Blog: Entries Tagged With 'web-hosting'

Since my hosting term was about to renew, I wanted to take a second crack at evaluating alternatives to DreamHost. I realized that if I was willing to give up things like unlimited disk space and unlimited hosted sites (I'm not hosting multiple sites anymore), I could find a cheaper plan just about anywhere. But as I mentioned in a recent post, a lot of the big web hosts seem to not have a great reputation for one reason or another.

I finally decided to give one particular host a try. We'll just call them Host B. It's one of the few hosts generally recommended by Reddit's r/webhosting community. Unfortunately, the experience left a bit to be desired. While DreamHost has supported multiple users for as long as I can remember, Host B only provides this under their slightly more expensive reseller plans. I have a couple subdomains and I serve them out of different user accounts for greater segmentation, so the ability to create multiple users is important to me.

There were also some technical issues. Host B uses cPanel, and there I had the ability to create an FTP subaccount, but the FTP server didn't accept my credentials. And the automated SSL certificate deployment was broken - when visiting my site, my browser showed an error saying that the cert was invalid and belonged to a random website.

At this point I had a day before my hosting would renew, so I decided to just stay with DreamHost for another year. But I did downgrade to the cheaper plan which will save me $72 a year. On this plan I still get 50GB of disk space, which is way more than I've been using. I did have to give up email forwarding (it costs extra with the cheaper plan), but now that my domain is registered with Google Domains, I'm able to set up forwarding for free there.

I do like DreamHost. There's a reason why I've been with them for nearly 16 years. Their customer support is top-notch, their custom-built admin panel is easier to use than cPanel, and everything just works. Well, occasionally (not frequently) there are hiccups like I talked about in my previous post, but their sysadmins are usually on top of those. So now that I'm paying a pretty reasonable price, I feel happy sticking with them for the foreseeable future. Maybe even for another 16 years.

I've been hosting this site with DreamHost since 2007 (wow), and in that time, I've been largely happy with them. Their hosting plans are not the cheapest, and even their domain registration fees are a little inflated, but staying with DreamHost has meant a mostly worry-free experience.

I've appreciated having private domain registration when that wasn't an industry standard, being able to set up email aliases for subdomains (lots of other popular registrars don't seem to have documentation about this, so they probably don't support it), and having no caps on bandwidth or even disk usage for as long as I can remember. Their uptime is the best in the industry, as measured by at least a couple different review sites. And their customer support, with few exceptions, has been stellar.

This week, though, they've been having some hiccups. Mail forwarding from my aliases has been unreliable. Several test emails that I sent to myself from another account were never delivered. Their status page mentioned email issues earlier today but has since been updated to say that everything is operational. However, my test emails still seem to be disappearing into the void.

They also apparently rolled out an Apache config change recently that broke things for me under certain conditions. I was trying to edit a blog entry earlier today and was greeted with a "server error" page when submitting the form. I narrowed the issue down to being triggered by a certain keyword in the text I was submitting. DreamHost makes Apache logs available for requests to each domain, which is extremely useful, and in the logs I could see that ModSecurity was blocking messages containing several words including "get", "post", "delete" and "head". However, it appeared to be matching against the request body instead of (just) the headers, which is a bit silly. So having text like "head home" or "get bananas" in a paragraph followed by a newline caused the request to be rejected.

Bananas indeed. I contacted support and, after another message where I had to re-explain what was broken, they went ahead and whitelisted the rules that were causing my error. Hopefully they did this for all impacted users, as I'm sure the config change wasn't affecting just me.

Lately I've been thinking about switching to a cheaper host, and the latest round of mishaps has further fanned that desire. I just recently moved our church domain's registration to Google Domains because it's $12 there compared to $15.99 with DreamHost. But all the other major hosts seem to be disliked by saavy users due to shady business practices, less than ideal uptime, and whatnot. And the hosts generally recommended on Reddit's webhosting subreddit are more expensive than DreamHost, at least for my particular use case. So, every so often I think about switching and every time my conclusion is the same: DreamHost is still the best value I can buy. I'm sure that they'll resolve my email forwarding issue after I contact them, and then things will go back to running without a hitch. I'm also reminded that I was extremely impressed with how hard they fought the DOJ over a user privacy issue, which became a win for privacy across the entire Internet. So while the frugal side of me hates paying more for things than I absolutely have to, it's hard to put a price tag on peace of mind.

For anybody who might find this useful, GoDaddy is selling 1-year registrations of .info domain names for 99 cents, valid for new registrations only. Of course, the year following they'll charge you the regular price if you want to renew. But hey, for 99 cents, having an extra domain to mess around with might be fun.

And if anybody needs some free hosting, get in touch with me.

This entry is a little redundant, but as I said on the homepage, I'm in the process of revising the layout on this site. If you don't like gory technical details (I'm thinking of one person in particular ;p) feel free to stop reading here! I promise I won't be sad.

Yesterday I transferred my domain registration and hosting to DreamHost. The transfer from GoDaddy failed a few times because I didn't know my domain's authentication code, my domain was locked, and private registration was on. But once I got around those, respectively, everything was finished within a few hours. It normally takes a few days, but GoDaddy allowed me to confirm the transfer on their end, and it went through immediately. DreamHost automatically changed the nameservers to their own, so no more Netfirms, unless I wanted to change them back (haha!).

Migrating the site went almost without a hitch. The hardest part was figuring out how to export and import the MySQL database. Aside from that, I only had to change a variable in my scripts to allow interfacing to DreamHost's MySQL server.

So now I'm good on my domain registration and hosting for another year. I'll be working on the layout and adding new articles in the next couple weeks. I think.

Moving my site went as expected. Right now I'm fixing up a couple parts of the site and working on some programming stuff.

This morning I woke up to find a nice surprise on my bed: a live vomit-colored caterpillar a few inches from my head. How it got there I have no idea. I really hope there aren't more breeding in my room..

My RA confiscated my laptop! Well actually, I let him borrow it because his computer broke and he needed to type 3 reports. I just got it back this morning, hence the lack of blog updates lately. Lots has happened so here's a quick overview:

Finals: CS 188 was mostly coding so I think I did pretty well. CS 118 I didn't read the textbook completely so I didn't know how to answer a few questions. Math 61 I did ok except in the topic of recurrence relations, from which he gave us the most questions. And Phy Sci 5 was decent.

I also turned 20. I can't believe my teenage years are gone. I'm getting so old! Soon I shall learn the meaning of tax forms, home equity, and the difference between HMOs and PPOs. Can't wait.

I'm going home in less than half an hour. I don't know if I'll be able to update my blog from home since it doesn't let me FTP in from outside UCLA. Unless I can get through by using another server as a middle-man, there will be no updates on this site for the whole summer. In that case, I might update on my alternate site. Also my Tagboard is back up- many thanks to Theresa for hosting it! I'll be on that every day.

Alright, time to start packing. Anson signing off for now.

Update: I'm at home now and figured out how to FTP in. All I had to do was change one setting in my FTP program from active to passive transfer mode. To think, all those vacation periods when I wasn't able to update my blog from home because of that... Anyway, I'm glad I found out now instead of in the middle of summer. So it looks like I won't be shutting up anytime soon. ;)

Kenny's server is down until summer due to a recent hacking. This means my Tagboard and Storyboard will be unavailable until then. Anton's server also seems to be down, meaning no page counter.

On a positive note, I set up a SHOUTcast server in Linux to broadcast my eclectic collection of MP3s. You can tune into my internet radio station using Winamp (and possibly even Windows Media Player). Just go to the Play URL option and type in the following address: http://169.232.110.173:8000

BOL has been giving me trouble again. For about two weeks now, I haven't been able to get in using my FTP program. Kenny gave me a workaround that involves SSH'ing into his server and FTP'ing from there, so here I am back again, posting my melange of rambling. Sorry for the half month of silence.

For the first time this quarter, I understood EVERYTHING that was said in my Electrical Engineering class. The teacher presented the topics with clarity and related the formulas to the concepts well. Everything made sense, and everything tied together. Too bad it was a substitute teacher.

Since I'm the webmaster for our floor, I'm making a floor site. Today I programmed a tagboard and set it up on Kenny's server. I will be adapting the tagboard's code for use on my blog site, so sit tight!

I set up an IkonBoard message board here. When I have time I'm going to fiddle with the board's code and change stuff.

I haven't updated my site since the June 28 entry. I couldn't FTP using Internet Explorer into my UCLA account, so I couldn't upload my webpage. Today Kenny taught me how to FTP via DOS command prompt, and that worked perfectly. Kudos to him! And many many curses to Internet Explorer. <goes and downloads Mozilla's Firefox>

Towards the evening, I went hiking on the trail above my house with Daniel, Sarah, their 2 guests, my brother, and David. My brother and David were riding around on their bikes, and they were supposed to meet up with us on the trail. But the walkie talkies we were using to keep in contact didn't work too well, and our cell phones couldn't get reception up in those hills, so for a while we didn't know where they were.

I guess I didn't do as badly this quarter as I thought I would. Even though I failed the final, I still got a C- in Math (because of curving). I got a C in Computer Science and a B- in Internet Programming. Ok, I know those aren't the best grades. At least I didn't fail anything. x.X I'll make sure I do a lot better next year.

I also wrote a Perl chat script. You can play around with it here while it is still on my PIC server. I lose my PIC account on June 30.