I’ve successfully moved all of my websites over to Surpass Hosting. Why you ask? Well, I got fed up with Network Solutions Customer Support system and the apparent ineptness within their Technical Support department when it comes to Web Hosting. It took around two weeks to get them to fix the time one of their shared hosting servers, which it should have only taken 5 minutes to correct after first contact with them. I don’t think they even understood how their shared hosting worked. They didn’t seem to grasp the fact that whenever a script runs, it has the potential to be executed on one of many “servers”. Just running a script with phpinfo() output would show that it was running under different systems (different system names and IP addresses) and one of them had the wrong time. I even told them what system name and IP address to check. As a domain registrar they are fine, but web hosting…. uhm no. I also think they outsource their tech support to call centers in India outside of normal business hours. All I know is, I spoke with several folks that I had problems understanding that had an Indian type accent. I am sure they are all smart folks trying their best, I just have trouble understanding them is all. Anyway, so far I am quite happy with Surpass Hosting at the moment for the following reasons:
- Much better system performance. On average I think their systems execute my scripts ten times faster.
- Much better and more stable tracert paths to them (9 hops vs 17 hops)
- Much better Control Panel with more features
- Better website statistics that keep the stats of my different domains separate. Network Solutions combined it all.
- The Customer Support mechanism is much better with their Helpdesk/Ticket system. The response times have been very good with the two issues I have raised. Both of my issues were resolved within hours, not days.
Looks like my modifications to the Guestbook have been successful. Nothing has made it through that shouldn’t. I also never received any spam into the email account I made up. I use a javascript trick to display email addresses on the page. Many of the attempted entries have also been thwarted by no longer using a guestbook.pl script. Stupid bots anyway.. they just go around trying to run /cgi-bin/guestbook.pl at any domain they come across. Probably because Matt Wright’s guestbook script is one of the most prevalent ones.
I am also thinking of redesigning my website to not use frames. If all I had was the menu on the left, it would be real simple. My embedded media player which I intend to keep kind of throws a wrench into it because if you click on a link, it would cause the media player to reload as well and either stop playing or play another random song instead of just keep playing the current one like it does now because its window contents stay unchanged while navigating the site currently. I might take a look at IFRAMEs. A pop-up type window wouldn’t really work because pop-up blockers would block it on initial page load. I may have to use that method anyway. Hmmm… Need to change the Pelicar site to be non-frame as well. That’s easier since it just has a menu on the left. But, it has a lot of pages I’ve have to change. Hrmm..
