Caramel Toffee » hosting

In which I may be the only one who cares

Adlina — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 06:00:46 +0000

Warning: If you’re (a) Someone whose site is laden with google ads or whatever other type of sponsorships, (b) someone whose online presence is only (read that again: ONLY) for business and making money, (c) someone who obsesses over SEO, pagerank and all the publicity-related stuff, and/or (c) work for webhosting/SEO companies or similar sites, then please do skip this entry. Well, not that anyone reads my rambling. I just feel the need to put a warning there first.

Writing For People vs Writing For Oneself

People are hard to please. When you write for an audience, you lose your freedom of speech. What started out as ‘I write because I like this topic’ becomes ‘I write this because many people like it’. It’s horrible. It’s like you’re doing a 3000-word assignment and hoping to get A+, but in the end managing to scrap only a B+ at most (Oh my, why am I comparing this to assignments? I really need to get mine done ASAP.)

My biggest pet peeve when it comes to writing: People who literally begs for comments and reviews.

Let’s take good ol’ dumpster Fanfiction.Net. You find people begging for reviews everywhere. EVERYWHERE. Worse still, there are noobs who write comments like ‘I won’t update the story/add a new chapter until I get at least [insert number here] reviews, so READ AND REVIEW PEEPS. Kthnxbai!’. Seriously, what the effing hell is wrong with those people? That’s even worse than begging. Ordering readers you don’t even know to review your story, especially when you’re new and still struggling with grammar building readership, is a big no no. Ugh.

Right. I’m rambling. My point is that when we write for the purpose of meeting someone else’s expectations, our tone of writing is noticeably different.

The Web Hosting Scene

Why can’t we have subdomain hosting that rocks on the English speaking side of the world too? I don’t need more domain name. I want something nice and cool and isn’t long like thisismydomainlolz.TLD

I’m kind of dismayed that we don’t have services like the ones offered by Japanese companies like Lolipop, Chicappa (and all other services under GMO), Stepserver, Sakura Internet and some other hosts. They provide pretty list of domain names to choose from for your subdomain. It’s paid service, I know that. I also know that many people frown at having to pay for a subdomain hosting. Random reader who accidentally stumble upon this entry might think I’m crazy, huh.

Yes, we have many free hosting services. You can have subdomains if you don’t have a domain name but your host would have lame names that don’t mean anything to you. I wouldn’t want my site to be hosted on a subdomain with the word ‘host’ in it. It’s just so uncool. So not unique. If there’s a company offering paid subdomain hosting with great support, with choices of domain names that actually have wonderful meanings, I’d be glad to pay. What we have over here is domain name squatting. I fucking hate that lame ass strategy of buying domain names and keeping it, looking to sell it for 1 million bucks (excuse the exaggeration, please). At least develop the damn domain OR design a better looking ‘parking lot’ for the ‘oh so beautiful’ domain names. The closest I could find is the cute free hosting at Bubble.Nu. Some pretty awesome domain names available there.

The practice of holding back expired domains for years and years and years is another infuriating thing. After estdomains went poof, and the registrar of one of my domain names disappeared along with it, keeping me from renewing the domain (That guy I was dealing with was Malaysian!), I’ve been waiting for that domain name to be released. But nooooo, it just had to be kept. Fuckers.

Okay. Signing off now before I get more too aggressive offensive.

From MediaTemple to SharkSpace + WP Issues

Adlina — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 13:56:26 +0000

-Before moving to Sharkspace. With WP-Super Cache half-on. Last straw? Lol -

As much as I love Media Temple, the move just needed to be made because I won’t be able to support the hosting cost. Maybe I’ll go back to it after graduating and getting my first pay, but it’s goodbye for now. Anyways, after two months of hesitating, I’ve finally made the move. I’ve moved to Shark Space because observing it for two days shows that sites hosted by Sharkspace loads faster than some other hosts I’ve been eyeing. The move, however, is not flawless.

1. Missing visual editor in WordPress 2.8.4
I was frustrated when I couldn’t get anything done to restore it back to how it originally was. I tried re-installing wordpress, deleting and replacing wp-admin and wp-includes folder – nothing works. I thought it was permission problem. Checked the permissions and saw everything CHMODED perfectly. The SCP transfer from {mt} didn’t have trouble at all.

The only thing that worked for CT to restore the visual editor was to add the following line to wp-config.php

define( ‘CONCATENATE_SCRIPTS’, false );

I’ve never used this line before.

Oh well, I’m not the type to bother my web host until I’m damn sure it’s beyond my capabilities (but hey, Shark Space has this utterly amazing response time! I’m totally impressed~). It’s not pride. It’s just learning to be independent. For now, this seems to work. When things stop working, maybe then ‘ll find another solution or finally relent and plead for some help from the technical team XD

2. Missing directories for Add-on Domains & Subdomains
To avoid clutter, my add-on domains and subdomains are always placed outside public_html folder. The weird thing is… I couldn’t access the files inside the folders. They all seem to be missing. I thought I’d get 500 or 503 error messages when I tried to access some files directly (files that I know are there), but I got 404! I’ve deleted the domains and subdomains. I’ll try again and see what happens then.

3. SMF Database Restoration Error
Apparently, the new database doesn’t like all strings connected to the smf_shop plugin. Everything else worked fine. Just that one plugin. Something about MySQL version. I should have see this coming. I was moving the databases from version mySQL 4 to mySQL 5. Ugh.

It would be wonderful if I can solve the missing post body problems with Junjou. If thep problem persists after the move, then maybe I’ll consider starting afresh with new content and keep the old entries in a subdirectory in case someone wants to access the old contents still.

Right. Back to work.

Sticky Post: About Adi’s http://adi.carameltoffee.net

Adlina — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 08:09:04 +0000

I seem to notice that many people from Malaysia were looking for Adi’s old blog, which I used to host since early 2008. Please be informed that I am no longer hosting his blog after he declared that he wanted to say goodbye to it. Yup, this blog is all me now, and all deleted subdomains (including nonexistent subdomains) will show the main page of my blog.

Sorry for the inconvenience. It feels weird that some people called me (or at least thought that I am) Adi because they misunderstood.

Going Again – For the Last Time + Toffee Host

Adlina — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 14:25:25 +0000

At least for my bachelor degree. I’m not sure about my further studies, but I probably won’t because there’s no way my parents would allow me to go. So tonight’s my last night at home. I’ll be boarding the flight from Kota Bharu to KLIA at 9.15am, and then to Brunei at 2.40pm and finally to Auckland at 7.30pm. Two months and a half feels like a few days! It’s true that you learn to miss what you have when you’ve left them behind.

The last few days had been food, food and more food. Diets can go to hell for all I care, because ten months is a long time to wait before getting to eat original Malaysian food again.

Ok, not only Malaysiam food because those I ate in Secret Recipe were obviously western. I’m going to miss the Food Courts and of course MY MOM’S HOMEMADE CAKES!!! I can make them with the same recipe, but it won’t be the same.

Hope the allowance comes in before the end of this month, or in the first week of March. I only have around $1500, excluding rent to pay until the end of February T_T

Also, I’ve been having lots of fun with Concrete5 CMS. Very easy to customise. VERY, very easy. If anyone’s looking for a lightning-fast hosting, try our Toffee Host (maintained by 5 people):

1GB disk space with Raid-10 data protection
10GB premium bandwidth
cPanel, Fantastico de Luxe, Installatron, RubyGems
Litespeed technology for blazing fast page load
Domain name from $6.66
SSL certificate at $10/year
PHP5, MySQL5, Ruby on Rails
And more!
http://www.toffeehost.com

I suck at promotion. Badly. Lol.

A Whiff of Cool Breeze After the Storm

Adlina — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 14:57:52 +0000

I used to always divide different main points into parts, so I guess I should try doing it again – for old time’s sake.

New Server: The post title is me making a silly attempt to sound a teeny wee bit poetic, because the rain finally stopped. I couldn’t feel my toes two nights ago while I was slaving away in front of my laptop, moving all files from Tektonic to Media Temple.*points to the left* I’m working on Caramel Toffee’s new layout! I hope I’ll be able to get it down soon. It’s been a long time since I last used layouts designed by myself for my blogs. I keep telling myself to make some, but I always end up being too lazy to start designing, much less coding. This layout will be hopefully be fluid, and XHTML/CSS valid though I’m afraif I fail at 1.1 strict, so it’s going to be transitional instead XD.

I don’t know why people seem to talk shit about Media Temple, though my readings kind of told me that (mt) is slow. Well, I guess I don’t mind much about speed. I’m not running high traffic sites like most of you probably do. It’s still fast for me. I guess if sites like ABC and Tech Crunch trust them, surely they couldn’t be that bad. I just love how they’re using Nginx like WordPress. No wonder it’s fast to load to Account Control centre.

Stubborn, Stupid Cashier: I went for grocery shopping with Mama this evening. There’s this cashier who obviously DID a serious mistake, but had the guts to say “It’s not my fault” to us. She mistakenly combined our totals with the totals of the customer who was ahead of us. We asked her to cancel the scan, and rescan everything, but she totally refused, saying that she couldn’t open the cash machine before confirming to totals. She even dared to say it’s not her fault. It obviously WAS her fault, because she shouldn’t have randomly grabbed our stuff when she hadn’t finished with the previous customer’s bill. In the end, the other customer gave us her money, and we paid with our combined funds. The bloody idiot of a cashier had the nerve to look smug and angry. I guess she doesn’t know the term “Customers are always right” in the business world.

Podcasting: My students requested I do podcasts – podcasts for learning Malay for English and/or Japanese speakers. That’s a rather nice idea, and I love them for suggesting it. When the site redesign is done, I’ll probably be able to add another section to Caramel Toffee called Randomcast or something. I’ll have the chance to work on my spoken English, so it’s all good. It’s about time I stop feeling embarassed if people hear my voice XD

Wow, presenting in parts like this makes my blog entry look really neat! I guess I’ll be sticking to it most of the time.

Enough is Enough, and I’m Tired

Adlina — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 18:32:42 +0000

Buh.

Something is extra-bloody-lutely wrong with my MySQL server if it wants more than 2GB of RAM that even Swap barely helps. I think I’m done with all this self-management shit. It’s been wonderful, but I don’t currently have the budget for something of high maintenance. So I’ll just be moving to managed plans. Yep, no more drama. I’m through. I seriously love the plan, but if my downgrading my plan caused my sites to perform like shit, I’d rather not put them in jeopardy anymore.

I guess I’ll go back to Surpass after all. Oh wait, perhaps to MediaTemple. My brothers’ fav.

Gaaaahh, I so need a part time job like whoooaah!! Dare I go back to my freelance writing days? Those days were wonderful… and I got paid well too I guess it’s time to put in more efforts.

So they edited my .htaccess File

Adlina — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 05:25:22 +0000

Without telling me. If they had told mefirsthand, I wouldn’t have been so angry. I always wonder why those people seem to always know when I’m awake and when I’m sleeping. It’s always after waking up that I find something outrageous done to my sites. I kind of panicked when I couldn’t access carameltoffee.net. The address kept changing to http://www.carameltoffee.net even though I’ve specified http://carameltoffee.net.

I knew someone must have been tweaking with my .htaccess, and darn, I was totally right! Someone added FrontPage extensions.

# -FrontPage-

IndexIgnore .htaccess */.??* *~ *# */HEADER* */README* */_vti*

order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from all

order deny,allow
deny from all

AuthName carameltoffee.net
AuthUserFile /my/path/here/_vti_pvt/service.pwd
AuthGroupFile /my/path/here/_vti_pvt/service.grp

Lol, what? I had to FTP a new .htaccess with only WordPress’ mod_rewrite. Am feeling so pissed of right now. I’m just glad nothing happened to Junjou and Ini Aku.