So PHP 5 added a whole slew of new features to PHP, but I’ve been stuck in PHP 4, so I figured I’d learn some of that.  I’ve also been stuck to relational databases (and that’s usually what they teach at school), but I’ve started to see some of the sites I know and love switching to non-relational databases.  So that was also something I wanted to learn how to work with.

I went online to search, and the three major contenders seem to be Cassandra, CouchDB, and MongoDB.  I decided to go with MongoDB since it seemed like the easiest to use and setup, and I liked the idea of document-oriented storage.  CouchDB can be ran on webFaction as well, but I’m not too sure about Cassandra (I’m guessing you can with effort).

So here’s my guide on getting it setup and ready to run.

So installing MongoDB on Webfaction:

1. Create a new custom application listening on port called mongodb
2. Create it and take note of the port
3. Login to your account via SSH
4. Switch to the directory of the mongodb app you just created
   cd ~/webapps/mongodb
5. Download the latest version of the 32-bit version of MongoDB (1.4.3 as of writing)
   wget http://downloads.mongodb.org/linux/mongodb-linux-i686-1.4.3.tgz
6. Extract the files from the archive
   tar -xf mongodb-linux-i686-1.4.3.tgz
7. Create a data directory for your MongoDB installation
   mkdir data
8. Start up MongoDB
   /home/[user]/webapps/mongodb/mongodb-linux-i686-1.4.3/bin/mongod ‒‒dbpath /home/[user]/webapps/mongodb/data/ ‒‒port [port]

Doing that will launch MongoDB in the terminal.  To have MongoDB run as a background process and restart should it quit can be done with a few scripts.  My way isn’t probably the most elegant way to do it.  If mongoDB doesn’t exit cleanly, then you have to delete the lock, run repair, and restart the daemon, so there are 3 parts to my way and a dummy file, but you can probably easily merge it all into one file (I’m just too interested in playing with PHP and MongoDB to do so yet).

This is mongo.sh, it checks if the mongo daemon (mongod) is running, and it calls the appropriate action.

This is startmongo.sh, there’s a dummy file called “isnt_running.txt”  If it exists when startmongo.sh is ran, that means that mongod didn’t exit cleanly.  If it didn’t exit cleanly, we have to delete mongod.lock and run repair on the database.  Otherwise, we just try to start up mongod.

#!/usr/bin/env php
<?php
// Check if MongoDB did not exit cleanly
if(file_exists(“/home/[user]/webapps/mongodb/isnt_running.txt”)){
unlink(“/home/[user]/webapps/mongodb/data/mongod.lock”);
exec(“/home/[user]/webapps/mongodb/mongodb-1.4.3/bin/mongod ‒‒dbpath /home/[user]/webapps/mongodb/data ‒‒port [port] ‒‒auth ‒‒repair”);
exec(“nohup /home/[user]/webapps/mongodb/mongodb-1.4.3/bin/mongod ‒‒dbpath /home/[user]/webapps/mongodb/data ‒‒port [port] ‒‒auth”);
}else{
exec(“nohup /home/[user]/webapps/mongodb/mongodb-1.4.3/bin/mongod ‒‒dbpath /home/emokid/webapps/mongodb/data ‒‒port [port] ‒‒auth”);
$fp = fopen(“/home/[user]/webapps/mongodb/isnt_running.txt”, “w+”);
fwrite($fp, “Starting up”);
fclose($fp);
}
?>

This is runningmongo.sh, it just deletes our dummy file letting us know that mongod is running.

#!/usr/bin/env php
<?php
// Check if MongoDB did not exit cleanly
if(file_exists(“/home/emokid/webapps/mongodb/isnt_running.txt”)){
unlink(“/home/emokid/webapps/mongodb/isnt_running.txt”);
}
?>

I just add mongo.sh to the crontab.  Mine runs every 20 minutes, but you can make it run sooner because if it does run every 20 minutes, that mean that the database could be down for 40 minutes.  Make sure to change [user] and [port] to your username and the port number you were given.

crontab

*/20 * * * * /home/[user]/webapps/mongodb/mongo.sh > /dev/null 2>&1

The PHP Stack

In order to run PHP with the mongo drivers, you need your own installation of Apache and PHP.  WebFaction makes this somewhat easy to do.

1. Create a new custom application listening on port and call it phpstack
2. Take note of the port.
3. SSH onto the server and go to the phpstack webapp directory
   cd ~/webapps/phpstack
4. Download the PHPStack setup script (this is the one for PHP 5.3.1).
   wget http://wiki.webfaction.com/attachment/wiki/MiscellaneousFiles/build_php_worker_531.sh?format=raw
5. Rename the script to build_php_worker_531.sh
   mv build_php_worker_531.sh\?format\=raw build_php_worker_531.sh
6. Make sure the script is executable.
   chmod +x build_php_worker_531.sh
7. Run the install script and specify the path to the phpstack, and the port number
   ./build_php_worker_531.sh /home/[user]/webapps/phpstack [port]
8. We have to install Pear twice in order to get PECL.
   1. Download the go-pear.php installer script
      wget http://pear.php.net/go-pear
   2. Rename it to go-pear.php
      mv go-pear go-pear.php
   3. Run it with the php_fcgi version of php
      /home/[user]/webapps/phpstack/php_fcgi/bin/php go-pear.php
   4. When it asks you about the paths, set $prefix to:
      /home/[user]/webapps/phpstack/php_fcgi
   5. Then run the installer.  Repeat the process for php_rawcgi
   6. For each installation (php_fcgi and php_rawcgi) run
      /home/[user]/webapps/phpstack/php_fcgi/bin/pecl install mongo
   7. Then in each php.ini (php_fcgi/lib/php.ini and php_rawcgi/lib/php.ini) add
      extension=”mongo.so”

To keep things easy, you can place all of your website stuff inside of the phpstack/htdocs, or you can edit the httpd.conf to point towards one of your other webapps.

Now you might want to secure your MongoDB a bit, and read up on how to use it with PHP.

I’m all for learning something new like Git, Hg, or Bzr.  When looking, I sortof eliminated Bzr from the list.  There’s only one main host for it, and I’ve just heard bad things about it (yup, I listen to the rumors).

So here’s basically what I was looking for.

• Public and Private Repositories
• Have collaborators on projects
• Reasonable priced
• Eye candy (sadly)…

So I’ve been looking around and saw GitHub, BitBucket, Codaset, and Codebase.  I won’t really go into a feature by feature comparison, just point out what I like and don’t like.

GitHub

This is probably the most popular at the moment.  It’s known for it’s awesome Git hosting, being fast, reliable, and feature rich.

My favorite part of GitHub is the interface.  It’s nice on the eyes, easy to navigate, and makes it fun.  The downside is the features of the plans.  Public repo’s allow you to have as many collaborators as you want.  For Private Repositories, it’s based on your plan.

I usually only have 2-3 private repositories at a time, but the number of people I work with fluctuate.  The smallest plan (which provides much more space than I need), only provides 1 private collaborator.  Normally, it’s me and 2-3 other people (per project).  I don’t really want to pay that much more just to have more people collaborating on a project.

So GitHub is great, but needs to be more flexible in the number of collaborators.

BitBucket

BitBucket is pretty awesome.  It does Hg hosting.

It’s not as pretty as GitHub, in my opinion, but it does provide a great set of features.  What I really wish for is that the Source tab would display the readme file.  Other than that, it’s okay.  Could use a few minor changes to make it friendly and lovable, but good as it is.

My main nit-to-pick is how the project pages look.  Not that big of a nit-to-pick, but I like my eye candy .  Other than that, it has a lot of the features I want.  I can have my private repositories, and have as many collaborators as I want.

I’ve heard rumors about uptime issues they previously had, but nothing recent.  I do wish the blog were updated more because (like I said earlier) it needs a more welcoming feel to it.

Codebase

Codebase supposedly hosts Git, Hg, and Svn.

I like what features it has listed.  My main issue is that the site isn’t well documented.  It has good instructions for using Git and setting stuff up, but there’s nothing much about the other features.  In terms of cost, it’s reasonably priced.  Good number of people you can have collaborating and everything, but it’s too costly for what I’ll be doing.

Codebase seems more like something for a small group or company.  So it’s really cool, but it aims to be in an area that’s not aligned with mine…

Codaset

Codaset is another Git host.  I think it’s kindof new…

It’s kindof like GitHub, but I think Codaset is more social.  Codaset provides a lot of what I want, but right now it doesn’t have a price setup.  The developer is still debating and setting up how to pay for it.

I love the features of Codaset, but my main nit-to-pick is how they’re setting up pricing.  It’s a great idea (don’t get me wrong), but I prefer a flat fee.  They haven’t implemented it yet, so I’ll see if I like it later on, but it’s sortof leaving me with my current setup of host personal stuff on GitHub and group projects on BitBucket.

Pay as you go is good, but I’m concerned about the implementation.

In Conclusion…

What do you currently use for your projects and why?  Do you work with people?

As I stated, I currently use both GitHub and BitBucket.  I might move it all to Codaset once I see it up and running with payments and all.  So yeah…  Thoughts, comments, suggestions?

This was a bit of a shock to me, at how many people are moving towards Ruby and Rails.  But the even bigger shock was people wanted to use cPanel.  I can kindof understand this, cPanel seems to be the standard for many hosts, and it’s what most people are used to.  Why am I shocked then?  I haven’t really had any good personal experiences with cPanel playing well with Ruby or Rails.  It may have improved, but I don’t use a cPanel-based host for my Rails hosting needs.  Although, I’ve just been playing with rails and have never really deployed anything…

Most cPanel based hosts don’t seem to offer what you need in order to do “Rails Hosting done Right.”  Most of the time you need SSH, which is usually harder to get setup on a cPanel based host.  cPanel 11 seems to have improved since I last played around in it, but I think there are better control panels out there.

But I’ve been searching, and I can’t really find any definitive place.  I like where I’m at, but I don’t like putting all my eggs in one basket.  The more I search though, the more it seems like the more popular hosts are the one with high affiliate pay-outs.  I’ll admit, I do post referal links because I do like having a portion of my hosting paid for, but it’s not most important aspect of me searching for a host.

I’ll post an update for the Rails host I find for my friends, but it might be a few days.

In other news, I started working today.  It was quite tiring.  I am completely exausted.  I have to work all 5 days of the week so far, but I think I’m going to see if I can cut it back to 4 because I just realized that Wednesday is the day I have loads of stuff to do and by cramming work in there, it’s going to be a pain.

I’m looking at my week, and so far the only times I have free time are from 8-9 in the mornings and Monday and Friday nights.  It’s sort of a pain, but I guess that was all my choice.  Still working on some projects, but they’re coming along quite slowly and I think once I’m done they’ll never be implemented.

So far classes seem fine, but some of my teachers and a bit odd.  In a good way I guess, but they’re the type of people who creep me out after being in their class for a while.  The good news is tomorrow I don’t have to go to class until 10, security also re-opened the pool.  I’m hoping to be able to swim in it before and after classes, but depending on the work load that might change.

As many of you know, I have a phobia of fat people, and with the lack of time for physical activities this semester, my worst nightmare might come true >.< .  I hope you’re offended.

Supprt. Both webFaction and mediaTemple have been good with support. With webFaction though I get a more direct and decent answer. mediaTemple’s support doesn’t seem like they read my question fully. Although I believe mediaTemple is larger and I know that most hosts that reach a large number of users have support people who rush to answer a question without reading it fully. Even though, I’m not sure if that can be given as an excuse. I sent in questions about apache modules and some questions about the PHP setup. I also asked about parking a domain and comparison’s with other control panels. I also included some humor about how cool are the people working there. mediaTemple gave me a decent response. They told me about the building and how it was very cool as were the people. When I asked about mod_security, they told me it wasn’t installed and if I wanted it installed I’d need to get a DV. When I asked about a script, they gave me a link to the PHP info page. It was helpful, but I get the feeling they didn’t even look at the script page. They said most people who used cPanel in the past are able to easily adjust to their control panel. webFaction gave a better response. I had some questions about the MySQL setup since I didn’t like mediaTemple’s. They said MySQL is on the same machine your sites are on and when you create a database, a new user is also created for that database. I liked that setup, and they plan on allowing you to make more users with different database permissions later on. They also said that even though they are a shared host, they don’t overload the servers. I’m not sure if that’s the same as overselling or not, but my site has been fast from the different places I’ve tried so far. I also asked about the control panel because their screencasts showed how to use it and it was much different then everything I’ve ever seen. The support person said it’s not hard to adjust and they developed their own control panel to make managaing all aspects of the site a breeze. I also asked about mod_security and it’s not installed. PHP is run under mod_php for speed. They looked at the script and said based upon the requirements it should run on their servers, but if it doesn’t there’s a 60-money back guarantee. mediaTemple only has a 30-money back guarantee, but they only give you back the money at the end of the 30 days, not when you cancel.

Uptime. In the first 5 days of hosting with mediaTemple, I experienced a few times of 30+ minutes of downtime. Their grid apparantly can’t handle the number of sites it is currently hosting. I haven’t had any downtime on webFaction yet. I’ll post an update later on. I stayed with mediaTemple for ~20 days and had slow speeds and downtime. webFaction may not be as fancy offering many of servers to process your site and non-obsolete shared hosting, but they are doing a much better job with managing their servers. mediaTemple say, “We’ve eliminated roadblocks and single points of failure by using hundreds of servers” which thus introduces hundreds of points of failures I guess.

Panel. mediaTemple’s panel looks all cool and stuff, and it’s great for managing 1 site. When hosting multiple sites, it’s somewhat more of a pain. It’s similar to cPanel, but with how it organizes the main page and everything, you’d think you’d have more control over sites hosted under it. I think the organization could be redone. webFaction’s panel is a bit intimidating at first, but it removes the flashy 2.0 design in order to provide an organized panel with much more functionality. It sacrifices design for functionality. It does have some JavaScript effects, but it’s not overly done. It does have a script installer, but it’s not as script rich as Fantastico. It does give you more options and allow you to install you own Apps and everything. mediaTemple’s panel also has script installers, but it only has 3 or 4. For design, mediaTemple would win, but for functionality, webFaction is much better. It’s not hard to adjust, after playing with it for about 20 minutes, I felt adjusted to it.

Features. Other than being “hosted on the grid,” mediaTemple doesn’t have much to offer other than hype compared to webFaction. Both offer PHP, Ruby, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and etc. Django hosting is still in beta at mediaTemple while it comes standard at webFaction. mediaTemple does have a nice AJAX based webmail. mediaTemple tries to offer load-balancing, but I feel that dreamHost does better with MySQL. mediaTemple is much slower then dreamHost or webFaction. Both allow for DNS control over the domain. Both try to have a form of load management. I think webFaction keeping the number of sites on the server low on a server is much better than attempting to balance the load across hundreds of servers. If the grid goes out, hundreds of sites are down, while at webFaction if one server goes down, only 30 sites are down or so. One downside at webFaction is there’s no FTP. You have SSH and SFTP. This is both good and bad. FTP isn’t as secure as SFTP, but finding a free nice and usable SFTP client is a bit of a challenge. I use fileZilla or cyberDuck, but some people prefer other applications.

Space and Bandwidth. mediaTemple give you much more space. I pay ~$15 and get 20 GB of space with 1.2 TB of bandwidth. mediaTemple, for only $5 more give you 100 GB of space and 1 TB of bandwidth. The largest plan at webFaction has 60 GBs of space with 2.4 TB of bandwidth. I believe this is because webFaction is trying to limit the number processes running on a server. For a blog and most sites, the smallest plan of 10 GB should be enough. Unless you need hosting for a large multimedia web sites at a cheap price, webFaction should be good. If you do need 100 GB of space for your site with all the features they offer at a cheap price, then mediaTemple might be for you.

Overage Charges. The overage charges for webFaction are $5 for 4 GB space and $5 for 200 GB of bandwidth. Most sites don’t need over 60 GB of space, so webFaction’s largest plan should be adequate for most sites, but if you do need more it comes at a reasonable price. If you do go over your bandwidth, you can choose to have your site cut off, or be charged a fee. The fee is still $5 for 200 GB of bandwidth. At mediaTemple, you are charged $2.56 per GB over and cannot choose to have your site turned off. So 2 GB over is already more than what you’d pay at webFaction. The only issue is if you only go 1GB over at webFaction, you’re still charged $5.

I like webFaction much more than mediaTemple so far. If you do sign up at webFaction, please tell them that emokid sent you in the referrer section.

Yeah… I used affiliate links. None of them are for mediaTemple. We like dreamHost because of their service quality, but they aren’t affordable if you’ve been formerly hosted with them. They are only good if you newly sign up and use a promo code or something like PERFECTDREAM. webFaction is currently at the top of my list along with SurpassHosting.

Interesting photo! I like the concept and it turned out to be a great shot.

The comment looked sort of legit at first, but the words concept and great shot baffled me when I looked at the photo commented on. Then I saw the e-mail address of the commenter and the URL and knew it was spam. So if the IP address, e-mail, or name isn’t the Akismet or Defensio’s database then it’ll pass and be displayed on the site, or placed in the moderation queue. Other comments that are clearly spam consisting of 12-186 links to porn sites or free male enhancers are traditionally blocked and worry free. Some posts of interesting videos and photos of celebrities sometimes make it through. So 80% of spam is usually caught by a spam-defense shielding service.

One of the main things I try to tell people when they want to start a blog or forum is to find a script that has built-in spam blocking techniques, or has plug-ins available to prevent or hide spam. Many just leave it at that, ignore this common piece of advice, or attempt to dive in deeper. Those who walk off without diving in deeper believe that CAPTCHA’s are enough.

CAPTCHA‘s are the little images with squiggly text, sand, and grids applied to an image which humans making legitimate posts or comments are expected to read and enter into a box in order to verify who they are. It was great at first, but now their are programs that can read most of them, and there are the ever cleaver human spammers. This is one of the main issues I’m seeing with sites. They install Cutenews or something similar and just have a CAPTCHA as “spam prevention.” There is no moderation queue or spam-shield. So people with the “Ctrl + V” are able to post the 186 links and have it published on a site. When multiple spammers start doing this time after time, the page starts getting very large. One of the sites I host was loosing megabytes of bandwidth per visitor due to thousands of spam comments for each of their posts. So as the mean and evil host, here’s what I did. Back up the comments file (in case they want to filter through it for legit comments) and disable commenting. Then I sent them a nice e-mail suggesting finding a plug-in or switching to something better. I also suggest enabling a moderation queue if the script has one.

MODERATION QUEUE‘s are probably the best way you can combat spam. It doesn’t really work on high traffic sites, so a spam-shield is required for those, or disabling comments all-together. Some scripts have better moderation queues that others, but the basic concept is that a post is hidden until one of the high-ups on the site approve it for display. Some are more advanced remembering the IP address of the poster or marking a registered user as a legitimate poster and no longer requiring them for moderation. That great, but one problem I’ve come across is a spammer getting the IP address of someone who used to post on my site and spam now gets through, but a spam-shield can somewhat help against that. So I always recommend to people who ask about preventing spam on their blogs to use a moderation queue. But some people (definitely not me, though I wish) get hundreds or thousands of comments a day.

SPAM-SHIELD‘s or more commonly called spam filters (I think spam-shield sounds much cooler though) are usually services offered by another company that helps in finding spam and preventing it from being displayed. There are 2 common ones (and only 2 I know of so far) which are Akismet and Defensio. I’m trying Defensio now, but Akismet was easier to setup on most sites. Akismet blocks most spam on the TyL Status page and on the forums. But on my photoBlog, it doesn’t seem to work as well. If you want to know, the TyL Status page and forums only get about 25 spam comments a day, while my photoBlog gets about 40-50 a day and the Akismet plug-in for PixelPost doesn’t seem to work that well. Defensio’s site (in my opinion) is more user friendly than Akismet. You go there, sign-up and login. Then you enter in your site’s URL and it pops out an API key. Akismet on the other hand requires you to go to wordPress.com and register there. Then in order to get your API key, you login and have to view your profile. Defensio is newer though; so it might not have as much experience catching spam.

Defensio vs Akismet Defensio is more advanced and feature rich when compared to Akismet, but Akismet has a larger background and it older and “more wiser.” Or at least that’s what I’ve been told. One thing I like about Akismet is it integrates right in with many different blogging platforms, and it is used on wordPress.com and made by the people behind wordPress giving it more of credibility just when you here about it. Defensio on the other hand doesn’t appear to be developed by people who do blogging for a living. But it has levels of spam and allows you to set how loose it is when filtering out spam. I don’t have an opinion on which one is better yet, but I do know that they both say not to use both at the same time.

So back to the problem at hand. The best way to save bandwidth due to spam is to keep comments hidden until you know their safe. If you’re okay with a few spam messages showing up on your site and then deleting them as they appear, then a spam-shield with out the moderation queue might be right for you. But if you want to conserve bandwidth, make sure that the 186 link spam comments don’t make it to your page.

So my spam solution is a spam-shield with a moderation queue. It might not be the best, but it works for me. Until there’s a 100% spam-proof filter, I probably will stay with the queue+shield until I write my own spam-shield.

What I like about mediaTemple:
- Full control over DNS, but webFaction has that too.
- Somewhat easy to use controlPanel, but webFaction has a better one.
- Ability to survive high traffic loads, but they’ll charge you extra if you exceed your GPU allocation and not shut down your site. I’d prefer my site be shut down and have to option to pay to open it because being charged $0.10 per GPU over. I’ve heard horror stories about this, but mt claims 99.7% of sites will never have a problem of going over.

If cPanel allowed for full control over DNS and some other stuff, then 99.8% of hosts would probably suit my needs, but webFaction, mediaTemple, sliceHost and dreamHost seem to fit the needs at the moment. slieceHost and dreamHost cost too much to setup, mediaTemple is too slow, and webFaction has some settings I don’t like. If only VPS’s and Dedicateds were cheaper.

DreamHost – Great if you overlook their past issues. Most things have been resolved and they have good uptime. Highly customizable through their not-so-pretty web panel. But functionality should be looked over eye-candy. I’d be using them now if there wasn’t a setup fee for month-to-month (but new customers can avoid it through coupon codes, old customers can’t). I’d suggest them to people who weren’t past clients of theirs. It’s too costly to startup an account if you were previously hosted with them

Media Temple (grid-service) – So-so. Everyone I know loves them, but compared to the old hosts this site has been hosted off of, it takes ruffly 1.5-3 times longer to load. They limit you to 5 database users. Good I guess for limiting connections and load managing, but if one user has access to the umpteen number of databases and that account gets compromised, say good-bye to all the stuff. Also, your site is identified by a lovely number. Sure it allows for quick support, but it doesn’t seem friendly to me. A plus is that their support team is friendly and has a sense of humor. I’d suggest them if you need the uptime and load balancing whatnot mumbo-jumbo, but for my purposes of just a single lonely blog, I think the speed is too slow. I’d suggest it to those who need something in between a standard VPS and Shared Hosting. Their (dv) plans are apparently great and off the hook, but it doesn’t fall into our current price range and yeah…

Pros: A lot of power for your site. A sub-domain to test sites before pointing the domain over. A nice web panel with a lot of control.
Cons: Slower than most hosts. Have “problems” with the grid which aren’t fully known or understood to them.

WebFaction – So far I’ve heard great things about them and have problems finding negatives (unlike MT, DH, or SH). Signed up and awaiting account activation. Then we’ll move over and see how we likes it. Okay, we started to move files over. They’re really fast and were great for the few moments. You can host almost any type of site and they have so much room for growth and whatnot, but their PHP/Apache settings didn’t work nice with my sites. Since I don’t want to change the sites or start from scratch, I sadly canceled the account. Other than the fact that PHP is run by the Apache user, they’re pretty good. You can install LiteSpeed, but I didn’t want to worry about Port issues or anything. So we’ll keep them on our list as a future host, but I’ll keep searching at the moment.

Pros: Fast. Web Panel with a ton of control. Subdomains for testing your site before moving it over.
Cons: PHP is run as Apache User.

SliceHost – If WF doesn’t work out, then we’ll try out slice host. Heard great things about them, but found a few scary negatives, mainly about how the slice in our price range doesn’t have enough ram for an operating system and a popular site… But we’re not popular yet and upgrading to more ram is as easy as a click of a button I’m told.

There are some other hosts, but I’ll add them if more dominoes fall.

Here is the criteria we’re looking for

• Cost: ~$25 per month
• Payable month-to-month, no long-term contracts
• $0-$10 setup fee (I’m sorry, let me charge you a sign-up fee for me having to fill out your stupid form! gosh I hate setup fees)
• A money-back guarantee (because through this test, I will only stick with one host that is better than the rest)
• Friendly support staff with a sense of humor. Sorry if I have a dry sense of humor, but please play along. If my question before signing up asks “Are you wearing a suit and tie at the moment?” Please answer the question whether seriously or not. Don’t ignore it because answering this question could effect my decision.
• Quick replies to support issues… I can only say that this falls into the above since some of the issues I ask about are dumb as can be. But if you can tell me kindly how to add-on a new domain to host or how to have multiple domains for the same site kindly (even though it’s in your knowledge base) then that’s a plus for you. I understand complex issues take a little longer to get to, but if it can be found on your site, then you should be able to tell me about it with a bit of extra detail.
• At least one female worker… Single if possible in her late teens early twenties who’s looking for a Filippino friend…
• Fast servers with fast speeds
• Great Uptime. We understand a downtime of 30 minutes a week (I’ve been to some hosts who have 30 minutes of downtime a day), but I’d like for my site to always be up.
• The latest and greatest toys, scripting languages and etc.
• Features that make you unique (not the female worker thing, but like a pimped out control panel, a friendly user forum, SSH access, VPS capabilities on a shared server, etc)
• The ability to know what I’m talking about even though I have no clue what I’m talking about. Like you know that support ticket you send in where you’re experiencing a problem, but you don’t know what the problem really is or if it’s caused by you or the host. The host should be able to do their best to find a solution without being mean or insulting.
• A well sized knowledge base or wiki or some other data source about your hosting.
• All OS and Browser compatible. I’ve actually come across a host (a free one though) who required people to use Internet Explorer in order to use the control panel. I understand not supporting Lynx, but at least let me use Firefox, Safari, Opera, or whatever I’m using that day.
• Some other pluses:
  • Limited or no overselling. I know that it’s rare to find a host that does not oversell, but I want to be able to know that the server I’m on will survive traffic once my site becomes popular.
  • User-to-User (with staff visits from time-to-time) forums. A friendly place where I can chat with other hostees and know I’m not suffering alone?
  • Easy to navigate site. Okay… this is sortof a need. I was going to sign up with one host, but I couldn’t find the signup page.
  • Decent looking site. I know I shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover, but if the host doesn’t have a reputation, then at least have a decent looking site (and not a site that looks like 500 other hosts)
  • Own their own servers. I’m fine being hosted under a reseller or VPS, but there’s more comfort being hosted by a host that owns the server since they have more control. If a reseller’s host quits, then the reseller and it’s buyer are screwed unless the reseller gets a forewarning and pulls off some good management skills (like yours truly has done before)
  • Can tolerate hosting a twirp… A.k.A some old geezer behind a computer that acts like a 12 year old who discovered the true beauty of the internet and is attempting to have fun by using it…

So wish me luck on the search

Current Interesting Hosts: surpassHosting, webFaction