Apr
12
(mt) MediaTemple 50% off coupon
Filed Under Opinion, Technology, Webhosting
While I was hunting around the net looking for more info on the MediaTemple mysql containers, I came across this coupon “surfstation” that gets you 50% off on their (gs) server package…
If you sign up for a year, that’s now only $100 instead of $200 dollars! A good deal… It’s too bad I can’t use it, since I’m a customer already 
If you decide to sign up, please use “thehappygeeks.com” as your referral domain, that way I get a bit of free hosting in return.
Or use this link to get there directly : http://mediatemple.net/go/order/?refdom=thehappygeeks.com (don’t forget to put the coupon code (surfstation) in as well)
I’m not sure how long this coupon will last, so hurry..
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Mar
23
Survivor: Fiji - Jeff bugs me
Filed Under Entertainment, Opinion, Rants, TV
Does anyone ever notice on Survivor after they cast their vote at Tribal Council, that Jeff Probst proudly announces “I’ll go tally the votes“.
Well, no. He’s not going to go and tally the votes.. He’s going to get the votes, bring them back and THEN tally them. He makes it sound like he’s going away to tally the votes and then maybe come back later to announce the results.
What he should be saying is “I’ll go and retrieve the votes” or “I’ll go and get the votes”
Sorry for the rant, but that bugs me every time I watch the show…
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Mar
21
The Webhosting Blues - Part II
Filed Under Opinion, Rants, Review, Technology, Webhosting
For my place of work I had to find a new place to host some of our company websites. This of course ruled out shared hosting and gave me a chance to try out some of the bigger offerings that I can’t afford myself.
Of course money is still an issue, so I had to be selective. Once again I hunted around the Internet to find some decent offerings. Tons and tons of websites later, I finally narrowed it down to 3 Webhosting providers.
And they where Cartika, Mosso and MediaTemple.
Let’s start with Cartika. They offer H-Sphere hosting on their shared accounts and are based out of Toronto. Since I am working for a Canadian company, I figured I’d give the local guys a shot as well. Mind you, the plan I was looking at is still shared hosting, but it’s clustered… But when it came down to price/features.. $75 CDN would give us 30 domains, 4GB of diskspace and 60GB of monthly transfer… Sorry, that just doesn’t cut it. And their H-Sphere VDC (Virtual Dedicated Cluster) starts at $300 CDN/month. Nope, they won’t let me spend that much 
Next was Mosso. The offer something called “The System”. To quote their website:
Put succinctly, The Hosting System is advanced, enterprise-level hosting technology and easy-to-use software that beats the pants off of running your own server—and costs less, too.
So a cluster with redundant everything.. Sounds good to me.. So what do you get? Well, for $100 US /month would give us 80GB of diskspace and 2TB of monthly transfer. And you can do Linux and Windows webstuff on the same platform. Sounded great. So I signed up at around 9:30am and was creating my first domain on the system at around 10am. I was one more click away from having the domain created.. I click the button.. ..Please wait.. and wait.. and wait.. After a while, I close the browser and open a new window and login again. I check the domain and… what? I have 2 identical domains that are still in the process of being fully created. Hmm.. I guess this is a good time to test their online tech support. I get to chat with a support guy fairly quickly and explain the situation.. OK, he will get his admins to check it out. Just as he’s about to give me my ticket#, MS Internet Explorer get’s a fit and starts consuming 100% of CPU and is using most of my precious memory
So I kill IE and loose the tech support guy.. Ok, let’s phone them.. I get through to a tech guy there really quick as well and when I start explaining about the duplicate domains, he says: “Oh, did you just talk to one of our support guys via the online chat?” Wow, they seem to know what’s going and and are on the ball.. So I chat a bit more with him and he assures me that they will look into it and will email me as soon as everything is ok.
Great.. I figured I’d be back to configuring my first domain within the hour. Well, I kept signing in to the control panel and checking the status.. Remember, this whole thing started at around 10am.. 11am comes and goes.. 1pm, 2pm, 3pm… I kept checking at regular intervals.. I finally noticed around 9pm that the domains where gone and I could start over again.. That’s over 10 hours.. And I still don’t have an email saying it’s been fixed yet either.. (a day later) I contacted their support again via the online option and asked on how I go about canceling the service.. (I had to send an email to cancel@mosso.com and explain why I am canceling - Still no reply to that either…)
So time to check out MediaTemple again. This time for their (dv) Dedicated-Virtual offering. Here the tagline from their website:
The best choice when you need complete control of your hosting environment. Customize your (dv) server with root level access to install anything you need.
For $50 US/month we get 20GB of storage, 256MB dedicated RAM and 1TB of monthly data transfer. And we get root access Works for me..
I signed up online and within 15 minutes I had all the accountinfo to start configuring our server.. I added 2 additional IP’s for $1 each per month and I opted for the snapshot backup for $19.95/month as well. (You can create a snapshot of the whole server.. Good idea to do before you start doing some changes that might come back to haunt you)
Well, so far everything is working just fine, I created domains, backups, users and rebooted the machine a few times as well.. Checked out the system as root and modified the proftpd config files for some other project we need.
All in all, their (dv) server is fast, stable and so far I haven’t had any problems with it. We’ll continue to test it over the next few weeks, but from the looks of it, we have a winner here…
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