Chris Northcott

A word of warning: Don’t go anywhere near Craig Dilks’ click-hosting.co.uk sham. The guy runs Plesk on a wayyy underspecced VPS (!) and does one hell of a shoddy job of it. (Elaboration: ports were open all over the shop, system load of 26.0 averaged over a day or so, lord knows how many network IOs but netstat filled my terminal buffer.)

Not only that, I suspect due to non-payment of bills, the whole outfit has dissapeared off the Internet, doing away with my entire posting history since 2007. So I’ve had to start all over again, with Allys as editor and general post-motivator.

I’ve taken this opportunity to update the somewhat dated theme (originally made on an ancient K6 laptop with Paint and Notepad) to a striking (but simple) green/orange noise gradient theme using 960.gs. It really does take a lot of the layout work, and I intend to post a tutorial on using the 960 Grid System at some future point in time. The original CSS for the template was less than 60 lines long, although it has expanded a bit since adding necessary WordPress additions that I didn’t account for.

I have also moved the hosting over to Amazon EC2. Whilst there’s a moral question mark hanging over moving my hosting on Wikileaks’ old home, it doesn’t bother me that much, and I suppose they really should have been hosting on their own dedicated server anyway with a provider like prq.to, who hosts The Pirate Bay among others.. It is just like having a full featured free VPS (as long as you stick to the t1.micro tier) with infinite expandability as your site gets bigger, and it comes complete with a CDN. The only thing I do lament is that S3 should have an FTP interface, or the WordPress Total Cache plugin should have S3 support. Either of the two would do me just fine.

Not planning on doing something like large-scale hosting on it, though.

In other news, we’re currently in the process of getting home broadband with Telefonica O2, bagging one hell of a deal.  Initially, we were going to have to pay for a £43 line connection charge, on top of £12.50 line rental and an additional £12.50 a month for broadband. Being an existing O2 customer, we got the first 3 months broadband free of charge. Buying the router up-front (normally £50 but half-price on a promotion) got the whole price for the router deducted off the first bill. So a bill that was initially going to be £65.50 is now £15.50, essentially waiving most of the reconnection charge.

And being on Be’s network, we get their expertise, decent support and network reliability thrown into the deal. The only issue is the notoriously unreliable stock router, which will be replaced at a later date.

I’m waiting until all my other sites are back up and running before putting my portfolio on here, otherwise there’s quite a few gaps which is less than ideal. This might take a week or two.