting some of the Internet's biggest Ruby on Rails sites.
When you host as many Rails applications as we do, you undoubtedly will run across some sites that need a bit more than shared hosting can offer, but aren't ready yet for their own dedicated server or cluster. Traditionally we've filled this gap with virtual dedicated servers, but even they can be too much administration for a small Rails startup to handle.
We've filled this gap today by announcing our Custom Rails Hosting solution.
The main benefits of this new custom system are:
The best part about all of this is that it is available at the same low pricing that our shared hosting plans are. Just simply pay a small setup fee to cover the custom setup time we spend with each site to make sure it is running optimally.
If you're a current customer and are interested in this new service, please let us know. If you're not, just sign up for a shared hosting plan and indicate that you want a custom Rails hosting setup.
Rails 2.0.1
We are finishing up the upgrade to Rails 2.0.1, which was released today. By the time you read this all shared hosting servers will have Rails 2.0.1 on them. We still will maintain Rails versions 1.1.6 and 1.2.6 for compatibility reasons.
When you host as many Rails applications as we do, you undoubtedly will run across some sites that need a bit more than shared hosting can offer, but aren't ready yet for their own dedicated server or cluster. Traditionally we've filled this gap with virtual dedicated servers, but even they can be too much administration for a small Rails startup to handle.
We've filled this gap today by announcing our Custom Rails Hosting solution.
The main benefits of this new custom system are:
- The ability to run more than one Mongrel using the Mongrel Cluster plug-in behind an Apache 2.2 balanced proxy
- The ability to deploy via Capistrano, Vlad, or just manually from Subversion (even SFTP/SCP is supported, if that's the way you want to go)
- A highly tuned MySQL setup that caches queries more effectively, resulting in faster performance
- Monitoring of your Mongrel(s) via Monit upon request (dead mongrels can be restarted automatically)
- Full control over the Apache configuration file, so custom directives can be put in that .htaccess just doesn't allow.
- HTML/CSS/JS compression configurable to even further increase performance
The best part about all of this is that it is available at the same low pricing that our shared hosting plans are. Just simply pay a small setup fee to cover the custom setup time we spend with each site to make sure it is running optimally.
If you're a current customer and are interested in this new service, please let us know. If you're not, just sign up for a shared hosting plan and indicate that you want a custom Rails hosting setup.
Rails 2.0.1
We are finishing up the upgrade to Rails 2.0.1, which was released today. By the time you read this all shared hosting servers will have Rails 2.0.1 on them. We still will maintain Rails versions 1.1.6 and 1.2.6 for compatibility reasons.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Get Control of Your IMAP Account With IMAPSize
Ted Pavlic suggested to us a wonderful little utility he uses to determine space usage on his IMAP with us called IMAPSize. It calculates the size and number of messages of every folder in your IMAP account. It then colors the folders based on the size they take up, and you can sort by total size, making it easy to spot items that are taking up too much space.
We want to thank Ted for passing this along to us, and hope you find value in it as well!
We want to thank Ted for passing this along to us, and hope you find value in it as well!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
