shakes

stupid things really ... i do a lot of 'playing' with different things and find myself often wanting to do something like a recursive delete fo an entire directory. or i have all my subdomains feed from the same images and include folder so I make symbolic links in their directory so I can still reference the files (especially images) with a relative url. It's handy with images because then I don't have to use full URLs when I code (cause that screws me up on my local dev box) honestly i might could have done without shell ... especially since support here is so darn responsive. but there's another part of the story i left out. I was kinda disapointed with the response I got from my request to keep shell during my account upgrade. In my opinion, if they were going to say I couldn't keep my shell access, I expected them to come back with some sort of offer to win my business regardless of the fact that one of my stipulations couldn't be met. i.e. saying something like "we can't re-grant you access to shell after to server move because of a b and c ... but instead let us offer you blah" ... blah could have been a free month ... a free pizza ... or a smilie that looked like me. I mean, I was wanting to upgrade my plan, and as a result, give TCH more money. So if one of my requests couldn't be met I just expected these guys to put forth some effort to win my business despite my unfilfilled request. Instead, I just got a "sorry we can't do that" e-mail ... twice. It wasn't rude or anything, but there was no attempt to try to get me to upgrade anyway. Just seemed a little out of character for these guys since they generally seem to jump through hoops for their customers. So what was I to do? Say "ok, my request isn't being fulfilled, and you didn't try to show me you still wanted my upgraded business anyway ... so what the heck, let's go for it" ?? Anyone who's reading this and thinking about signing up ... by all means please do! don't take this as a "TCH" sucks post. The people here really are great and will do almost anything to make you happy here... I guess I just hit the wrong issue and had bad luck.

yes indeed the reseller account is a great deal! it was going to be especially good for me beacuse just ONE of my other sites was costing me $30 a month. I was going to be able to consolidate all of my sites to one host at $30 a month. definately a good thing for anyone who needs more than one domain per site. but again, the shell access deal killed it for me.

I signed up with TCH about a month ago. I was skeptical at first ... i mean what decent hosting company offers hosting plans for as cheap as $4 a month with tha specs these guys have? Here's my experience of the last month: The Pros Overall, this place is just awesome. The servers are super fast. I used to have problems doing large transfers to and from my old host because the servers were so effing slow. I couldn't believe how fast and responsive the tch servers were. Support is top notch. Before tch, I had never seen a company offer their AIM names for support. What's even better, is that generally about 3-5 of these guys are online. Tickets with my old host used to take 24 hours before I'd hear back. These guys are slacking if it goes 24 minutes! And then there's the forums. Few companies are doing this, and none as well as tch. (although we still don't know who won the free computer!) Not only are the tch staff great about caring to the forums, but the other customers are here all the time. And they do more than just tell you to search for your answer, no matter how redundant your question may be. Options and more options. Man this place has got it all. Anything you need for your site is either at your fingertips, or chances are these guys will install it for you. for once you actually get more than you pay for. tch is where it's at. The Cons It's a short list, but there are a few things that bug me. One is no support for add-on domains. Many people have more than one domain that go to sub sections of the same site that are all about the same topic/company. TCH doesn't allow this (from what I know) because you aren't allowed to host more than one site from your account, and i guess it's not easy to 'police' this and make sure no one is abusing the add-on domains. Still... it's nice to have (even as a 1 time add-on fee) ... so it's a con. The next issue is no shell access. It used to be offered as an add on, but now not at all. I understand the reasoning here ... big security risk, but guys like me just have to have it or we feel naked. I was lucky enough to get in on the shell access about a week before it was disallowed. unfortunately, when requesting to upgrade to a reseller account, i was denied the request to keep the shell access i already had. and such is why I am canceling my account soon. I want a reseller account but need shell. so gotta go elsewhere Overall, this place rocks. I think 80%+ of the people who are looking for a company to host there site with would be ecstatic about this place. if you're debating signing up ... do it! you won't be sorry! (unless you absolutely require shell access or add-on domains) it's been real guys ... take it easy!

used to use blogger ... still good as it was one of the first good ones... but now i use movable type. i switched because i wanted something that was hosted on my own server. mt rocks.

honestly ... as long as zonealarm is blocking the requests i wouldn't worry about it. Unless you can prove these are malicious, you can't do anything about it. from my experiences zone alarm is pretty solid and keeps most things out.

should have guessed it was dial up with "dialsprint.net" anyway ... yeah it's excessive ... but what I'm saying is it could be some kid with a cable modem and some application running that scans the network for open machines that he can get any information from. In which case it will try over and over again. or it could be someone with the welchia virus broadcasting traffic trying to spread. does zonealarm give you a port number?

you've probably got enough response already but i'll add in my .02 ... i've been a customer for about a month now and every expectation I've had has been beaten. The few times i've opened a ticket they've been closed within an hour ... a number of other times I've just shot these guys an IM and had my answer 30 seconds later. support is top notch ... servers are super fast ... and what other hosting company offerss a forum? and to top it all off ... this place is dirt cheap. I actually almost didn't sign up because the plan was so cheap I couldn't believe I would get good service for that little. Well I did sign up, and I've gotten better service here than any other provider I've had. Give em $5 for a month and try it out. If you really don't like it ... and really miss your $5 you can get it back.

are you using sprint for your ISP? genereally ISPs will assign dynamic dns names to you when you connect. So anything from your isp will have something.dialsprint.net ... that's why it shows up in cpanel as your connection. as for the entries in zone alarm ... it could be people probing the network for open PCs ... as long as zone alarm is stopping the requests there's no problem... although in my opinion you should be behind a broadband router anyway (assuming you have dsl or cable)... too much at risk when your machine is dangling directly off your net connection.

your "template with variables" option could be done with PHP. I can tell you, though, that making something like a photo album (and making it good) will take many coding hours. I would check out some pre-exisiting programs. gallery is a good one a lot of people use ... pretty easy to set up. http://gallery.sourceforge.net you can see what it looks like running at my gallery another one is called ... coppermine? http://coppermine.sourceforge.net/ this one uses mysql and whatnot. I've been thinking abou switching but i need to play with it more to see if i like it.

my best gues is you want none of the above. The only reason you would want a 'server model' would be if you're building a dynamic site with one of those languages. as far as I know, asp and cold fusion don't work on TCH (don't know about jsp). like dennis said, those are all different languages for coding dynamic sites. they work together with HTML. HTML alone provides static content to users ... mix one of these languaegs and you can serve up dynamic information based on a user's actions (or whatever else for that matter) a quick run down: ASP - Microsoft product. i don't think anything else needs to be said there. A lot of people use it but it's usually because either they don't know better, it's a business that thinks it has to use M$, or they have no soul. JSP - Java based scripting language. from what I understand, JSP pages are precompiled and therefore execute faster? But I think there's a good bit of investing that has to go into using jsp (I haven't researched this much) CFM - A macromedia product that runs off of Cold Fusion server. I dont' know much abuot this one either ... i hear it's expensive but powerful. PHP - A web scripting language created and maintained by the open source community. totally free. absolutely awesome. it really is just as good, if not better, than ASP. If you want to do dynamic pages, this is the place to start. There's a ton of books and online resources available. hope that cleared some things up.

perhaps i was a bit harsh ... I have problems with any wysiwyg editor as they don't encourage people to understand the code and keep their code clean. I also had issues using dw (i tried once because a friend swore it was awesome) and i had issues because all of my pages are static and consist of many includes. then again maybe I just didn't spend enough time tinkering to set it up properly. either way to me it's just better if you hack at the source and really understand what's going on. i'll cut dw some slack though becuase from what I saw of it, it did look pretty darn powerful (i'll never give front page any credit tho)

I use (and have for many years) Homesite. Formerly by Allaire, then Macromedia bought it and burried it. It's still a great program but they've stopped development of it. from what I understand you can still get it if you buy that 'web-authoring-for-dummies' preogram dreamweaver.

i don't know anything about inivision ... but any bb that uses mysql, at the very least you'll be able to write a custom query to query the db for the most recent posts...

IE is hardly a web browser ... let alone an FTP prog

what is the difference between mozilla firebird and the normal mozilla browser? i've been trying to figure this out but haven't felt like downloading firebird.