Tag Archives: iPage

Well, THAT Sucked

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The last few days my Web host has been having a tough time. I don’t know the exact nature of the problem and I doubt I ever will, but this site has been broken. For a while it would not load at all, and then it was in ‘read-only mode’, Which meant that it was still performing terribly and I couldn’t even put up a notice that I knew things weren’t going well but the solution was out of my hands. Not a good situation when my credibility as a programmer is an important asset.

I couldn’t even make a backup.

Things seem to be getting back to normal (though they are not there yet – the site is still quite slow). There’s even a chance that I’m running on a brand-new server that is not being shared with as many other people. Or at least a brand-new server. Unfortunately, however, while I have come to appreciate iPage the company, which was very helpful and patient getting me up and running, iPage the service has not been so great.

I have vowed that the next move I make will be to a server that I control completely, so I can choose who shares it with me. I’m looking at Co-location deals now, though I might wimp out ant take the middle road. A VPS (virtual private server) gives me all the control of having my own machine, but in fact it’s an illusion — I still share physical hardware with an unknown number of others.

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Thanks!

Things I Learned while Moving to a new Web Host

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You probably can’t tell, but this site is now being served by a different host. The reasons I switched were many, but once MMHosting got hacked I decided it was time to move. Then when a particular PHP library was not on their servers (one that allows WordPress to read the date of an uploaded image), I actually did the move.

After quite a bit of looking around in which all the dang hosts started to look the same, I chose iPage. They are not quite the cheapest, but they purchase carbon offsets for wind-generated power. They also had a stronger emphasis on security.

At this writing, I still don’t know if my new host has the needed php library. I’ll be finding out when the dust settles. If not, I can install it in my site myself, I suppose, but let’s keep fingers crossed.

So, I learned a few things, and remembered a few others.

  1. Among sftp clients, RBrowser may have my favorite interface but it’s glacially slow with multiple files.

  2. Without ssh access to my site (none of the big hosting companies allow that on their cheap plans), I had to use phpMyAdmin to copy my databases over. Here’s an interesting bit of trivia: if your data has the phrase ‘drop database’ anywhere in it, phpMyAdmin will stop executing the import right there and then. This is to protect you from SQL injection attacks, where people sneak malicious data into your database that later gets executed as an instruction. ‘Drop database’ can be pretty devastating, so the software simply refuses to complete the import, even if the phrase is safe in the text of a post.

    The way phpMyAdmin is configured at my new host, however, when it stops, it doesn’t say why. It doesn’t even admit that anything went wrong, or indicate in any way that not all the data was imported. This can be inconvenient when you have a bulletin board for a product that has a drag-and-drop database feature. (Now it has a drag-and-drop database.)

  3. You can’t tell Safari not to uncompress zip archives it downloads (that I could find), but the original zip files can be found in the trash.
  4. jerssoft_phpb5 and jerssoft_phpbb5 are not the same thing, no matter how many hours you spend banging your head on them.

So iPage has been great (although their control panel is not completely Safari-friendly when it comes to processing payments). I’ve interacted with them in three different ways now — phone, chat, and a support ticket. Two of the interactions were due to the afore-mentioned payment glitch, and once for technical support trying to get my files copied and the site ready to go before I switched the domain registry. Although I didn’t get the answers I was hoping for, the tech was competent and knew what she was doing.

If I continue to be pleased with iPage, I will provide a link for those looking for a Web host. Because we all need Web hosts these days, don’t we?

Thanks!