Re: [SLUG] Election Site hosting

From: Paul M Foster (paulf@quillandmouse.com)
Date: Mon Jan 19 2009 - 12:10:02 EST


On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 10:11:31AM -0500, Dennis Devine, San Antonio wrote:

> 1and1 provides Linux hosting, although it is not local. Access is
> good and the price is right. This is a national and international company.
> Domain included.

There is one problem with 1and1.com: You can't access your site until
the registrar cycles the nameservers. Here's how this works:

You have a customer site at, say, hostica. You decide to move it, so you
go to the registrar and tell them to switch the nameservers over to
1and1.com. You then proceed to set up the account at 1and1. Now, we
assume you want the customer site to have uninterrupted visibility.
Since you can't predict when the registrar will cycle the nameservers,
you want the site to be visible at 1and1.com as soon as the nameservers
cycle. Ergo, uninterrupted access. Now, normally when you set up a site
at a hosting company (like 1and1), they give you an FTP addess to upload
content. That FTP address is normally something like ftp.newsite.com.
The problem is that until the nameservers cycle, that FTP address is
probably pointing to the old hosting company. You see the problem? There
has to be a back door to upload your content at 1and1 *before* the
nameservers cycle, in order to maintain uninterrupted site visibility.

At 1and1.com there is no such facility. There is at glowhost.com. There
is at dreamhost.com. There isn't at 1and1.com. This is all fine if it's
a *new* site-- you just wait until the nameservers click over, and then
upload your stuff via your FTP address. No one's seen the site before
(it's new), so there's no interruption. But if it's an existing site and
you move it to 1and1.com, the old site will be visible until the
nameservers change. Then there will be nothing until you notice the
nameservers change over to 1and1.com, and upload content via your new
FTP address.

While I'm talking about hosting companies, dreamhost has good pricing
and generous hosting specs. But you'll need to prepare yourself for
lunacy. These guys are very quirky. Their monthly newsletter leads me to
believe there are probably bongs on everyone's desk there. They seem to
do a good job and they're always introducing new features, and they
treat the hosting customers like family. It's just that the guys who run
the place are very odd characters. Their front end is one of their own
making, which works pretty well.

Glowhost.com is another decently priced solution with less generous
specs. They have a variety of techs, but only really one guy who's their
main tech. If you ever get him on the phone (or via email), you'll find
that he's incredibly bored with the whole thing and always assumes he's
right, even when he's not. Fortunately, he generally knows more than I
do about these things. They use cPanel as their front end.

Rapidsys is a local company which does hosting but whose main line is
ISP work (the internet connection, not the hosting). Do not use them.
They really don't know what they're doing with regard to hosting. We've
had to consistently wait many many minutes just to have an FTP
connection go through, and hours to download the least amount of
content. I believe this is because they use Windows servers.

Godaddy.com is the most horrible hosting company I've every seen. I just
had a customer set up a hosting account with them, and it took hours to
upload a few megs worth of content from their old site to their new site
on godaddy. Turns out they had hosted the guy on a Windows box. We got
him to insist on changing to Linux servers, and the problem went away.
Godaddy's site is, I believe, run on Windows machines. And their site
does not operate properly on any browser other than Windows IE. This is
the company that agreed a few years ago to switch all their "parked"
domains over to Windows machines after being paid a chunk of change by
Microsoft. The point of that exercise was to bump up Microsoft's ratings
at Netcraft. And I don't think I've every seen a more cluttered site in
the world. Everything you need to do there (like renewing a site)
involves a ton of irrelevant screens which try to entice you to buy
endless add-ons for what you want. Ugh.

</rant>

Paul

-- 
Paul M. Foster
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