I am a programmer … Since the late 80s, I have written programs … The first programs ran on mainframe computers, and they were written in ASM/H (Assembler) … For the most part this was for work, but I did write a program to keep track of our pick-up work softball team stats … Things get done when your’re motivated …
Then, in the early 90s, I started running a BBS, and I started coding utilities for this BBS in C … I chose C because it was portable … (You could run it on almost any platform unchanged) … I wrote a ton of C programs … Communication utilities, network utilities, online door games and tons of utilities for my Spitfire BBS System and I had registrations from around the world for these utilities as I shared them with other Spitfire Sysops … I started delivering the Inquirer, and I wrote a program that did everything except deliver the papers … This was before Windows/95 … before RDMS such as MSSQL, Access and MySQL … Then the Internet was born, and my 5 node BBS system that received over 100 calls per day dwindled down to nothing. The Internet took over …
I got out of computers for a while, and when I came back, I went to setting up a web page for the band I was in. I started using Netscape Composer, but when I got undesired results, I went back to editing the source HTML text as I had been so accustomed to in the ASM and C days. I never went back to a WYSIWYG editor. I tried development IDEs, and they didn’t return desired results either …
I taught myself ASM/H. I taught myself C. Then when the time came, I taught myself HTML. At some point, someone wanted me to do their site, and I was in a situation where I had to have somewhere to put it on the web, so I got into hosting reselling someone else’s space on their servers. I brought up my own web server using Windows NT4 on a 200K SDSL line and developed my own web site. I taught myself ASP. After the DSL company went out of business, and the number of people I was hosting grew, the viable solution was a T1 line for my own internet access, and my NT4 server was more reliable than the hosting servers I was reselling at the time. I taught myself NT4 (and eventually 2000) and I taught myself IIS, FTP, SMTP, etc … I taught myself to host web sites …
After a while I got into the web and wanted to do more things, so I looked into starting to develop COM+ apps for use with ASP, but I was disenchanted by the VB6 IDE … I was back in an IDE and I hated it … Then I found PHP … PHP is the best thing I have ever found … It’s like C, and coding PHP has been like an old shoe … So much more available for PHP than there is for ASP (unless you want to pay for ASP/VB components). The more I got into PHP, the more I was looking at Linux … The more I started learning Linux, the more I was exposed to FreeBSD as a solution for hosting and Internet servers (as they were the first Internet servers) … I now have a FreeBSD Mail Server that does SPAM prevention, Virus Scanning and it’s all updated dynamically via the Internet. The only investment there has been the time I put into it to get it configured properly …
So, now I have almost 50 computers all prepared to do Internet hosting in a reliable environment … I no longer get the errors I had previously at two other places I bought reselling from … I checked market value at the time and I have set up a pricing scale that made sense … Now here is where the problems start …
After all this history I have in computers (mainframes to minis to micros) and I grew up with the 8088, 80286, 80386, 80486, DX2s, SXs and Pentiums, there are those that seem to think they can fill my shoes by buying an IDE to do what I do … While some people may become pros at this, they are SOL when a problem occurs … Most of them will just start from scratch and hope the new one works … In my development of ASP and PHP (web scripting languages) I have also evolved with them knowing their idiosyncrasies and why things are as they are, or why something that used to work doesn’t work anymore … With the development came security and different way of doing things so that systems wouldn’t be compromised … To call yourself a web developer if the only experience you have with the code is looking at what the pretty GUI application created for you, think again. Unless you understand what’s happening, you’re a fool to submit it and run it on a web server …
So what I describe is a person who thinks they’re a web developer without thinking … This goes hand in hand with web hosts that think they’re web hosts … I have had this stress for a while now … I get the SPAM, I bet everyone gets the SPAM … “FREE 1 Gigabyte Web Site!” “$5 a month after 6 months” “No setup fees!” … Here is where they come from: A guy buys a computer or rents one (more economical to buy) … He then throws it in a datacenter rack somewhere in the world, and is now a port on someone’s network. He buys Plesk or cPanel and now has a “Dummy’s Guide to Web Hosting” installed on his computer. A bunch of scripts that will set up and manage hosting accounts for him, he doesn’t need to know squat. Some companies even install it for you, and here’s your password … Off you go …
Then this novice web host fires up Dreamweaver and creates a nifty web site that produces PHP code that he doesn’t even understand, but hey, he’s getting a return on reselling his disk space that he has sitting colo’d somewhere. So he easily makes his $150/month dedicated server payment. But what happens when the formmail.cgi bug is found in cPanel? What happens when Plesk goes south? What happens when his MySQL or MSSQL server is compromised … What about service updates and well, what I like to call “System Maintenance” isn’t done cause he doesn’t know better … What about when every port has a running service on it and his machine is shut down by the ISP because he has rogue IRC servers and FTP servers running on his box because he didn’t know any better? Well, your web site goes down.
All I’m getting at is that you get what you pay for, and while some deal might seem great, you really ought to know what you’re getting into … I do everything I can to make sure my connection to the Internet is top notch. I do everything I can to solve day to day problems along with recurring Internet problems (such as SPAM or email Viruses) … I keep my systems up to date and monitor mailing lists to make sure I hear from the people doing the same thing I am doing, competent admins running reliable hosting on networks they manage. I also run both flavors, Windows and Unix Internet servers. I have mailed my customers countless times about the availability of a SPAM/Virus Free server available to them.
In relation to the connection, I found a glitch in Fast.Net’s network. They regularly once per minutes without fail would exceed 80ms on the routers in their network. I reported this with tons of evidence. My customers didn’t notice cause 80ms is nothing in terms of HTTP. SMTP, POP3 or FTP. I was not satisfied, and Fast.Net said there was nothing they could do, and that this was acceptable per their SLA. I found it completely unacceptable and called a Tier 1 Provider after I hung up with Fast.Net’s tech. Wouldn’t you know, Fast.Net is in Chapter 11 as of June 2003. See, they should have listened to me. I know what I’m doing …