Posts tagged review

Dreamhost Hosting Review

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If you don’t know who Dreamhost are, just write Dreamhost on Google 😀 they are one of the largest hosts nowadays and up until recently I was a big fan and a client for over 10 years, wow! 10 YEARS! So as you all know i tend to only review hosta i stopped using, so why have i left Dreamhost?

First lets start with some history, for a while Dreamhost was the home of a bit of weirdly offbeat hosting, their hosting setup was unique, their culture was unique, their services were unique, also it was one of those hosts that gave you freedom, even when you screwed something over or abused some of the services or just didn’t have your wordpress well setup they were lenient and most of the times helpful, it wasn’t about oh its your fault or i cant do anything, it was a matter of helping you out even if it was your fault, their hosting was weird but cool, you never cared about how much space you were using or resources cause it just worked!

And from a very affordable price you had a ton of extras to play with it was a playground feel and something very unique on the hosting industry, it reminds me of when Gmail started, you just had so much to work with now, even with kinks you always forgave cause… well lets just say it… Dreamhost was awesome!

And although i had move most of my sites and apps to vps/cloud/dedicated hosting, i still was very happy with my Dreamhost account!

Was? Oh yeah since about 2 years ago, they changed and a lot and besides the culture part… well it was fun but its not the essential, the change was in their network and features, the moved from a clustered type of hosting where i have to say it had the occasional downtime but overall it was fantastic speed and resources to a plain basic shared hosting setup one that is very stifled on resources, a hosting account that at its max had 20+ sites all running a lot of traffic, including a buddypress social network and a forum, now cant handle 2 wordpress sites at the same time without giving 503 errors.

Now compare that with a test vps i have that also has 2 pretty new wordpress sites but getting there, this vps is KVM with 256mb of Ram and 1vcpu, is it awesome, no? but after a well setup (nginx/apache/mariadb) its running those 2 sites like butter its almost native speed, while on Dreamhost you basically traded that slight instability for basic performance, those 2 sites load slowly and i guess any more php sites and my account would die, by the way i was paying 7$ a month on Dreamhost and i pay 1$ a month on Atlantic.net and altough Dreamhost “gives more” like control panel, backups, the most important part, the hosting is pretty weak!

The fact is that shared hosting on Dreamhost is dead, they want people to move up to VPS, to their Cloud Offerings, to their Specific WordPress Offerings or Dedicated, they went were all the other hosting companies have been going since… well forever! They give you a great offer on shared hosting, but the shared hosting is so restrictive that any usage above a very low margin will probably need to upgrade, thats fine, but that wasnt the Dreamhost I sign up for!

Dreamhost could easily put nginx in front of apache, or just tweak their shared hosting to be as fast and streamlined as possible but they of course have no incentive for that, when you sign up for their vps you can do that yourself so they can do it, it reminds a bit of my issues with webfaction and their weird limitations…

Also i tried 2 times their VPS platform, the first time was a bust well mostly because their shared hosting was still in the old platform so it was literally moving to something worst with more limitations in everything, the second time around it was better but for that price and performance i expected a big leap from the shared hosting, i was using the shared mysql but than again why would i need to pay for vps and then for vps mysql, its just plain not good.

I also asked to be moved in the last 6 months to another datacenter and they did it, but nothing changed, still plain boring performance and hosting, this wasnt a easy decision i really liked Dreamhost, my kind of hosting, but they arent anymore, and so i move to bigger and better things, so to finalize this… yeah i left and im not going back, and sorry to say that ill probably also pass on their cloud offerings, burn me once… ok stopping the rant >_< sorry sorry, here is a resume 😛

Dreamhost Strong Points

  1. Awesome Control Panel
  2. Basic Hosting Feature Set
  3. The Shared Hosting Price is Alright
  4. Good Network

Dreamhost Weak Points

  1. Shared and VPS Hosting has Weak Performance
  2. Shared Hosting Increased its Limits
  3. The VPS Hosting Price is Expensive
  4. Lost Some Extra Features
  5. Its Price point has lost Value (You dont get the same bang for buck you once got)
  6. Lost part of its Nerdy/Tech Culture and Charm
  7. Uncertainty Regarding New Features (Adding then removing features)

Webfaction Hosting Review

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So I was a user of Webfaction hosting for a year, and nooo don’t take my dramatic image that Webfaction sucks! Hehehe it just sucked a little but it failed quite a bit, lets start from top shall we.

Webfaction is a shared hosting provider, it kinda sits between traditional shared hosting and running a VPS/Cloud/Dedicated hosting, its basically shared hosting with the basics plus lots of the resources and freedom of having control of most of your account, sounds great? Yeah i thought so too!
After some issues with some of my hosting i decided about a year ago to keep a part of my sites on  dedicated and some on shared hosting, so Webfaction looked like my perfect choice for a shared hosting provider (my end goal was 3 Webfaction accounts), still before singing up with I sent a e-mail with some questions, one of those was regarding the PHP and if that would run from the memory on the server or if it was included since their site doesn’t state that clearly, i was told that i wouldn’t need to worry about PHP since that was part of their setup and thus outside of my personal memory, only if i installed my own apps would i use up that memory, great!
So moving some of my sites over i had to get used to their control panel and system, that has some particulars compared with other shared hosting, but nothing too complicated and in some sense pretty cool, like the ability to run folders with just Nginx for example (bypassing the heaving Apache), still it took a while to move things over (about 8 sites, with 10GB of data, 5 MySql databases), performance wise it wasn’t all that good, i had some downtime (3 times at least) and weird issues like blazing speed one moment and crawling and timing out the next, after some back and forth with support (that although reasonably fast they are very bland with replies and tend to not give details on issues) and about 3 months in and more talking with support the server was moved to Cloudlinux and that would fix the issues.
And yes it helped, kinda, now i wasn’t getting those server wide glitches but started getting out of memory issues, were support sometimes telling me its my fault and other times telling me it isn’t a issue and shrugging it off, and that was my normal operation with Webfaction for another couple of months, with my sites going down all in a row, i had 8 sites on Webfaction, because i never had outstanding hosting, I moved the only important site out, but still the performance wasn’t improving, 2 of the sites were placeholders and the rest were smallish static or wordpress site, the total traffic per month was like 5GB to 10GB and around 1000 visit per month for the combined sites, my contacts with support always started with me asking what was the issue and they say that PHP was running and had to be terminated and me replying that i was told PHP wasn’t a issue and i don’t understand why PHP is running out of memory if i barely have visitors, and finally shrugs or promises that it would magically get fixed.
This kept going on, at one point support wasn’t even able to determine what was the PHP file that brought the site down (apparently support doesn’t have access to logs or Webfaction doesn’t make any logs of these issues), but since it wasn’t always the same domain even i was unsure, suffice to say it was a pretty miserable experience, so after 7 months in, i quit Webfaction and moved everything over to another one of my VPS (and yes the performance has been fantastic and PHP runs like a dream), i paid yearly so my fault there, so here is a resume of what i think are the strong and weak points of Webfaction hosting.

Good Points

  1. Feature Filled Hosting Platform, from php, python, perl, git, django…. you name it.
  2. Good Control Panel, although tricky, after you get used to it, it has some great features.
  3. Good Hosting Specs, with plenty of space and bandwidth.
  4. Lots of Control, of your hosting with shell account and the ability to run your own software
  5. Good Fast Network, at least in their Amsterdan location that i used.
  6. Really Good Community, they showed a lot of ways to go around issues and some of the things you can do on the platform.

 

Bad Points

  1. Support isn’t Knowledgeable, at least of their platform or lacks any real access, they are polite but i needed answers, not shrugs and reboots, especially when they say its a issue on my side and then point me to a “optimize your site” article as a solution for a plain WordPress site that received 10 visits that day and was able to crash my entire account!!!!
  2. Monitoring the Server wasn’t Proactive or Fast, every-time i had a issue even if the entire server was down it seemed like a surprise to support (and i don’t go running for support, I normally wait 30min or more just encase its some reboot or small glitch), not too sure what they are monitoring :/
  3. Although told otherwise PHP is considered an App, so every time it runs it takes memory from your account (in my case between 30Mb and 60Mb, so i had 256Mb of RAM at the time = i can only run around 5 instances until their prevention tools shut me down), so if you have 1 site you are good and you can run multiple PHP processes, if you have 5 or 6 like me, or if you have a very popular forum or WordPress site, you will get shutdown FAST (check Webfaction’s “tools to prevent server high loads” and “cgroups” and “Cloudlinux”)
  4. It doesn’t use Standard Configurations, so you get some issues and incompatibles with some scripts, of these 4 its a issue you can fix easily by searching the forums.

 

So to summarize, Webfaction likes to compare itself as a superior VPS, but it really isn’t! a quality VPS is unfortunately superior (at least in availability of resources), even a smaller one, the now 512Mb of RAM on Webfaction isnt superior to a equivalent VPS, were you can run a LAMP (+Nginx) stack with 150Mb of RAM and plenty of space to run PHP and anything you want smootlhy, its just a bit more work to setup hehehe, i would say if you have just a couple of sites and you want a good shared hosting with more freedom than the average Shared Host than Webfaction is a nice choice and like Webfaction likes to say hosting for developers (so expect issues?!?), but if you want to run critical software or if you need your sites to run smoothly, then Webfaction is unfortunately not the best choice.

Review of Tresorit “Secure” Cloud Sync

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In my quest for some good secure cloud hosting/sync aka Dropbox clone, ive tested and used a lot of diferent cloud sync providers, might as well start posting my findings, today im starting with TresorIT, coming from Hungary, being their main features their client side encription and any folder can be synced.

So lets start with the install, I installed it on a Windows7 Laptop, that went fine and started fine, standard stuff here, i do note that this soft is installed on a very strange place (it installs on AppData instead of Program Files), also it created a ton of .tresor or .tresorit hidden folders, a bit weird but nothing much.

On running its a bit bare with information, username and password (so i assume the client side encription is done with that password) and off it goes, syncing away, however there is no way of knowing what is it doing, also its not as fast as say Dropbox or Skydrive, but the worst thing is that if you turn it off and delete a file and then turn the program back on… it wont retrieve the file from the server… so whats the point here?

That is pretty much standard syncing operation (if the software is not online at the time of the deletion you bring back the file from the server or if there is a new file update the file on the server, you dont erase the file on the server), so basically if there is corruption or you accidentally delete a file, or if you need to retrieve a file from the server online you are screwed, so what are you syncing for?

Yeah as of now TresorIT is pretty much useless, if you want syncing without protecion of data you might as well choose Bittorent Sync, its way safer (cause you at least know more about the security than blindly trusting TresorIT), its way quicker (on LAN its Blazing!!!!) and well if you delete something you are also screwed anyways!

TresorIT Advantages:

  • Stable enough Software
  • A presumption of security

TresorIT Disadvantages:

  • Basically if it stores files in the cloud, yet there is no clear way to access them if you need them (so what the point?!?!?)
  • Lack of information on syncing
  • Not the fastest of the bunch
  • Weird Instalation on Windows 7
  • Contacted Community and Support about issue, didnt get any reply from support >_< meh cryptic organizations dont give a nice vibe!

If you reeeeaaalllllly need to check them out, its TresorIT.com!

Google Drive and Cloud Storage

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So Google just launched Google Drive and although this has been quite a week on the cloud, and the response from the web to “Google’s Dropbox Clone” has been mostly “meh”, i do understand the sentiment, it is basically a Dropbox Clone, sure it has some new features but those are mostly baked into Google Docs already, so what is my view on this Goggle Docs+ i mean Google Drive…

Oh Shit it does Sync!

That’s awesome if it was released in 2006, its 2012 now and there are plenty of sync everywhere including cloud services, some more simple, some more fancy, but that’s pretty much the service, Google launching it now, feels and seems like an afterthought, because Microsoft and Apple went into it, they better do it as well, also it pretty much does only that, its a sync engine for Google Docs and that service although cool is not that awesome and it doesn’t replace at all using a local office software.

Oh Snap Google Owns Me!

So most of us are loyal and use a lot of Google Services, i know i do, and the day some algorithm in Google decides to suspend my account for some random reason (ie a bad Google Adwords ad, or putting my nickname on Google+ or whatnot), and of course i can trust the non-existent Google support to help me out, so yeah, using Google nowadays should be done with a backup/alternative always in mind.

Worst! Google unfortunately resides in the USA the home of such nice things as the Patriot Act and the reason why a lot of companies don’t host any personal/private information in the USA, cause its too easy to just go into your files, you need warrants and judges to go to your home to check your computers, but going to your cloud files… hummm not so much, and with the latest CISPA, it will just get worst, if banks/governments dont trust putting anything inside US borders, why should we trust Google with our stuff?  (ie i know most other cloud hosting are on US, im just stating the fact that Google is also).

Oh Jeez i have to Pay!

So Google launches Drive and decides to updates its storage price, and the web gives a sigh…

If Google Drive was launched with the previous storage prices it would have been an awesome cloud hosting mini revolution, i would see people using and integrating Google Drive in lots of different ways just to find uses to that cheap pricing on storage, but no! the new prices are 4X or more expensive than it used to be, and now its price is just on par with the cheapest of the pack, so why choose Google Drive? Not on storage price!

Its a Google App Engine all over again, they start with a really cheap price and then when people start using it they change the rules of the game, so if anyone is already deep down on Google Services and needs more storage, they will have to pay 4 times or more just to have THE SAME STORAGE THAT THEY USED TO HAVE! its ridiculous and in my opinion its another huge fail from Google.

But wait it gets worst, now with the new storage prices, Google Services have all different storage limits, like Gmail has 10GB, but Drive has only 5GB and Picasa has 1GB what? but Google+ Photos is unlimited, its ridiculous and besides making it more complicated it also kills the gmail “you never have to delete an e-mail ever again” popular slogan, cause now gmail storage stopped growing… thats just sad T_T so sad…

Oh Wow it kinda Sucks!

Ok so Google Drive is syncing to Google Docs, but…no not really, since your documents formatted with Google Docs wont sync, yeah thats right, they will only live only on the Google cloud, so when Google kills your account those files will be lost forever, nice file sync Google, its mostly one way… plus at least in my opinion, not supporting linux is just another silly mistake.

Also Google’s new “all services have the same terms of service” makes Google retaining/granting ownership or license of any material you upload, unlike competing syncing services, if you put something on Google, even if you delete it later on, Google still owns some rights to it, i know! its fucking embarrassing and ridiculous.

Oh chucks i quit!

So whats my take on this Drive… humm ill skip this one, it kinda just makes me dislike Google even more, the old Google ignored users, but this new Google just doesn’t respect its users, Google’s moto “dont be evil” is pretty close to becoming moot.

Cloudflare Review Part 2

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So a couple of months ago i did a test and review of Cloudflare, it was getting popular and i wanted to check it out, so why a second part? Well 2 reasons, first instead of using it for a week, now i’ve used it for a couple of months on a couple of my sites, so i have a better view of the service, second cause i still have a couple of gripes with Cloudflare but also some nice tips to share.

My Hits with Cloudflare!
So like i said i’ve been using Cloudflare for a while now and i would say, its still a hit and miss for me, but mostly a hit, even with hosting your DNS through Cloudflare (and therefore losing control of your DNS ), but to be honest, unless you are paying for the really good DNS hosting, Cloudflare’s DNS service is far superior, i know, cause i’ve used a lot of free and paid dns hosters and hosted my own and i checked it here, with just a couple of tweaks/added services their DNS could compete with the best.

Now in terms of site performance i would say its pretty spanky awesome, i’ve had sites that were literally hanging for dear life bashing the server and just by turning Cloudflare on, it not only relieved a lot of the stress on the server but also turned the site speed way up, that’s by far the best thing about it, how much performance and how easy their CDN/Proxying system is.


My Misses with Cloudflare
But there are still today a couple of gripes, the first and largest is with their security settings and their intermission publicity type of thing they do when they block a user, as far as feedback from my visitors, i would say 100% of my visitors freak out when they reach a site and they are greeted with the cloudflare “you might be infected”! its just a fact, they expect to see a site, it really doesn’t matter if they are infected, their network is bad or they have an unlucky ip, its just not standard web usage to go to a site and be greated with something else, it feels like a pop ad or intermission ad to force someone to do something, what sites like wiki-whatever.info/exclusive-experts.com (i made them up, but you know what kind of sites im talking about) do all the time while spamming Google, its a disaster in terms of usability and no type of customization will ever change my mind, people never expect a warning from a site, even Google disabled their “you might be infected” because people freaked out even if it was with the best of intentions.

There are also some misses with the “html,css,js…” optimizations, with external objects (javascript mostly), with search engines, 1 of my site was heavily penalized while switching to cloudflare (and yes turning it back after a week made it slowly return to normal, it was weird and it was reported to cloudflare staff), but 2 other saw a huge increase on traffic (I MEAN FREAKIN 400% more 300.000 users HUGE WAY!), probably due to getting faster, hehehe so again hit and miss.

What is the Cloudflare Structure?
Cloudflare seems to work a bit like this, they get datacenters on popular internet hubs around the world, popular in the sense that a lot of traffic goes through them, i would bet that altough they spend quite a bit on hardware, that they dont pay or pay very little for bandwith and do what most large providers do and have peering agreements, thats were the free cloudflare users come in, altough clouflare provides a free service they kinda need those users to have enough critical mass for these peering aggrements to be worthwhile for both parties, so altough we arent paying they need the free users, note that this isnt something evil, its awesome win-win for everyone.

The Economics of Cloudflare
How do they get paid! Humm i would say affiliates (through their detestable intermession security warning and through some of the plugins), and of course paid accounts, on this i wonder why they start the price at 20$, maybe they think most of their free users have only 1 site, and if they have more they only have to pay 5$ for each after that, well in my case at least for now its simply not economicaly viable to pay for clouflare pro, for 20$ a month you can buy yourself a whole lot of hosting, even with the added savings of a Pro account.

How do I use Cloudflare

  • Basic Security Level: Essentially Off (because the bonus of blocking potential bad users doesnt outweight the really horrible spammy intermission alert)
  • Caching Level: Aggressive
  • Minimim Expire TTL: 4hours (but adjust this to the update schedule of your site)
  • Auto Minify: JS=OFF CSS=ON HTML=ON (avoid the JS, until now it hasnt work in any of my sites and also makes Googles PageSpeed Apache Addon freakout)
  • Rocket Loader: OFF
  • Outbound Links: OFF
  • E-Mail Address Obfuscation: OFF
  • Server Side Exclude: OFF
  • Always Online: OFF (still a good feature, it only shows a bar on top saying that the site is currently offline, i just turn it off as a personal preference)
  • IP Geolocation: OFF
  • Browser Integrity Check: OFF
  • Hotlink Protection: OFF

Yeah i disable most of the features, dont get me wrong if you need it or its good for you, please turn it On, still the only feature i really cant live with is the Basic Security Level for the reasons i already ranted about hehehe, but hey, freaking thumbs up for Cloudflare its free and it works pretty damn good, my only real gripe is with the security warnings, i would prefer pure blocking than any kind of  warning, the more transparent and white-label the better and im really waiting for their announced new pricing scheme to see if i can get a few pro accounts for a couple of my sites, but even so Cloudflare isnt perfect, well damn if it isn’t pretty close.

Free Hosted DNS Review YAY… I think…

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So i got an e-mail from EveryDNS warning that they are moving on from the freemium model into the dyndns paid DNS (they were merged or acquired some time ago), that’s cool, i guess, i was only using them as backup DNS for Hostcult, since that domain runs pretty much all our hosting (so if it fails 90% of my sites start failing), before i was just using my domain registar DNS ( ResellerClub ) and they pretty much failed a lot on me over time (with glitches, maintenance, performance issues), so having a backup DNS was a pretty good idea, so with this e-mail from the now defunct EveryDNS, i think i have a opportunity to check my options (and in the process share them with you all).

So why not choose a professional/paid DNS? well if i don’t find a good alternative, them ill probably pay for it, but DNS is such a thing that 95% of the time im running it myself on each server, i only really need dns for off server domains or for my main hosting domain, so checking the free alternatives seems like the place to start, so i’m doing a showdown between: Hosted VS ResellerClub VS InternetBS VS NameCheap VS CloudNS VS Hurricane Electric VS PointHQ VS XName VS CloudFlare.

Added info for the tables:
Europe Avg: A 24 hour average from my computer in Europe.
Monitoring Avg: A weekly average from Pingdom DNS (From 2 locations in Europe and USA), 5min intervals.
Monitoring Spike: The worst performance for that week from Pingdom DNS (From 2 locations in Europe and USA), 5min intervals.
Uptime: If it was online or not.
Location: where the DNS server is.

Local DNS

Europe Avg Monitoring Avg Monitoring Spike Uptime Location
ns3.hostcult.com 170 129 419 100% USA, TX
ns4.hostcult.com 166.5 109 325 100% USA, TX

Notes: Running on Cpanel, Complete DNS functions.
Restrictions: None.
Comments: Well running your own DNS isn’t perfect but its simple and doable, the client when doing a DNS query will have a quicker time, connecting again to the site (since both are in the same place), also changes to DNS are done quicker, overall good if you are hosting the sites on the same place as the DNS, and not that important the reliability, since if the server is down, the DNS being up or down is irrelevant.

Branded ResellerClub DNS

Europe Avg Monitoring Avg Monitoring Spike Uptime Location
ns11.hostcult.com FAIL 112 301 100% USA, TX
ns12.hostcult.com FAIL 98 293 100% USA, TX
ns13.hostcult.com FAIL 105 283 100% USA, TX
ns14.hostcult.com FAIL 82 258 100% USA, TX

Notes: Didn’t get any response from my own tests >_<, Average Control Panel, Complete DNS functions.
Restrictions: Its only available for domains hosted there.
Comments: Humm ResellerClub is my main domain registrar, and my current main dns host, but like i said above and as you can see on the tests, ResellerClub leaves a lot to be desired, its average at best, normally not so good, it also doesn’t help that all of their servers are in the same place.

Un-Branded ResellerClub DNS

Europe Avg Monitoring Avg Monitoring Spike Uptime Location
mercury.orderbox-dns.com FAIL 93 275 100% USA, TX
venus.orderbox-dns.com FAIL 77 219 100% USA, TX
earth.orderbox-dns.com FAIL 88 212 100% USA, TX
mars.orderbox-dns.com FAIL 118 363 100% USA, TX

Notes: Didnt get any response from my own tests >_<, Average Control Panel, Complete DNS functions.
Restrictions: Its only available for domains hosted there.
Comments: Much like the Branded, the Un-Branded DNS is kinda slightly better, that makes it even more disappointing since i use the branded, ResellerClub is average at best, normally not so good, it doesn’t help as well that all their servers are in the same place.

InternetBS DNS

Europe Avg Monitoring Avg Monitoring Spike Uptime Location
ns-canada.topdns.com 175 88 245 100% Canada, QC
ns-usa.topdns.com 133.5 91 205 100% USA, NJ
ns-uk.topdns.com 109 74 176 100% USA, TX

Notes: Average control panel, Complete DNS Functions, although ns-uk has uk in the name, its actually hosted in USA, weird…
Restrictions: Its only available for domains hosted there.
Comments: Well InternetBS is also one of my domain registrars, and i can say im pleasantly surprised, even though my own test weren’t awesome, the weekly average shows that they perform pretty well, so kudos to InternetBS for a solid DNS Service.

Namecheap DNS

Europe Avg Monitoring Avg Monitoring Spike Uptime Location
freedns1.registrar-servers.com 95.5 78 200 100% FAIL
freedns2.registrar-servers.com 95.5 82 188 100% FAIL
freedns3.registrar-servers.com 178 72 187 100% Germany

Notes: Good Control Panel, Complete DNS Functions.
Restrictions: None.
Comments: My last and least used domain registrar was surprising, not only do they provide DNS services for free to anyone, but the performance was outstanding, they clearly know what they are doing, this is one of the best candidates to this point, excellent job.

CloudNS DNS

Europe Avg Monitoring Avg Monitoring Spike Uptime Location
ns1.cloudns.net 60 86 190 100% FAIL
ns2.cloudns.net 160.5 88 242 100% USA, TX
ns3.cloudns.net 112.5 72 233 100% Bulgaria

Notes: Good Control Panel, Complete DNS Functions.
Restrictions: Free for only 3 Domains.
Comments: Cloudns has a good panel and a pretty good DNS performance, even tough a bit weird, clearly their ns1 performs awesomely well, while the other 2 are a bit more weak, also hosting DNS in Bulgaria is just plain weird, you should keep DNS near major backbone transit facilities, that’s what i think.

Hurricane Electric DNS

Europe Avg Monitoring Avg Monitoring Spike Uptime Location
ns1.he.net 232.5 119 265 100% USA, CA
ns2.he.net 229 196 740 100% USA, CA
ns3.he.net 234 194 712 100% USA, CA

Notes: Average Control Panel, Complete DNS Functions.
Restrictions: None.
Comments: Hurricane is kinda horrible in everything, clearly putting all their DNS servers in their facilities in California, doesn’t help little old me half way across the world or anybody else for that matter.

PointHQ DNS (No Longer Recomended!)

Europe Avg Monitoring Avg Monitoring Spike Uptime Location
dns1.pointhq.com 63 111 242 100% FAIL
dns2.pointhq.com 133.5 110 238 100% FAIL
dns3.pointhq.com 228.5 92 210 100% FAIL
dns4.pointhq.com 63.5 96 225 100% FAIL
dns5.pointhq.com 67 73 186 100% FAIL

Notes: Good Control Panel, Complete DNS Functions.
Restrictions: Free for only 10 zones.
Comments: PointHQ has some servers closer, some server further away, still pretty good performance overall, but i wonder, normally a browser checks the first nameserver or it just chooses randomly, so you want a excellent first nameserver performance and then good performance from all the secondary ones, with PointHQ we don’t have that, if my browser checks dns3 im gonna have to wait 3 times more than if i was lucky and it choose dns4, so yeah, its ok i guess.
Update: Yeah its now fully paid! And they kinda screwed their users, so i would skip this one!

XName DNS

Europe Avg Monitoring Avg Monitoring Spike Uptime Location
ns0.xname.org 83 79 302 100% France, Paris
ns1.xname.org 69 106 336 100% France, Roubaix
ns2.xname.org 109.5 118 311 100% France, Villeneuve

Notes: Good Control Panel, Complete DNS functions.
Restrictions: None.
Comments: Xname has been around for some time, and it shows, in a good way, they have some great performance, and i find it even more remarkable because all their DNS is in France, but USA monitoring still was quick, that just shows that you don’t need to put DNS servers across the world to give good performance, good job.

CloudFlare DNS

Europe Avg Monitoring Avg Monitoring Spike Uptime Location
carl.ns.cloudflare.com 175.5 70 235 100% FAIL
sue.ns.cloudflare.com 178.5 65 173 100% FAIL
lady.ns.cloudflare.com 178 71 203 100% FAIL
todd.ns.cloudflare.com 176.5 93 245 100% FAIL

Notes: Basic Options, Lacks DNS Functions.
Restrictions: None.
Comments: What is cloudflare doing here? well cloudflare can also host you DNS, you can disable their CDN system, so basically you can use it as a pure DNS host, that’s why its here, so i have to say its weird, on my personal tests it goes from blazing fast 62 to 284 that’s why it has that average, also their system is probably a distributed one, as it doesn’t matter what dns server i point to, it will always reach the same place, probably they are leveraging their own CDN for their DNS hosting, and that’s a good thing, check the weekly average, that’s some impressive performance, with cloudns and namecheap with close results, probably cause all 3 are leveraging some sort of CDN cloud system as well, still it seems inconsistent at times and the lack of full DNS features, kinda kills it from the start, but still something to watch out for the future.


Conclusion
So what am i going to use, well most likely ill go with Namecheap and maybe Xname or Cloudns as backups, Namecheap clearly has a combination of full features and outstanding DNS performance, and also a namebrand you can trust with something as important as DNS.

As a sidenote, good job everyone, 100% UPTIME!!! YAY!!! (i include myself on this, so *pat pat* on the back) also i know this review is a bit unfair, DNS is more than these checks, and everyone can have a bad day, you just need a DDOS on one of the nameservers and bye bye average, also there are tons of providers missing, but i choose these ones according to popularity and namebrand, since that makes this choice of providers a bit more trustworthy, still i think this is a good broad view of them and good enough for me to make my choice.

Comparison of WordPress SEO Plugins

Tech 5 Comments

I’ve had my fair of problems and gripes with SEO on wordpress, especially with the “All in One SEO Pack” you can check it out Alternative to All in One SEO Pack ^_^

So that was like a year ago, nowadays there are loads of plugins that do what i want or part of what i want, however cause there is no point in testing 20 plugins, im narrowing it down, so for this review im choosing just plugins that have a minimum set of features that i need (like meta tags in the head, canonical urls,…), that have been updated recently (last 3 months), that aren’t on the first version (at least a couple of updates under the belt) and that have a control panel, also i’ve tested all these plugins for obvious misleading or security leaks, at this moment they have none that i can see (actually one has, sorry made this intro before the testing hehehe).

WordPress SEO by Yoast

  • Specs: 98kb zip / Average Rating on WordPress: 5 stars
  • Pros: its enable by default, nice detached admin page, explanations with loads of options, quite a few added features (like authentication for google webmasters or breadcrumbs, both nice but not necessary for SEO), import ability to several other SEO plugins.
  • Cons: inserts the most amount of junk on the site’s header including plugin version number than all the plugins in this list, quite a few irrelevant options/features.
  • Hummmm: Looking good, and it makes “All in One SEO Pack” look like amateur hour, it has almost the same amount of junk and promos but done nicely and cleanly, also its pretty well organized, if it wasn’t for all the junk inserted into your site’s header, it would have been a really high contender.

SEO Ultimate

  • Specs: 490kb zip / Average Rating on WordPress: 4 stars
  • Pros: huge amount of features (19 different modules), modular system (you can activate and deactivate features you want).
  • Cons: its not enable by default, some of these feature modules are just a one option affair, others offer features that are good for SEO research but that are not needed as a wordpress plugin (there are better tools and sites and ways to get that info), some modules seem incomplete, exploit scanner gave 3 severe warnings with SEO ultimate (obscured links and dropping tables).
  • Hummmm: wholy jesus, if gre’s high performance SEO is overkill, then SEO Ultimate is trying to live up to its name, by being ULTIMATE!!!! i would say that it could be a pretty nice companion to another seo plugin (by deactivating the modules with duplicate or irrelevant functions), still its the only one that gave security warnings, so with alternatives, i would stay away.

Greg’s High Performance SEO

  • Specs: 212kb zip / Average Rating on WordPress: 4.5 stars
  • Pros: simple, clear and very instructive admin page, loads of functions and explanations.
  • Cons: pub directly on your admin page (from pluginsponsors.com), complex to setup, and to be 100% efficient needs to be hardwired into the theme, its not enable by default.
  • Hummmm: high performance or not, this is a case of overload, SEO is just a small part of a website performance and its not even the most important by far, a site with no SEO but with high quality content, performance and promotion will always win, this plugin is too much, also tweaking too much of SEO might do more harm than good, this one if for the ubber tinkerers.

Platinum SEO Pack

  • Specs: 137kb zip / Average Rating on WordPress: 4 stars
  • Pros: enabled by default, basically same feature set as “All in one SEO Pack”, clean detached admin page, ability to migrate from “All in one SEO Pack”.
  • Cons: still some junk on the site header including plugin version number (still a bit less than “All in one SEO Pack”).
  • Hummmm: im impressed by not being impressed, platinum seo is basically “All in one SEO Pack” without the shitty stuff, sooo pretty good ^_^

SeoPress

  • Specs: 435kb zip / Average Rating on WordPress: 4 stars (taking from their previously name)
  • Pros: ahhhhh…
  • Cons: not enable by default, huge amount of pages, complicated and confusing as hell, lots of functions are not available, while having lots of links to the pro version.
  • Hummmm: this one is supposed to be good with buddypress and wordpress mu, but in hindsight i rather have no SEO than whatever this is, so no pros, only cons, actually the only SEO plugin in this pack that i would stay away like it was the black plague.

All In One SEO Pack

  • Specs: 176kb zip / Average Rating on WordPress: 4 stars / Most Popular SEO Pack
  • Pros: Loads of features, default selection of options is good.
  • Cons: Its not enabled by default, huge amounts of junk and links and banners on the admin page, weird options, inserts junk on the site’s header including plugin version number.
  • Hummmm: I used to like it, but i think with time “all in one seo pack” as degraded itself, you can promote other stuff and still keep yourself useful and practical, the main fold doesn’t even have any options its just pub and shit, also some of the options and functions are not that useful in SEO or even practical.



Conclusion and What are you going to use?

Hummm this one is a big thought, but i would say the clear winners and real all in one seo alternatives are  WordPress SEO by Yoast and Platinum SEO Pack, but for diferent reasons, if you want a clean, simple SEO option for WordPress i would go with Platinum SEO Pack, it has everything you need, but if you want a bit of an edge and more options and better understanding of the features, then i would go with WordPress SEO by Yoast.

S2R is officially moving all their WordPress Sites from All In One SEO Pack to Platinum SEO Pack, mostly cause i don’t need the extra features that WordPress SEO by Yoast offers and i don’t like the added junk that WordPress SEO by Yoast adds to the site header.

Domain Registrar Reviews and Comparison

Reviews 2 Comments

Well domains are an essential part of what makes the internet useful and easy to use, we really don’t need them, but our minds are generally not made to memorize big numbers like 145.234.211.841 (this is a ipv4 internet address, in the future with the introduction of ipv6 the numbers will be stranger and larger hehehe) so something like hostcult.com is way more simple to use and memorize (well secretly i wished icann would have made them even more simple, like just typing hostcult on the browser or hostcult.c).

Also brands wouldn’t be able to use the internet so well if, like if microsoft was 6427-7-38 (american phone keypad combination) instead of microsoft.com, so it makes sense to use domains, as the years gone by, i have used a series of different domain registrars to register all my domains, so here is a small resume of the domains registrars i use today and some of the ones i used (no point talking about registars that no longer exist, or that are not relevant today):

Godaddy
When: couple of years ago, about 10 domains.
Pros: pretty cheap at the time, still cheap today with coupons, pretty good feature set.
Cons: renewal fees are expensive, icann fees are billed separately (they always bill that as an extra while most domain hosts bill it as part of the overall price), confusing control panel, they keep offering/pushing their other services, they will cancel/suspend your domain at the slightest problem or dmca.


eNom
When: couple of years ago, about 5 domains.
Pros: cheap reseller, awesome control panel, pretty good pricing, reliable registrar, awesome support.
Cons: at the time, it was complicated to buy and put money inside of the account (you had to have money on your enom account so you could buy domains), also they weren’t the cheapest (even though now, they are one of the cheapest).


Onlinenic
When: couple of years ago, about 30 domains.
Pros: cheap reseller, average feature set.
Cons: convoluted payment system, lots of downtime, unreliable, horrible support, horrible control panel.


Namecheap
When: couple of years ago, about 5 domains.
Pros: large feature set, good control panel, good support, probably my recommendation if you have/want just a couple of domains, they are/were a enom reseller, so its a good platform anyways.
Cons: a bit pricey, still renewals are normally the same price as registration, so no hidden fees.


Domainsite
When: couple of years ago, about 5 domains.
Pros: simple and quick control panel, average pricing (even though i bought at the time with discount), interesting feature set, with unusual services, horrible support service.
Cons: renewals are way more expensive.


Moniker
When: couple of years ago, about 10 domains there.
Pros: cheap reseller, the best bulk registration i have ever seen, average feature set and control panel.
Cons: at the time it was being sold off or not, kinda weird things going on, so i moved on as a precaution, also because pricing is kinda average.


ResellerClub
When: today, around 150 domains there.
Pros: cheap reseller (the more you pay, the cheaper the price, because i pay a lot i have a pretty good pricing), reliable, average feature set and control panel, still they have been adding new stuff with time.
Cons: no automatic renewal system, every other month there are problems with they credit card processing company “transecute” (that i think they own or at least are very buddy with), support is average but normally takes a lot of time to get back to you


InternetBS
When: today, around 5 domains there.
Pros: cheap registrar, average feature set, average control panel, i tend to buy domains here if they are cheaper than on resellerclub and then transfer them over or not to resellercub.
Cons: none so far.

Notes:

  1. I buy a lot of domains, so my main concern is the price, features are not that important, since most of these can be had with a server to run the domains, so these registrars might be good for you or not.
  2. Also i have a couple of free domains from webhosts i still use, but i don’t recommend that, you want to keep your domains separate from your host for all the good reasons.
  3. I do have domains on other registrars, mostly domains that aren’t offered worldwide or that involve a lot of bureaucracy that some local registrars can deal better, like .pt/.de/.co.uk domains.
  4. Like i said some of these registrars i haven’t deal with in years, so they might have gotten better or not, take my “reviews” with a grain of salt.
  5. Cant believe i put Godday first!!!! seems their insane promotion and publicity is starting to work on me… well… NAAAAA heheheh

Apthost Hosting Review

Reviews

Well im doing reviews of host i’ve used, in this case it was Apthost Shared Hosting in mid 2009, sometimes when i finish a new site i decide to make a new account on a new host (cause they look good, or have a awesome promotion, and yes i know hosting promotions are more hype than substance, but you never know unless you try, thats why i continue to be a Dreamhost customer), so in this case i choose apthost, mostly because of their tag of being the best host for “FFmpeg”.

So lets get into the review, the setup and payment was quick and easy as expected, my account was activated, and like normal quick upload and everything is looking good, i also requested a transfer of another one of my sites but that was a fail apparently apthost staff hasn’t mastered transfer from cpanel to cpanel so i never did anyways, speed isnt awesome, but its all good, about a week later i noticed there were several error_log type files (some growing to multiple mb sizes) in a lot of the folders on the site, but the site seemed fine, when opening those, it was just standard log files with lots of weird errors (like page loads fine, but log reports errors from my ip anyways… weird), talked with support that dismissed it.

So like 3 weeks into it, the real problems started with multiple downtime’s and overall pretty lousy performance (strange how this tends to happen to this kind of hosts, probably when they finish filling up the server to the brim…), since the site was new i decided to put a “maintenance page” while i try and workout the issues, so then it starts a week of trouble tickets with support and it kinda gets silly, most of the replies are “Your site is coming up fine.Please check it from your end.” while the site is still down, also “It is being taken care of. I noticed that one of the techs did not show up, and left the monitoring of the server unattended, which caused to go into overload mode. It is coming back online in few minutes.” or the “the account has been suspended for 30 minutes in our node due your account is responsible for overloading the server, which is impacting overall performance in the node.”, so my site that wasnt even online is overloading the server… awesomeeee i kinda couldn’t believe it, i know it was probably and automated system of some-kind and because the server was in the shitter that probably went to everyone on the server, still funny though

So after a week of practical downtime, they announce that they are moving me to a new server, ok… ohhh but there was a problem and the new server is built from backups that are from Friday and not Monday, what? well at this time since i was still on my 40th day (45 day money back guarantee) i asked for a refund and that was awarded after about a week,

So a recap of my review of Apthost:

  • They aren’t a very good host overall, at least they don’t seem to have their shit together
  • Support is not very supportive, there is a lot of one liner copy+paste replies from support
  • I also don’t appreciate the 30min suspension for “overloading” (i would suspect a lot of people would hit that, in a more professional webhost they contact you ALWAYS before turning off your site)
  • Apparently their backup system sucks
  • They did follow trought with their moneyback guarantee
  • Setup was quick and easy

Review of Virpus VPS Hosting

Reviews 6 Comments

So this is my review of Virpus VPS Hosting, as a principle i only review hosting companies AFTER i’ve been with them, as well as i try and be to the point with my review and it shouldn’t be taken as a literal performance of the hosting company as a whole, just of my particular experience.

I was with Virpus for 5 months, and i signed with their unmanaged Advance package (so a mid to high end hosting package) with Directadmin, since the initial payment it took around 9 days to setup my account but after a contact with support they did apologised, they said that they had a huge surge of new customers and were a bit late on the setup as well as i was discounted for those days, so thats cool.

After the initial setup there were a couple of things that weren’t setup right, especially since there were extra notes fields when you first signed up to put that kind of added or just needed information for a correct setup, but those seemed to be ignored (not a huge deal, since a lot of vps companies do this, probably cause the people that make the setup don’t do any tinkering), so a few back and forth with support and everything is on track.

So the hosting comes with Directadmin hosting control panel, well its kinda a subpar hosting panel, but at least it has a low overhead (doesn’t consume a lot of resources), that and probably a new server (although with not so new hardware) meant performance wise, the vps was quick and the first site i transferred over was indeed almost 2 seconds faster than on the other vps it was on.

After about a month later i transferred another site over, still the performance of both sites was pretty good, this lasted for 2 and a half months, since then i started having some downtime, for some apparently unknown reasons, others were to DDOS or Server Problems, so i had about 5 fairly large periods of downtime in the first 4 months, however in the last month i started having daily mini periods of downtime, i know i know, it can be a problem on my vps, but the vps was stable and apache has like 20 days of uptime i was using barely half the resources on the vps as well as the downtime was at random times, but still the sites started to drop off the internet for 5 or 10 minutes at a time (i use 3 different site monitoring services), i contacted support and nothing but excuses but nothing is done, so i moved one of my sites back to another vps, but the downtime continued for 2 more weeks, then again i contacted support and i was said they were going to scale this to management, i waited one more week and since i wasn’t contacted by support or management and the trouble ticket in question was closed, i moved the last site to another new vps.

So like i always do, i go and read the terms of service (to see their cancellation policy and if i had to pay anything extra, but no, i was within my time to cancel and not have to pay anything) and so i asked for a cancellation, after that i didn’t heard anything from support, not a “we have canceled your account” or anything (if my e-mail account or virpus account was hacked it seems it would be quick and easy to burn my vps), but what comes next wasn’t that nice, although my due date for payment was more than a week from that time, after i canceled they immediately tried to make a payment to my credit card, as well as tried several more times the following week (i was lucky that the reason i didn’t wait 1 or 2 more months with virpus, to see if the service would get better, was that i had to renew my credit card and i didn’t feel like adding my new one to virpus…), so to sum it up my review of virpus:

Good Points:

  • Pretty Cheap VPS Hosting
  • Good Enough Support for Technical Questions
  • Average Performance (was good at first but then it kinda when to normal+downtime)

Bad Points:

  • Cheap Hardware
  • Downtime (my threshold for downtime is about 2 per month, that is to be expected from upgrades to random problems, more than that, its totally unacceptable)
  • Bad Support Followup (they told me at least 3 times that they would check and get back to me, of course they never did)
  • Unethical Cancellation Procedure (tried to charge my credit card without reason after cancellation)

So i would say that i would recommend virpus to anyone that wanted a cheap vps for hosting anything that wasn’t priority (hosting files, cache, image galleries, backups), it was quick and overall the downtime wasn’t that bad (a month with about 20 downtime windows of about 5 to 15minutes each is bad for a active site, but not that terrible for file hosting or something like that, its still about 90% uptime), but i can’t recommend them cause they did try and charge my credit card when they didn’t have any reason to do it (for some companies you do have to pay something before you leave), so if you read this, there are way better and cheaper hosting companies on the web, so stay away from virpus.

Update: So a week as gone by and im still getting the “Invoice is Due” and that i should log in to my account and pay, nice ^_^ but since they closed my server and then closed my account, so even if i wanted to pay i was out, a little more of this and ill just consider it spam/phishing and start flagging them all as such.

Social Network Software Elgg Review

Reviews 2 Comments

Yep, i’ve used Elgg social network software on 2 experiments, one live, another offline, both times, with versions 1.1, 1.2 and the new version 1.5, both times the software was lacking for my own needs as well as my users (i’ll explain the good things and bad things bellow), most of all it seems to be a software directed to a specific view of what a social network software should be, more than being an all round software… more times than none, it mimics in some way the features found in facebook and/or myspace, instead of giving what i would think that small to midsize social networks need. Also i don’t think most of the things Elgg lacks are core features, no but they are plugins that should have been developed by the creators and not users, since i totally agree with they’r notion of a platform core + plugins for functions, one of the things i was most impressed with Elgg.

This is a combined List from 1.1 to 1.5 (i know some things were improved and are now much better on 1.5, but in my view are still not ideal):

Awesome Features

  • True Plug and Play System (The core can always be updated, cause both themes and plugins are totally unrelated with the core), similar to wordpress and in my view the only way to create software that is meant to be augmented.
  • Basic Essential Social Network Features (User Profiles,Friends,Activity…).
  • Security and Protection of users Privacy in mind.
  • Even with more than 1000+ users, it seems to not be such a burden on the system and flows pretty well (i’ve seen SMF or Phpbb start crawling with the same load).

Not so Awesome Features

  • Serious lack of communication from the developers (reason for me to not use the software anymore in any live site)
  • No Central Forum System / Advanced Message Board.
  • No Picture / Video Gallery System (the file system is just a very basic form of picture/video gallery).
  • Authentication and OpenId still don’t work perfectly, several users constantly reporting problems and logouts, on a system were you should login once and never again.
  • Several features are a little barebone (like blogging, files, pages, messageboards)

The results of using Elgg even with 1.5 is very little user engagement, even with high traffic flowing to the site, most users would register and then leave and never come back, mostly cause they dont have a central place (forum, video or picture galleries….) to find friends on the site (unlike facebook where you bring friends from the outside), while the same site now with SMF with very little extra functions (embeding and picture posting enabled) has in a very short time become a very active main forum with 4 times more page views and several times more engagement and time on site.

Also their upcoming Elgg hosted solution doesn’t give me much confidence, more on their communication with the community than on the platform, we will see, if they do improve, i’m sure i’ll change my mind, still awesome platform, poor functions ^_^