zerolight

I just switched from my previous host when it became apparent that they didn’t know what they were doing. Shame as they were very cheap. Basically, thought they said they supported PHP, but it turned out only really PHP installed via cPanel which was owned by user “nobody”, the server. Anything I uploaded myself could not access the file as system my PHP scripts run under my user had no file permissions. Their solution was to change the file permissions on my site to 777… letting every hacker, their dog, and even the village idiot, have free access to my domain. Nice one. I canceled my account on the spot… good job I was on a monthly plan.

The transition to Lunar Pages was easy, it’s also clear that they are very professional, know what they are doing, and have a massive and loyal user base. Support forums are a nice touch, and it’s nice to have a free 0800 number in the UK for a USA based hosting firm.

From my end, moving my website and email over took minutes, unfortunately, getting my JD-WordPress/OpenWP component in Joomla to function (such that I could edit and create posts) on the new host wasn’t so easy and swallowed up a couple of hours – sorry Z. In the end I got it working by re-ftp’ing the component onto my site (so I assume some permissions got mangled first time around or something). Which tool minutes… go figure!

We’ve moved the site over to Integra-Net from Ace-Host. A good resource for comparing web hosts can be found here.Thus far everything seems to be loading faster, so I’m pleased with the decision. It worked out cheaper too. The only downside is that my “PhotoStream” banner seems to have stopped displaying correcting under IE. Did it ever?

I sold one of my domains, dorrian.co.uk, yesterday. If you still have our email address as dorrian.co.uk then you’re not going to reach us. If you don’t know our new address then we probably don’t like you very much. ;o)

Web stats are not something that really concern me, I run this site for fun, primarily to muck around with new technologies, and to share photos with family in South Africa. Thus, the number of visits that my site gets is really of little concern. My web host provides stats for my website via an application called Webalizer to track usage. Curiousity got the better of me, so I checked out my sites stats.

The monthly average number of hits my site received in 2005 was about 25,000, approximately 2000 visits, from around 200 unique visitors. Since February 2006 there’s been a sharp increase to a monthly average of 170,000 hits, roughly 8500 visits, from around 600 unique visitors. That’s kinda scary. I’m assuming it’s more likely to be related to search engine mining than that many visitors. Infact 10% of visits were google bots. It’s no coincidence that earlier this year I enabled search engine friendly URLs.

Does Webalizer really give me any useful information on how many people actually visit my site? I don’t think so. Do I care? Nope. Was this post pointless? Probably.