Originally intended as a small group of friends supporting each other to reach their goals, there are now over 700 members and I’m really interested to see how this develops into a workable system.

Last year I promised to write once a week and failed, so I’m hoping this might spur me on to achieve that goal this year. The intention is that a tracking system will be created to monitor progress of group members. If the system works (once it goes live) I’ll also be purchasing a mug as a daily reminder – I just wish they did one in purple!

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Web Hosting is a minefield…

Seeing the web hosting feature in the latest edition of .net Magazine has confirmed my feelings about the web hosting industry: it’s a minefield. A completely over saturated market of small-fry & big brands, most of which you will never have heard of unless you’ve heard a horror story or two. In my experience it doesn’t seem to matter where you turn, something unexpected goes wrong.

For years I was a happy client of Lonex. Their support was good enough although there was no status page, the servers were reliable, and generally things went ok. Then they got DDoSed and never recovered – my sites suffered downtime a few times a week, everything was slow, and I couldn’t get support to acknowledge or fix the problem.

So I moved to Surpass: a seemingly huge company with a public community, status pages, good support, and reliable service. Then I started work on this blog and found the pages loaded really slowly. I queried this and after ages of back and forth with support I got a message which simply read: “Thanks for your patience. We have completed some work on this server and performance is back to normal. Thanks for hanging in there.” – Nothing had changed as far as I was concerned.

Next I opened a single account on PeartreeUK and started prepping my blog for launch. For some reason I couldn’t get Wordpress to work properly. In my frustration I gave up without giving them a chance and tried yet another company.

This time it was Clook. A more expensive company but they had good reviews from friends so I figured I’d get what I paid for. My blog had the same Wordpress problems  & I realised it was entirely my fault. So I got it all fixed and launched my blog on Clook.

4 months later and I have two niggles with Clook:

1. Because Apache is running as “noone” PHP scripts create files that I can’t delete through FTP. There is no way to remove the files through the control panel so I have had to install a PHP File manager which I really don’t like. It just makes my life far more complicated than it needs to be, especially when trying to work with a publishing platform like Wordpress.
2. For some reason there is no way to setup recurring payments. I have to remember to pay my bill each month. Yet again just something dumb that makes my life harder than it needs to be.

PeartreeUK – my Web Hosting Solution

So last weekend I  decided to finally sort out my hosting life. With all my resold accounts still hanging around on slowly-slowly-Surpass, and my blog on clunky-Clook, I’ve turned back to the one place I know I’ll get what I pay for – PearTreeUK. They may be relatively small, but there’s nothing like being able to get hold of an intelligent human being whenever you need one! Having kept my original account open as a test bed, I have now upgraded to a reseller with them.

I doubt you will find better customer service than PeartreeUK’s -  having one person consistently deal with you from day one means that you are always taken care of without the frustration of trying to explain yourself AGAIN everytime there’s a shift-change. If you’ve visited here before you may notice how much faster pages (and FTP) now loads – my Wordpress backend feels like it’s on speed. Add to that their prices & the excellent attitude of their employees and you have a value-for-money service that I highly recommend.

Note: Expect an update post in 6 months documenting my experiences with Peartree!

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Personally, I strongly disagree with those who say web folk should stop supporting IE6 now, that we should use special stylesheets to make sites look particularly ugly in IE6, or more worryingly that scripts should be used to prevent sites from working in IE6 at all. It is the job of a web developer to support all major browsers (of which IE6 is still one) and punishing unwitting users is not the solution. It is Microsoft’s job to cease support of this ancient and incapable technology not ours.

The problem lies with the large number of companies and organisations that depend upon either Windows 2000 (which only supports IE6 not 7 or 8) or IE 6 for their internal business applications to function (think public sector in particular). It is these sources of revenue which force Microsoft to continue to support old technology & which keep the IE6 usage statistics high. All of these companies are aware that these technologies will be phased out eventually and should have plans in place to upgrade their systems, but again it’s not our place to force these changes.

Microsoft are now pushing IE8 through automatic updates and will cease support for Windows 2k in July next year – with this I can see the lifespan of IE6 finally drawing to a close. With the death of the OS which supports only the abominable IE6, it will be feasible for Microsoft to finally cease supporting IE6 too. When Microsoft say IE6 is dead, and only then, will IE6 really start to die – so the web design community needs to stop wasting it’s breath on users who can’t do anything about it – and tell it to Microsoft.

For now IE6 is still here and web folk still need to do their jobs. This means continuing to develop websites which support IE6 even in a slightly downgraded fashion, but it also means pointing clients towards a future without IE6 and guiding them them through this transition by removing all reliance on it. Cheer up, just think of all the work that will come flying in when IE6 does die.

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I had no idea that the article had been written or that I was in it, so imagine my surprise when I woke up this morning to find I’d gained 20+ new followers in the middle of the night!! This is a prime example of how the combination of micro blogging and social bookmarking has become a powerful tool for networking and marketing. It is allowing more and more people to have their say, and is exactly why I love the internet.

I also want to say thanks to Mariess and WollyMittens for enlightening me to the mystery of the midnight followers!

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