Big thanks to all of you who pinged me about helping with my little web experiment. So far we have six hosts represented, but I’d love to have a lot more. So if you have any friends that have blogs and can help out, please direct them to me. I’m collecting data in real time right now, so it will be interesting to see what it’ll all look like after a few days. When this is done, we should all have a pretty intimate insight into all the various hosting companies out there and how they compare to each other during normal wear and tear. The teaser is over for now! Stay tuned, in a few days I’ll ...

Hey guys. I want to do a fairly simple web experiment this week. I want to try to assess real-world uptime and latency for a bunch of popular hosting sites. I need a bunch of volunteers to help out. Basically all I’ll need you to do is upload a file to your root directory and allow me to ping it from time to time to do some measurements. I’ll tabulate the data next week and put it online for everyone to see. So, if you can help out, drop me a comment and let me know: The name of your hosting company The address to your site Your email address where I can contact you about this The more people ...

As some of you know, last year I went from having my blog hosted on GoDaddy to using shared hosting services over at HostMonster (and before that, I went from having a Linux box on the floor of my bedroom to GoDaddy). Shared hosting is a fairly cheap way to set up a website, and you can usually get away with it for less than $10/mo. For the most part, I was pretty happy with HostMonster shared hosting, although in these last few months their databases kept falling over, and I had intermittent connection problems. To their credit though, they always answered the phone and fixed everything in a ...

If you accessed my website at all today, you would witnessed one of the slowest websites to ever grace the series of tubes that we call the internet. I spent about two hours on the phone today with web hosting company GoDaddy.com trying to convince them that it was their problem. Unfortunately, even after escalating it multiple times, they still told me it was my fault. So about an hour ago I decided that I had had enough of GoDaddy. I cancelled my hosting, acquired new hosting via HostMonster, and managed to change my DNS and completely set up my blog from scratch in a little under an hour. Unfortunately ...

So if you hadn’t noticed, my blog has been really flaky for the last week or so. For some reason, all the hard drive space on my machine keeps disappearing, and it’s causing mysql and apache to occasionally crash. I spent a few hours this morning trying to figure it out, so hopefully it will be a bit more stable soon. As for today, I’ll probably hang out by the water for an hour or so, and then maybe do some grocery shopping. I’m going to get a membership tomorrow at the Bentall Fitness Center I think (gotta look good for Mexico right?). Looking forward to the long weekend coming up. I’d ...