Liking WebHostingBuzz, and deals

Posted on February 12, 2012 at 6:04 pm UK

Just over a month ago, I started a relationship with a new web hosting service, WebHostingBuzz. The words you’re reading now are served up to your screen from a database in the cloud (well, from a dedicated Dell server physically located in a data center somewhere in the US).

As I noted in my first post about WebHostingBuzz, you now get content served to you a lot quicker and more reliably. If you look at the footer of this page (on the site itself), you’ll see a counter showing how quickly the page was served. Typically, it’s less than half a second. Page load speed is important to Google ranking.

I’m very pleased with the uptime record since I moved this site – 100%.

uptime

According to Hyperspin – a service that monitors this site and emails me daily reports – 100% uptime has been the state of things since I made the move to WebHostingBuzz. They promise 99.99% so I’m quite pleased with 100% over 30+ days!

So far, I’ve had nothing but a stellar experience with WHB. I’ve not had reason to connect with tech support yet (which is actually a good thing), but I’m pretty confident that when I do – and it’s inevitable that I’ll have to at some time – I’ll encounter the professionalism and great service that I did when the tech team helped me migrate things to their service.

In that first post I wrote last month, I mentioned what the deal is with WHB:

[...] in essence, they’ll host my web presence at no financial cost to me and I’ll talk about them from time to time, here and elsewhere, and give them a platform to occasionally tell their own story. We’re addressing our arrangement openly and transparently: there’s a little badge on this site that declares ‘hosted by WebHostingBuzz,’ for instance, as well as a similar phrase in the footer of each page.

Even if we didn’t have a sponsorship deal, I’d talk about them anyway. But rather than just talk about WHB, I asked them to give me something to offer readers of this blog.

They didn’t hesitate, and here’s the deal and how to get it:

On budget, reseller, business or VPS plans
On either the US or the UK WebHostingBuzz domain
Get 50% off your first purchase, for any purchase period
Your coupon code is: hostingdream
Enter that code in the coupons box when you get to the checkout

That’s a good deal – 50% off. (I get no commission, by the way, nor any other type of benefit if you take up WHB’s special offer. Just to be clear on that point.)

If you decide to join up with WebHostingBuzz, let me know how you get on.

WHB: A new host for a new year

Posted on January 8, 2012 at 2:26 pm UK

In November 2011 I made a decision that, in early 2012, I’d move this blog and some other web properties to a new hosting service. From today, that service is WebHostingBuzz and I’d like to introduce you to them.

Founded a decade ago, WebHostingBuzz (WHB for short) offers a wide range of hosting services – web hosting, business web hosting, reseller hosting, virtual private servers and dedicated servers – as well as specialized services such as WordPress, Joomla, Magento and Drupal hosting plus e-commerce hosting. The company says it has over 30,000 customers worldwide, hosting more than 250,000 websites at datacentres in the US and in The Netherlands.

Sounds pretty standard stuff, doesn’t it? It’s the kind of setup you’d expect from any competent hosting company. I think WHB undoubtedly meets that minimum bar; it’s some other things about them that I think takes them beyond the minimum.

The arrangement I have with WHB is more than simply customer and hosting service. When I was initially approached about getting together with WHB – the timing couldn’t have been better, given my November decision – I had a number of conversations and email exchanges with their UK-based CEO Matt Russell. It quickly became clear to me that here is a business that acts differently and which is interested in forming relationships with people and businesses that aren’t just about obvious commercial interests. They see themselves as forward-thinkers and look for similar others in the relationships they want to build, and want to use the evolving social web as a platform to tell their story.

I also like their stance against the US government’s proposed SOPA legislation that aims to combat online intellectual property theft among other things. The intent of this proposed law may be good but the proposed measures and methods to fight such crime currently in front of the House Judiciary Committee of the US House of Representatives are alarming in areas such as the power it confers on government (and if you think that only matters in the US, think again).

So we agreed a sponsorship deal that brings benefits to both of us – in essence, they’ll host my web presence at no financial cost to me and I’ll talk about them from time to time, here and elsewhere, and give them a platform to occasionally tell their own story. We’re addressing our arrangement openly and transparently: there’s a little badge on this site that declares ‘hosted by WebHostingBuzz,’ for instance, as well as a similar phrase in the footer of each page; and there’s this post to start with that is posted primarily to its own topic category: webhbostingbuzz.

Today, we threw the metaphorical switch and this site is now ‘hosted by WebHostingBuzz.’

What does it mean for you, the reader? Well, in a practical sense, the first thing is that you should get content served to you a lot quicker and more reliably as this site is now hosted on a dedicated server. It also has WHB’s VIP Management service behind it where people who know what they’re doing will look after the physical infrastructure that enables the content to appear on your screen.

If you’re thinking about a new web hosting service, you might want to check WHB out and look at some of their special January offers for dedicated servers as well as the coupon discount from their UK home page. (Note: I get no commission or anything for mentioning or linking to any of their deals.) Connect with them on Twitter and on Facebook. I wonder if I can persuade them to open up on Google+ as well.

And finally, I’m impressed with their 24×7 tech support in the past week and during this weekend – it really is 24×7 – as they did all the heavy lifting to successfully migrate my WordPress content including databases, DNS changes, etc, to their service.

A good move.

No frills for a while

Posted on October 4, 2011 at 6:22 pm UK

If you’re a previous visitor to this site, you’ll probably notice that it looks very different today compared to your last visit. What you see is the look and feel of the default WordPress theme known as Twenty Eleven that’s included with the latest version of the content management system, instead of the customized Thesis theme with colourful banner at the top that has defined the appearance of this site for over four years.

Why the sudden change? Reverting back to default is a start point in troubleshooting an issue that’s been plaguing the site – and me, and maybe you as well – for the past few months. Take a look at this chart:

vpsresourcescharts

It shows memory and processor usage over the past month on the virtual private server I use at my hosting service DreamHost. To summarize it all very simply, the red and blue lines constantly spike into areas well outside what I’m allocated to use. This results in frequent site downtime among other things.

That means you get errors when you try to get here. No content. Or, very slow page loading. According to Pingdom which monitors the site for downtime, this site has suffered 14 outages totalling 8 hours 59 minutes and 58 seconds between September 1 and October 2. That’s a full working day when nothing here was accessible by anyone.

And that doesn’t include the frequent outages for just a few minutes which have been happening every single day in recent weeks, especially whenever I publish new content via Windows Live Writer.

I have some helpful suggestions from DreamHost technical support which I’m now going to implement. Part of that is starting by reverting to defaults on most things including the theme. I’ve also deactivated (and will uninstall) nearly all plugins – I had over 40 running.

Probably all a bit much really.

So no frills for a while as I see if DreamHost’s recommendations and my execution of those over time solve the problems.

Of course, if you only read content here via an RSS subscription or other means of remote consumption, you probably won’t notice any difference. But thanks for reading this anyway, published in the interests of timely communication.

Get prepared with an IPv6 internet address

Posted on March 6, 2011 at 3:25 pm UK

As you may have heard, the Internet is running out of space. Specifically, the addressing system known as the Internet Protocol or IP address that uniquely identifies every single device connected to the global network is close to maximum capacity in its IPv4 guise.

Blame Vint Cerf, the man who invented IPv4 about 40 years ago, and who never imagined that 4 billion IP addresses wouldn’t be enough.

What does the address shortage mean today in practical terms? Probably not much at the moment to the average business or personal user but Charles Arthur’s explanation in The Guardian last month may give it a more immediate focus:

[...] This could mean that in a year’s time you may hear about a new site – yet when you type its address into a web browser or click a link to it on a web page, your computer simply won’t connect to it because it will use an addressing system entirely different to the one used before.

It could even get worse than that, according to James Blessing, a member of the board of the UK’s Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA). "You might find that you can’t get online unless someone else goes offline," he said. "It would be like the internet before broadband, when everything was on dial-up modems, and if too many people were dialling in then you couldn’t get connected."

The problem has been exacerbated, experts agree, because ISPs, governments and companies that make the routers used in households and businesses have ignored the problem until the last moment.

The solution is a new addressing protocol called IPv6 designed to succeed IPv4 that experts believe will resolve this address exhaustion issue for the foreseeable future.

While IPv4 allows 32 bits for an Internet Protocol address, and can therefore support 2[to the power of 32] (4,294,967,296) addresses, IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, so the new address space supports 2[to the power of 128] (approximately 340 undecillion or 3.4×10[to the power of 38]) addresses.

Put in plain English, that’s 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses. A lot, in other words, far more than a paltry 4,000,000,000! So there will be plenty of addresses to go around for anyone and anything to connect to the net for a long time to come.

This isn’t something I’ve thought about much other than note the various reports and stories in recent months. Then I noticed that my hosting service, DreamHost, offers IPv6 addresses now at no extra cost. And they explain it very simply:

[...] While an IPv4 address today might look like:

192.0.2.235

an IPv6 address would look like:

2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334

So I set one up for this website which means I’m good to go when IPv4 hits the buffers, which could be as soon as late 2011. My IPv6 address is -

http://[2607:F298:0002:0120:0000:0000:0DDC:1DD7]/

Click it and see. It translates into the human-friendly address you will recognise -

http://www.nevillehobson.com/

If you want to get your own IPv6 address, talk to your hosting service. It may take a little while to propagate across the internet’s addressing system but all should be good within 24-36 hours.

One thing to note – right now, an IPv6 address doesn’t appear to be well supported by URL shortening services like bit.ly and is.gd – both gave errors when I checked my IPv6 address with them, insisting it wasn’t a valid URL. Google’s shortener works fine.

I’m not losing any sleep over this, by the way, and nor should you, but it’s one less thing to have to think about in the (near) future.

How to automate your copyright year

Posted on January 5, 2011 at 9:17 pm UK

footercopyright The other day, I noticed that the copyright notice I display in the footer of this blog still said ’2010.’ So I dived into the code in the footer template in the WordPress theme I use and made the change so that the copyright year now correctly states ’2011.’ Then I tweeted it as I’ve noticed many other blogs still showing last year, suggesting people hadn’t thought about it.

Earlier today, I had one of those slap-on-the-forehead moments after reading Marcie Bell’s tweet that WordPress automates copyright automatically. I think that means WordPress.com hosting and depends on your theme. Still, it was the word ‘automates’ that gave me the "d’oh!" moment as doing this manually is a little ridiculous when there are easy ways to automate it, and it’s simple to set up yourself even if you know little about PHP coding.

What I did was edit my blog’s footer template (called, logically ‘footer.php’) to include this standard PHP date code where I have the copyright text:

<?php echo date("Y") ?>

The full copyright text in the footer looks like this:

Original content copyright 2011 by Neville Hobson. Some rights reserved: see Creative Commons license for information.

In terms of what you see, nothing’s changed with the substitution of the PHP code for the actual year, 2011. The point is that, come January 1, 2012, the copyright statement will update automatically to reflect the new year now that the PHP date code is there.

The underlying code that renders the above text looks like this:

Original content copyright <?php echo date("Y") ?> by Neville Hobson. Some rights
reserved: <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/" alt="
Don't steal content!" title="Don't steal content!">see Creative Commons license</a>
for information.

You can do this yourself on any blog platform – not only self-hosted WordPress, the one I use – that lets you directly edit the code of your blog template files. There are a number of ways to do it. With WordPress, for instance, it’s easy to edit the footer.php file from the theme editor you can access from your admin dashboard. Or you could edit the file remotely and then upload it via FTP to your server. Or, perhaps you have a theme that offers user-friendly editing of some of the theme components via a choice on a theme-specific admin section in your dashboard.

However you do it, it’s automatic simplicity.