Over the last few years, I’ve been swapping hosting companies, looking for the perfect one. I’ve always used UK based hosts, since I felt it was best if I ever needed to phone them for support. I’ve always used Windows hosting, because I’ve used various bits of ASP in my online projects.
Over the last year or so, though, I’ve been getting comfortable with PHP an MySQL databases, and since getting in to blogging using the venerable WordPress, it’s opened my eyes to the world of open source web applications. Whilst this blog is hosted by the admirable LiquidSix (which has wonderful support, and very reliable), I’m edging towards Linux based hosting to give me the flexibility I’m after (I want permalinks for starters). Quite a few WordPress plugins won’t work on Windows, which is a shame.
If you want Windows hosting - go with LiquidSix, I can’t recommend them enough (and some of my domains will continue to be hosted by them). But if you want a Linux host, I’ve been recommended Dreamhost, who are based in the USA, and have an admirable record for email support. I’m looking at one of their shared hosting accounts.
Although they advertise a basic package for $7.95 per month, that’s if you buy 2 years of hosting in advance - on an annual basis, it’s $9.95 per month with a $49.95 setup fee. In a very geeky way, my eyes popped out of my head when I saw what they offer in their ‘basic’ package (as of 15th Feb):
- Web based control panel
- 20Gb disk storage (increases weekly by 160Mb!)
- 1Tb Bandwidth (increasing weekly by 8Gb)
- Host unlimited domains
- Custom DNS
- One-click WordPress install (apparently!)
- One-click install for loads of open source web goodies
- ImageMagick for on-the-fly image processing
- Absolutely everything…
All rather tempting if you ask me!
I have just upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.0. If you notice any hiccoughs with the site - please let me know!
[Update] After some plugin weirdness (Spam Karma 2) all seems to be working again.
For those of you who are new to the world of Blogging, it is a form of personal web publishing, allowing people to easily post information and comment about whatever they please. This blog is powered by a web application called WordPress, a fantastic system (although not for someone who is not familiar with the dark arts of website hosting) for running a small website.
Recently, an upgrade was issued to WordPress, bringing the version up to 1.5.1, promising lots of bug fixes and performance enhancements. I took the plunge, and a day later, I realised my RSS feed had ceased to be, throwing up an HTTP 304 error. Damn. A quick visit to the helpful folks on the WordPress support forums showed a number of people had the same problem and a fix had been issued. Basically, you need to download the patch, which is a file named “wp-blog-header.php”, and replace your old copy with it (after having backed it up or renamed it, of course!). I duly did this, and hey presto! A working RSS feed again.
Or is it? A quick check of this feed on Feed Validator, shows the error
line 69, column 3: content:encoded should not contain onclick tag (2 occurrences) [help]
]]>
line 69, column 3: content:encoded should not contain relative URL references (4 occurrences) [help]
]]>
Stumped! I’ll get on to the support forums and see if anyone can help out. In the meantime, apologies if you’re having a spot of bother with the feeds. SharpReader on Windows, and NetNewsWire on OSX don’t seem to have a problem with it, but some RSS parsers do (e.g. Carp and Magpie). If I do find a fix, I’ll post it here.
