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     Although the offer is indeed legitimate, there is one hidden fee that I did not know about until canceling the account. I took advantage of Siteground's offer a year ago that allowed me to host a site for a full year at the price of hosting for a single month. Domain name registration was included at no extra charge. It was an experimental site and I seldom checked it, but I never noticed any hosting problems. I had another account on Siteground which I used for several years with minimal issues, and I assume that there would not be any lesser quality for the discounted hosting. I received a message from Siteground today, which informed me that my hosting would be automatically renewed 15 days prior to expiration on January 11. This yielded two surprises. The first is that this would make my hosting period actually 13 months instead of 12, because I originally registered on December 12 of last year. The second surprise is that they will be charging me $14.95 for domain name registration, which was originally free. Wikileaks was hosted on an AWS EC2 webserver, but that hosting has been terminated by Amazon. According to their terms and conditions, Amazon reserves the right to: "refuse service, terminate accounts, remove or edit content in its sole discretion" This is truly disturbing. I had been planning to transition all of my sites to AWS EC2 hosting, but now that requires some reconsideration. I believe this may be the first time I needed to issue a support ticket at Webfaction. I have been hosting sites with them since April without any problems. The server went down tonight. A technician responded 4 minutes after I issued the support ticket and the issue was fixed 5 minutes later. This is currently the fastest response time that I have witnessed. Adding domains via the CPanel system takes an incredibly long time. I estimate that the average is around 5 minutes. This is FAR longer than on any other host I have ever used. Typical times are around 10 to 15 seconds. I originally considered this to just be a minor inconvenience, but I encountered a new problem today which is related to this. The page loading timed out while I was trying to add a domain. After several unsuccessful attempts to reload the page, I logged out and back in. I found the add-on domain listed, but it did not have a document root associated with it. The worst part is that I could neither delete the domain nor add it again. It also did not show in the list of subdomains when I checked in the WebHost Manager. I was hesitant to open a support ticket, because I had problems with that last time. They still never responded to the last support ticket, and several days have already elapsed. The add-on domain eventually vanished by itself, but I am still unable to add it, because the process times out. I will attempt the support live chat later. I had a problem with DNS settings for a new site that I decided to host on Hostgator. I had opened a reseller hosting account with them three days ago. DNS settings seemed right to me, but instead of my new site loading, I got searchportal.information.com. I panicked a bit, because I read a number of forum posts about this problem. There seemed to be some speculation regarding hacking, but that didn't seem quite right to me, because this problem seems to be ongoing, and the earliest posts about this were from 2006. It seemed unlikely that they would leave a security vulnerability of this magnitude unresolved for so many years. Also, the searchportal site seemed like the type of domain parking site that would typically be used as a substitute for a 404 error. The solution was fairly simple. I had failed to realize that more than one IP address was available for the users on my reseller account. I had mistakenly set up the A record with the IP address that they gave me in the welcome email, but it wasn't the correct one for the user account that I was using for the site. I was the sole real user, but I set up different user accounts to better organize the different groups of sites that I was hosting. I fixed the problem myself after I realized the issue. However, I am still troubled that technical support never replied to my request for help. Nearly four hours have elapsed since I opened the support ticket. It remains officially still open and no technician has replied. The use of .htaccess is deprecated in Apache2, but there are some situations in which it is still the best or only option. If you are on a shared server and want SEO URLs, it's the only option. If you are transitioning from a shared sever to a dedicated one, you may want to continue using .htacess, at least temporarily, to ease in the transition process. Enabling .htaccess involves two part: 1) Edit the site definition file. There should be a section that contains the following text: AllowOverride None Change that to AllowOverride All If you test out your site before proceeding to step 2, you will get a 500 server error. This is normal and should not be cause for panic. 2) Add the rewrite module to the enabled modules. This can be accomplished with the following code from a terminal: sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/rewrite.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/rewrite.load Restart apache: sudo apache2ctl restart If your site is hosted on a Debian/Ubuntu server using Apache, you may encounter 404 errors when attempting to use a Javascript directory. You may try to remedy the problem by verifying via ftp or ssh that a javascript directory has actually been created properly and that all permissions are set correctly (e.g. chmod 755, chown), but that is not likely to fix it. This is the consequence of an alias that exists by default which points to "/usr/share/javascript/". To fix the problem, edit a file named "javascript-common.conf" which is located at "/etc/apache2/conf.d/". Modify the following line: Alias /javascript /usr/share/javascript/Change "/javascript" to some other name that doesn't interfere with the directory structure of your site or remove the alias completely if you don't need it. |  |
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