Contest for First Person Ever to Receive Refund from W2Servers

posted by Steve
Jun 13

Over on the Web Hosting Talk discussion forum we have started a contest to see if any human being, living or dead, ever has or ever will receive a refund from W2Servers, a budget hosting company to which we paid $1,000 for two servers, both of which mysteriously disappeared after we had paid in advance for one year of using them.

The CEO of W2Servers, Mr Lyron Foster, has promised that all dissatisfied customers will receive refunds.
Are you happy with your W2 Services?
I applied for a refund for a portion of the $1,000 I had paid them on May 25th, today is June 13th, no refund has been received.

If you are now or you ever have been a customer of W2Servers and you have received so much as one cent in a refund please let us know, or better yet claim your prize in the W2Servers Refund Contest over at Web Hosting Talk. The contest is set to run until the day after the end of time in the desperate hope that someone somewhere on the planet Earth will claim the prize!

Let the facts of the matter guide your decision about where to lease web hosting services.

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New Server, New Provider, We Upgraded!

posted by Steve
Sep 23

After three years of completely satisfactory service from The Planet our online presence had grown so much that the existing dual-core webserver was not keeping up very well.

For the longest time we kept looking for a great deal on a much faster server. While we had always been completely happy with the service we got from The Planet the deals they had on offer did not meet our requirements while staying in the target price range.

Finally we stumbled across Wiredtree, a fairly new company with some fascinating deals. When we saw a server listed with a quad-core Nehalem processor, cPanel and WHM pre-installed, and some generous disk offerings we finally made the jump.

So far it's all good. We were able to use WHM to transfer all of the domains we are hosting over to the new server and within two weeks we had tweaked the new machine and transferred all of our clients. We have nothing bad to say about The Planet, but having now moved to Wiredtree we are very happy that we did. Wiredtree offers proactive server management, they do an excellent job of hardening your server before they hand it over, and they respond to tech support requests promptly and with obvious expertise.

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Drupal, what a treat!

posted by Steve
Nov 13

Today I had a look at a new Content Management System, new to me at least, called Drupal. Wow, what a very well organized and well implemented setup that is!

Within a very short period of time I had a new website going that features dozens of incoming RSS feeds from various news sources, shopping pages based on Grouper Evolution, a forum, a blog, and a fairly reasonable set of user options.

I built a site around the idea of atheism and critical thinking and had it online within just a few hours. I'm very impressed so far with Drupal. Have a look at Leaping Dolphin to see what I mean. Check it out for your next web project.

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Troubleshooting Winblows

posted by Steve
May 22

A very good friend of mine who lives in the next state over called me last night wondering why he could not connect to any of my web sites. Right now they are spread across 2 dedicated servers as we wait for a client to finish migrating from our old server to this kick ass dual core server. I suggested there might have been a temporary routing problem between his ISP and the data center in Dallas where this server lives, and we went on to talk about other things.

This morning I had an email from him listing sites of mine he could not reach, he was just getting timeouts. Since I do tend to block IP addresses in my firewall that I see being used for nefarious reasons, I looked up his IP and verified that it was not blocked. But still he could not connect.

On a hunch I had him try doing an nslookup of one of my domains, and discovered to my great surprise that he was using a DNS server in Russia and it returned its own IP address for every domain name. In other words his Microsoft Windows computer had been hijacked, and all of his web access was being proxied through this Russian server. And the reason he could not access my sites is because I had already blocked this criminal enterprise in my firewall.

I did some research for him and found out that the particular malware his Windows box was infested with was likely installed when he received an email or visited a webpage with a maliciously crafted Windows MetaFile (.wmf) image. If he had been so foolish as to use Internet Explorer as his web browser or Outlook Express as his mail client then it would have been conveniently auto-installed for him as part of Microsoft's "Rich Multimedia Experience" design philosophy.

I went on for some time about how he should reformat his C: and reinstall Winblows when he interrupted me and asked if he would have this kind of a problem with a Mac. And of course I answered quite honestly that he would not. He explained that a University where he was once employed was offering a great iMac educational deal, and when we ended our conversation his plan was to order an iMac tomorrow.

There's one more friend who won't need to call me for technical support anymore, and I know he will love his iMac. A happy ending, for sure.

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Over 40 GB in One Day

posted by Steve
Apr 27

Since this new webserver was placed into service earlier this week, there has been nearly 130GB of traffic to and from the sites hosted here. Yesterday there was over 40GB of traffic in one day. The vast majority of this traffic involves the 24 Amazon Associate stores we are hosting. And the primary client of this 40GB of traffic is Google.

For our Amazon Associate stores we are using a program called Associate-O-Matic by a gentleman named Justin Mecham. I've been using this script for over 2 years now, and have watched it develop from good, to very good, and more recently it has reached true excellence. The degree of flexibility in store design offered by this PHP application is stunning, the support provided by Justin is always helpful and positive, and the functionality of the program has grown steadily over time. More importantly, he actively solicits feedback and wish list items from his customers, then implements the ideas in a sensible way.

I'm hoping that Google will make good use of the 40GB per day of store crawling traffic. Just this morning I noticed an increase in shopping cart activity, which might suggest a similar rise in commissions.

I'm theorizing that the Googlebots have noticed how much more performant this server is compared to our previous Pentium4 and IDE based machine, and that they are responding by making more frequent and more numerous requests. This should result in a deeper indexing of the items on offer, and may then lead to more referrals of human shoppers. At least, that is our current strategy. We need to earn about $8.00 per day to break even on our hosting expenses, this seems a realistic expectation. Whether the business will pass through the break even point remains to be seen. It does seem we'll be using a significant portion of our 2.5 terabyte monthly bandwidth allocation.

Like many other things in life, it's a gamble.

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Welcome to Steve’s Web Server!

posted by Steve
Apr 25

Welcome to Steve's Web Server, we are here to promote rational behavior and critical thinking. Our intention is to call into question a number of ideas that are widely held and, in our view, harmful to the well being of human societies and the planet we all share.

We have recently rented this new, faster web server in order to provide an uncensored home for various websites dealing with critical thinking, debunking of religious beliefs, and the community of atheists and agnostics in which we operate.

We also seek to examine political activities in the light of reason, and this has led us to a firmly anti-war stance.

Our first dedicated server did well for 2 years, but eventually it proved unequal to the load imposed by the various websites it was hosting. So we placed this faster machine into service in April, 2007.

Thanks for visiting Steve's Web Server.

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