So…. we had a nasty bit of downtime today. It’s seems the datacenter lost power and the backups only lasted so long 
We’ll be credited of course, but downtime still sucks. You don’t realize how important email is until you get to it. Thank god for my Tivo, otherwise I’d be totally bored sometimes. The Home Media option (that I paid for a few months ago) is no longer optionally, it’s standard. I’ve got work tomorrow, so I’m off to bed.
Monthly Archive for June, 2004
There! I found it at last. I’ve been looking for the feature on our FamilyTalk plan that’s outdated/cheaper now/redundant. I found it after some time looking over this confusing plan overview. We currently pay $9.99 for 5000 Mobile to Mobile minutes on two lines. You can get a 1000 Shared Mobile to Mobile feature added (all lines draw from that 1000 minutes of Mobile to Mobile) for $9.99. That would eliminate the one $9.99 charge. I can now drop my $2.99 100 text message feature and change it to a bundle with 250 text messages, 50 picture messages, and 1MB of data. I wanted to add more text messages since I get informed of when my dedicated server does something important, since text message overages are killer, but they only offered 100 and 750 (@ $9.99) packages. I get what I want of the bundle and save a few dollars, plus a few nice features (Adam, you get free picture message receiving 
)
What I really can’t stand is how much of a mess our plan looks like. On my mom’s part, she pays for two things that my brother gets for free. On my phone, I pay for two things my brother gets for free as well, but I get Unlimited Mobile to Mobile for free while my mom and brother pay $9.99 each for 5000 Mobile to Mobile minutes. I also love the $2.25 per line of hidden fees that they don’t include in how much you pay per month when you price out a plan. It took me 25 minutes to figure this out since you can’t look at what every phone pays for at once. It obfuscates figuring out what the heck everyone pays for. How frustrating
It’s 67° F outside and it’s 80° F in here with the fan on medium and my G5 off. The fact that’s it’s 4 AM and I have a headache doesn’t help. Arghhhh
Wow. I’m simply amazed at how fast my PHP pages render. PHP pages are dynamic and the server has to think about them before they are sent, unlike HTML where it just sends the page to the user. MovableType moves quite fast too, partially since MySQL is done locally. The biggest thing is also that there are only 5 people on the server, and none of us have highly active sites, so the server has an extremely low load. In terms of bandwidth, we’re doing a lot better than I thought. I’m going to run the UT2K4 game server much sooner than I thought, since bandwidth is much less of a concern. Joe’s got the current PHP installed (4.3.7). We’ve both gone on a Perl module spree. We’ve just got Image::Magick left, and that shouldn’t take too long to do. Adam and I have to redo our contact pages, but there are scripts for that thru CPanel. My week in review: Tivo, new server, work. I need to see a movie this week.
Well Joe and I have been looking at dedicated hosting for awhile, but our timing and it’s prices have been a deterrent. The biggest thing that that has kept us from it has been our need of a Control Panel, a way of administering everything without acting like total nerds. They’re not a cheap feature to add ($20/month). We’ll still be total nerds in doing a lot of stuff though, so don’t worry. We also are using a company which includes managed services in the plans (OS and Security Patches == Thank God) does a deal every week where they give something away for free. This week is free control panels. The stars must be aligned just perfectly, it’s right after a period of income for both Joe and I. The only expensive part is the setup fee. And it’s not really expensive considering a few things. There’s a really low setup, but it comes with a high monthly rate vs what we’re doing with a high setup free but a low monthly. When I worked it out, in about 10 months we start saving money. The fun things I get to look forward to are
- Current versions of Perl and ImageMagick
- Perl Modules installed when I want them
- Encrypted Password and Data Transport (Sue me, I’m paranoid in this day and age)
- Game Server (won’t be doing that too often, especially at Tech
) - Fast
- 1.2 Terabytes of Bandwidth (about 1230 Gigabytes for the MP3 generation)
I won’t be moving right away (bellmor.com that is), I’ll be setting everything up with bellmor.net getting any kinks worked out. Joe will probably do the same with zollo.net. This is definitely going to be interesting.