Weblogs

Apparently this “Personal Publishing System” decides that my entries are too old and then starts to move them off of the page. Because it’s a CSS layout, it changes the look of the site which is my default web site … I have links here to places I frequent … There are other links I would like to have handy, but I don’t want them public … I haven’t had a solution to that .. yet …

What have I been up to? What’s been going on? Well, sometimes I wonder how much I should actually post on this here thing … I mean, it is public, and it could be accessed by anyone, so what to “conceal” and what to make public? How much of what I type in here has affects on other things? I honestly don’t know … So, I just type and see what happens …

The ENT guy that prescribed me to get bloodwork changed my appointment, so I am going back there later. Today has been rainy, so all day yesterday my sinuses already told me it was coming … I don’t think my antibiotic run did a damn thing, but hey, it’s good for practice. The blood test came back, and my family doctor said my blood was thick so I had to lose weight … So, next time I am going in there I am going to punch the doc in the nose, swipe some of the blood off his face and offer after looking at his blood that I think he’s bald and skinny. Call me fat will he?

Web hosting is now turning around and around … I created new DNS servers on FreeBSD … I put them in place about two weeks ago. Just today I close all DNS ports on the Windows servers. In fact, the secondary box for one of the name servers crashed April 26th or 27th … It also used to be the network’s MySQL server. Thankfully I had moved the MySQL serving to a FreeBSD Server in previous months, and I had just changed the DNS Servers, so the box wasn’t doing much of anything … Fate?

Customers are coming and going … In some cases, it’s a good thing to see some of them go … The people that I gave the world to, much time, and there was no sense of appreciation … Not that I necessarily needed that to begin with, but it’s just that some people don’t realize what the heck is going on out there/here … But, this brings my services into a specialized area … I feel that making my customers people who’re educated in the ways of the Internet makes the acceptance of my ideas or actions that much more justified. There are those that think a change is a hassle … I can see them rolling their eyes and saying “What now?” … but realistically all change has been for the good. Once everything is put in place, I don’t see much reason for change, only expansion …

All the “service” type servers have been moved to FreeBSD Servers … This is awesome … So now, Mail, MySQL and DNS are served by servers that will never go down and are updated much easier than a Microsoft server … I must say, as I always do after tooting FreeBSD’s horn, is that if Microsoft performed well, I would probably have never done this. But, MS Servers have to be booted frequently … and when they’re not booted on purpose, sometimes they decide to boot themselves … Whenever a MS Server boots, obviously DNS isn’t available … It’s one thing to boot from maintenance at 4AM or something, but the Microsoft servers like to boot during peak hours on their own with bugchecks … While this could be attributed to 3rd party applications, there is much money involved in those applications simpy because they’re MS applications … When using FreeBSD you have the availabilty of all the Open Source software you could ever hope for .. Not to mention that the FreeBSD operating system smokes Microsoft servers hands down …

So, I’m not necessarily here to judge the MS Servers or operating systems, I am simply reaching the goal of stability provided by the servers that provide the service that I “sell” … Making those services closer to 100% reliability meant putting FreeBSD servers in those places where MS has constantly failed me … Once there is a base of FreeBSD stability with the ability to also serve Windows type content (ASP, .NET), then we can certainly work towards a better recovery or backup type reliability in the way of data and power …

I appreciate the people who know what I am on the road to accomplish, and I appreciate that they understand the range of what why how and where … With sharing this development with me and by utilizing these services, they’re all molding this web hosting company into a solution for everyone … While I know that there’s a huge competition in the hosting market, I also know why … I spend countless hours reading documents and learning what it is that’s actually out there … PHP.NET has a link to the webhostingtalk.com forums at the top right of their page … I have simply read in there about all the nifty things that people are or aren’t doing … I have also had conversations on the phone with people who hosted with “big” hosting companies and much preferred my way of thinking … They just recently signed on, and they are going through the general learning that I think anyone should know being in the Internet business … This is something that non-RFC-compliant Microsoft people simply don’t know and have a user friendly operating system there trying to solve all the problems … Where I think they missed it was that instead of being user friendly and fixing things for you, they should announce the error and instruct the user on how to fix it … How will people learn if this isn’t done? They will have learned how to accomplish something the wrong way and poison all of those after them on how to accomplish something … Soon the solution will break (with an update or something) …

Well, enough of my rantings … I feel that I am in the right direction when it comes to the solutions I have decided on providing … For myself and anyone else who’d like to share these benefits with me (customers) … This is why there’s no nickel and diming of services or hidden gimmes or gotchas … Straight hosting with the availability of the world! I simply couldn’t justify charging extra for things when I don’t have all of the extras that “big” companies have … But, most of the time, they’re just words on a web site or another check to put in a display table … at least I’m honest about it … I’d say most SPAM’d hosting offers are from people who have colo’d a box with a 160G HD and installed CPanel (or similar) and pay $150/mo for the colocation … This one box does all their hosting/mail/database/billing etc … and when it breaks? Oh well … I think anybody could do this, but in the real world … All of these services need to be separated run and monitored individually on their own machines …

So, if anyone has any questions or anything regarding any of the drivel I have just composed, well before, but the stuff you just read, drop me an email or something … Thanks!