TechnologyInsanity.com

Some of you may have noticed that the site was down for a bit, I was going to switch hosts to my VPS, but there’s just too many things that aren’t working yet. Might have been kind of insane to do it with my site, I’m feeling like I need to pick up another domain

Well, curiosity got the best of me. I signed up for 1 month of VPS access. I chose the bare minimum, because that was the point. Unmanaged, no cp. I haven’t really gotten to do anything with it yet, I need to get everything up and running, mysql, php, etc all needs to be installed and configured manually. I also need to install an open source control panel. Either ISPConfig or EHCP. I don’t really know what I’m going to do with it when I get it running, maybe port the site over, maybe not. I’m just getting used to the fact that I only have a command prompt to work with. Yes, I’m familiar with Linux, but I never did everything with the command prompt.

Maybe I’ll just sell some web space on the cheap. I mean really cheap, I have 350GB transfer, 384MB ram, and 20GB hard drive space. I’m not sure what the processor is. It cost me $17 for one month, I thought it was worth it to play with, but if I sold web space for about $5/month to about 8 people that would cover the costs completely for this month and next month. (next month will be $35 I believe.) It should be much faster than shared web hosting, even with 9 websites (including mine). That would allow for about 39GB transfer/month per person. If there’s excess bandwidth. (which I’m sure there would be, you could probably go over that amount..) Also about 2GB storage per person.

If you’re interested e-mail me at admin at technologyinsanity dot com

If there’s no interest I’ll simply get rid of it after this month.

I don’t know why, I just tinker with things all the time.

If you have any other ideas about what I should do with this host leave it in the comments area

I am on shared hosting, by JustHost.com. This service has not given me any issues, customer support is very good. When I’ve contacted them about something, I get a response within 20-30 minutes. So, mostly I’ve had no issues, and the loading time for my site is fine. It acts up a little, but not much, not any more than what you would expect from a shared host.

They offer a sort of gimmicky sign up, with unlimited everything, I’ve yet to find that limit, but perhaps I will some day if I get too much traffic.

I admit, I’m a noob when it comes to web hosting, and there’s so many options out there I basically just chose one. My experience has been limited to playing with MySQL databases and PHP on free hosts.

Recently, I found this information about JustHost here. 

Apparently, they went as far as to create a fake website with them at the top, here. If you look at the website, JustHost.com you see that they are proudly displaying their fake badge.

I found this more comical, than upsetting really. Like I said, for my purpose I don’t really care so long as it “works”.

It seems as if a lot of shared web hosting providers are using the same tactics, so it’s nothing new. (well, it’s new to me) Hopefully someday I will be able to go on a dedicated host, I’m really not impressed with shared hosts, not JustHost specifically, but all of them. I may be on a dedicated host sooner than I think, because my traffic has been increasing day by day. Perhaps I’m just giddy and want to try out a dedicated host. I wish I could, but I’m not sure I can afford it. I might try out a cheap dedicated host in the near future for a month or two.

I’m posting this in the tutorials section as well, because I believe it is a tutorial to understanding shared host gimmicks.

I’ve told people that I wouldn’t buy an Xbox unless I found one for around $50. Well I went over that mark by about $11.

I bought a complete Core system that was broken off of eBay. I’m going to attempt to fix it, and then mod it. Engadget reported today that the new IXtreme 1.5 firmware works on basically all of the Xbox 360 drives, so that shouldn’t be an issue.

The key here is me being able to fix it, if I’m not able to, I’m not real worried. I love to experiment, it’s what I’m good at. I will keep updated posts here in the near future, this is just a heads up.  The error code as reported by the seller, (A seller that exclusively sells broken items) is E73. I’ve found the details on this here. I’m not afraid of soldering a few things if need be, I’ve already installed modchips etc. If I can’t fix it I’ll just send it right back to eBay

Should be interesting, I’m looking forward to it.

I hate to break it to you, but having your blog on one of these services makes you look unprofessional. My theory is that if you own one of these blogs, people might see .blogspot .blogger or .wordpress and run away without ever looking through your content. You might have the best content in the world, but the .whatever might be your achilles heal.

If you’re serious about your blog, why not spend the $60 or so per year it costs for a shared host and domain? That’s about as much as a video game these days. I’m getting more entertainment out of owning this blog than I ever would from a video game. It is NOT hard to set up. I used something called “fantastico” to install wordpress automatically. Yes, you may have to learn how to do upgrades manually, but that is very simple, not anything technical.

*one note is that if you do get too much traffic you’ll have to upgrade the host to dedicated or similar, which will cost around $100/month.. Some ads would take care of that cost, however if you’re really getting that much traffic.

I believe that is why people run away, they don’t think you’re serious about your blog if you have that .whatever. By having that, you have proven to them you’re not willing to put a little money into your site. You’ve proven you’re not willing to put a little extra effort into it.

There are also other benefits to owning the domain and host. Customization is one big factor. Another is the fact that you’re blog could be shut down at any time by the .whatever, if they don’t like your blog, that’s not going to happen when  you own your host and domain.

I urge you, if you’re in any way serious about your blog, buy a domain and host. I don’t think you’ll regret it.

To be honest, when I started this blog, I didn’t even have the intention of using my host/domain for a blog. See, I’ve been trying to learn PHP, and I beleive certain functions I could not run on my PC with Apache because some ports are blocked by my ISP. I might have been wrong, I don’t know, but that was the main purpose for me buying the host, the domain I just bought for the fun of it I guess. That’s why when I got more serious about this blog, I changed the domain to technologyinsanity.com.