Do you have a website you need to host? If you do, then you’ll find a great offer down at Nexx, where you can learn more about their Unlimited Web Hosting offer. They have a new service offering which they’re trying to promote, which consists of domain name and 12 months unlimited hosting for the pricely cost of $10.

The great thing about unlimited packages is that you don’t need to worry about hitting any limits in terms of bandwidth, space or even number of email addresses you host. They’re all included in the price of the package and you can focus on putting your site together and working on your content. Nexx even allow you to deploy a number of popular open source packages at the touch of a button. These include WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Zen Cart.

Nexx Hosting seem really confident about their service, in fact the $10 offer is meant to give you a taste of the level of service you can expect from their servers and their staff. They’re hoping that you try it out, find it awesome and decide to stay. The good thing is that $10 is really cheap, so you do ge to try out the service for a very small premium.

Oh yes, remember to use the code SPARK10 if you sign up.

That’s where websites like Web Hosting Geeks, a website that specialises in web site hosting, can help. They run reviews on a number of different services and compare different aspects of their services. They can help you identify what are the attributes you are interested in and how a variety of hosts compare on these attributes. And, if you’re not quite sure what you’re after, the website includes a number of articles on different topics related to hosting. Here are some that caught my attention:

• Dedicated Servers: Do you need a dedicated server? This is a complete server where you have access to all the resources. If you’re running a bit site and need lots of reliability that’s the way to go.
• How to make money from Web Hosting: If you’re going into Web Hosting with a vengeance, you may want to generate revenue from your hosting facility. This article talks about the different options and how you can make it happen.

So, whether you’re interested in domain hosting, dedicated hosting or reseller hosting, check out Web Hosting Geeks and make sure you know what you’re getting into. It’s easy to do your homework with a website that collects all the information you need in one place. Check it out.

photo credit: ph0t0 {loves you too}

I’ve just had a run-in with my old hosting provider ServerGrid and it has just escalated to a point where I can’t work with them any more. The latest debacle consisted of them turning off one of my websites last week because they alleged that I was using a section of  it to send spam! Those pages hadn’t been in use for a couple of years, so this was highly unlikely, but they deactivated the site without any notification. I realised this a couple of days later, so raised a ticket about the problem. It’s now 5 (FIVE) days later and I’m still waiting for the ticket to be resolved! How shoddy is that!

I’ve just looked over my ticket history and I raised 27 tickets this year, most of them caused by sites being down or non-responsive. Most of the tickets were pretty frustrating. I would raise a ticket that there was a problem, they reply a few hours later saying that it looks fine at their end, I tell them I still have a problem, then a few hours later the box gets reset (problem goes away) and they email back saying that it still looks fine from their end.

As I’m writing this post The Only Network is still offline but I’ve already made the domain change to move it to my new host (Tubu, whom I love). I raised the ticket last Thursday about this and it’s Tuesday now and well, I’m sick of being treated like crap. The ineptitude of their staff and their sheer reluctance to help means that they have lost one customer who was happy to sing their praises in the past.

Goodbye ServerGrid. I won’t be missing you!

RapidSwitch, a leading supplier of dedicated servers and one of the fastest growing hosting companies in the UK, is building a new data centre with a 20,000 server capacity, to meet growing customer demand.

Fit out work on the new site has commenced, and it will be ready for service in early 2009. The new site is near Maidenhead in Berkshire, close to the existing RapidSwitch Hosting Centre, enabling direct connectivity between the two sites at multiple 10 gigabit speeds. There is also diverse connectivity from the new site to London, again at multiple 10 gigabit speeds. The data centre is 600 racks in size, which will give a total capacity of 20,000 servers.

It’s always a good sign when a company adds a data centre. It’s a sign of increased growth and confidence in the market. It’s good news, both for RapidSwitch and all their RapidSwitch Dedicated Servers customers. RapidSwitch are interesting in that they are purely focused on the upper end of the hosting market, namely dedicated servers and co-location. Their dedicated servers start at £39 a month, which is a pretty good price if that’s what you’re after.

I didn’t need to do any market research to find out that the main concern my readers had with my website was the slow loading time and the more-than-occasional PHP timeout error. I tried to alleviate things by using WP-Cache, but that didn’t stop the problems. So my mate Andy pointed me in the direction of his awesome web host and well, you can just feel the difference.

This is going to be the first time that the majority on my websites will be hosted on a Linux box, but WordPress is much happier on that and it’s an opportunity to get more hand-on with new technology for me. Fun huh?

Isle of Man eBusiness News – Spring 2008

I’ve hosted the video on Vimeo, which is a pretty compelling YouTube competitor. Anyone have any experience working with them?

Obviously there’s the usual things, disk space, bandwidth, email and a lot of other facilities. They also offer a number of website design tools and website templates. The nice thing is that the reseller account can be used for business web hosting, ecommerce web hosting or any other arrangement you are after.

The main features I’m using at the moment are MySQL and PHP, but they also offer .Net hosting, mainly because the systems are hosting on Windows boxes. They also offer phpBB, osCommerce and SiteStudio as standard. I’m having a great time and learning a lot, which is always good.

This is one of their generators. The facility has multiple mains feeds, backed up with a number of generators which are continually kept “warm”. If a power outage occurs, the generators can come online within 30 seconds. The facility uses UPSs to bridge the time between the power outage and when the generators come online. They also keep 4 days worth of fuel for the generators on-site. The whole power/UPS/generator/power distribution setup is mirrored so that if any element breaks down, the system automatically switches to the alternative system.

The climate in the facility is kept at 21 degrees (+/- 1.5) at a relative humidity of 50%. They have an N+1 redundancy policy, but are planning to move to 2N+1 in the future.

The fire-suppression system is pretty comprehensive too. They have a VESDA (Very Early Smoke Detection Apparatus) system which works on a “double-knock” basis. This uses multiple elements to make sure that if there is a component failure, it won’t trigger off the system by mistake. In the eventuality of fire being detected, FM-200 is released into the room to starve the fire from Oxygen. The main advantage of FM-200 is that it extinguishes flames without necessarily killing any people in the room.

The physical security was also worth noting. Proximity cards are needed to move around the building, together with PIN codes. You need to go through an air-lock to get into the building and anyone without the right clearance is just not allowed in.

The visit was pretty informative, and it’s great to see this sort of setup locally. I might actually look at moving my hosting to their services, depending on how competitively they are priced. More about that later!

It was interesting to see the markets Netcetera are looking to tap into. Their core business used to be in web hosting, but with the inception of their data center they are also looking towards providing business continuity services to the local business community. It will be interesting to watch them grow in the future and I certainly will be keeping an eye on them!

Seems like the site is down for maintenance; or maybe their changing hosting provider; or maybe something more sinister has occured. I’ll be keeping an eye out, but I hope it was a planned occurance.

Makes me realise though how transient artefacts on the Web can be though. Like all modern technologies, it’s built out of layer on top of other layers and if one of these goes wrong, down comes the whole thing. I experienced this a few months ago, when my old hosting provider decided to pull the plug. All my websites were down and it took a fair bit of work to migrate them onto a new hosting provider.

The thing to bear in mind is that websites need a continual effort to maintain a web presence. Whether it’s tending to things that have broken or paying your hosting provider or just keeping your content updated, there’s constant effort required to keep things alive. If you don’t keep doing this, the forces of chaos will step in and entropy will eat away at your presence. No different to real life I suppose!