Fuddland

Notice anything different around here? No? Well, I guess that’s a good thing.

I’ve moved hosts again. Whilst Servage do offer good packages which would perfectly suit the majority of people, they fell short of satisfying the needs of this site. Specifically, my grievances were:

• You cannot run cron jobs on scripts that are not in the public folders. What this means is, if you want a certain script to run automatically every given period of time, it needs to be in the public folders [as opposed to private folders to which only the account administrator has access]. The script which automagically posts my Moblog entries is run by a cron job which checks for new emails, grabs the oldest one and puts the text and images in the appropriate places before building the entry itself; therefore it contains [in plain text] the username and password to the email account which receives the entries. Naturally I’m keen to keep those pieces of data out of the public domain, which is tricky [although I’m sure not impossible] if the script has to lie in a public folder.

  Furthermore, Servage allow scripts to run no more than once an hour, and if you want a job to run every hour, you need to manually set up 24 copies of the same command.

  To add frustration to laboriousness, they don’t send you or even allow you access to any error logs, which makes debugging one’s scripts or site very difficult: if a script doesn’t work when it’s run through a browser window, all you get is the usual “500 Internal Server Error” page — any debugging information has to be built into the script, which is still no good if it won’t even compile in the first place and you’ve no idea why.

• The control panel interface for the account is fairly basic and contains no information about how much storage space one is using — if you want to know, you need to submit a support ticket.

• Support tickets cannot be re-opened once they have been closed by Servage, so if they think they’ve dealt with your request, but you’re not satisfied, you need to submit a new ticket and explain the situation from the beginning because you can’t be sure they’ll look at your previous tickets. It took three attempts to get them to install one Perl module.

However, as I say, they do have attractive default features for most users, I just wanted things to be a little easier. So I’ve moved to Hostony, and it was the best server-moving experience I’ve had so far, thanks to a top tip in the MT Wiki. After uploading all my files [the Movable Type installation, plus all of my images, CSS files etc.], shifting my entire weblog — post, templates, everything — was a trivial matter of using phpMyAdmin to download a backup of the MySQL database from the old server, editing a few lines at the top of the file with a text editor, replacing the name of the database with its equivalent on the new server, and importing the file. I then just had to learn a couple of MySQL commands to change all server-specific text in the database in one fell swoop, and pow: 1,367 entries and 3,719 comments over three weblogs moved from one server to another in less than half an hour [and a lot of that time was downloading/uploading the database].

The only confusion came before the account had even been set up: I placed my order on the Friday evening, and early on Saturday morning [it was before my tea so I had only just got up] I got a telephone call from someone with a very thick, but indeterminable, accent, and it took me a minute or two to register that this wasn’t a marketing cold-call from India, but someone from Hostony verifying that I had ordered an account to be set up in my name. It was pretty comical that, once I’d figured out what he was saying, and confirmed that I did indeed order an account, he just said, “Okay, it’ll be set up later today. Goodbye!”

So after my daliance with Servage, welcome to Fuddland: The Hostony Years.