miner2049er

After finding my website (on server 302) inaccessible, almost a week ago, last Saturday Jan 13, I tried to access the server status page: http://www.tchstatus.com/monitoring/status.html and I got a 404 "The requested URL /monitoring/status.html was not found on this server." I emailed TCH support about this, and in the reply I got back from Tom Duncan I was told: "We apologize for the confusion caused by the inactive page. We shall remove it as soon as possible." Today Friday Jan 19, after a week of website outages (almost twice a day for about an hour at a time) that bad link is still showing. In a subsequent email last weekend I was told, by Alex Spaford in Tech Support, to use this convoluted URL to check on server status: http://64.92.162.226:8082/pubgrp?uid=5D923...amp;showicons=1 That does not show the status of server 302. So my questions... (1) Why was I told the bad URL was going to be retired, and it wasn't? (2) How do I check on the current status of server 302? (3) Why does server 302 continue to have down-time, as it has done all this week?

Aha! Everything returned was the same, except for [HTTP_HOST] which gave me either simobile.com or foothillsforum.com, depending on what I had entered in the address bar. Thanks to everyone for all your replies. Cheers, Miner2049er.

I'm hosted by TCH on a shared server, and currently I have my domain name simobile.com parked on top of foothillsforum.com Is there any way I can detect through code in my index.php file that someone had got there by typing in simobile.com rather than foothillsforum.com, or can I never detect? Currently in my PHP code, all I ever get returned to me in variables such as $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] is foothillsforum.com - I want to know if somebody had used simobile.com to get to the site. In the address bar pages do show up as either www.simobile.com/blahblah or www.foothillsforum.com/blahblah depending on what was used. Thanks for any any advice!

(1) Is there way to automate (maybe with cron) the backup of: ( a ) an individual database? ( b ) all my databases into one file? (2) where do these go in my server space / or best place for them? (3) With my server-visitor logs, they are stored as monthly logs in home/logs, correct? (4) When they are stored monthly, is there a clean cutoff at a certain time? i.e.. one log ends on last day of month at 11:59PM and 59 seconds, the next log starts on first day of next month at 12:00AM and 0 seconds? (5) What's the best strategy for saving/viewing my server-visitor) logs? So that I can refer to them in the future, locally on my office PC, and not keep them stored on the server?

Some questions... (1) I am starting up a website, and have secured the domain name with Yahoo domains. In fact, I have secured in total four slight variations of the domain name - the primary one, say for example smokey.com, plus three other similar names - smokie.com, smoky.com and smokee.com. I wish to start a reseller account to host these, but want all domains to just end up sending visitors to the primary one, no matter what variation they entered. When I click on the TCH "Buy Now" option I get the following: Select a domain option: o I will use My Existing Domain and update My Nameservers only. Please enter a valid domain name. Existing Domain: [ ] - [ ] Continue >> What should I enter here? (2) Over at the Yahoo, I noticed they have help pages for the following settings: A and CNAME Records MX Records Name Servers but any quick tips would be appreciated on what I should enter to point all four domains to TCH. (3) What about email being sent to any one of these four name variations? Say I published a contact email as support@smokey.com, but someone sent an email to support@smoky.com. Can I get all mail routed into a single "server-side-inbox", or would I have to pull via POP3 from four different places? (4) Regarding the analysis of the page access logs - can I get all accesses (for all four name variations) sent to a single log file, or would I have to combine four separate files? (5) If a visitor had entered one of the three variations, rather than the main name, I may want to display a splash page saying something like: you entered smokee.com for future reference the correct website name is smokey.com *** site Is the display of such a page something that can be handled outside of my code? (i.e. by the web server.) Or would my code, say index.php, be able to detect what had been typed in by looking at some sort of PHP environment variable? (6) Any other important things I should be considering regarding this "four-into-one" situation? (7) I also have a personal website, not connected with those previously mentioned, and also wish to have that hosted on TCH inside this reseller account. How would that be added? Thanks in advance for any replies (and if you could indicate the correspondening question number alongside, that would be great.) Cheers, Miner2049er.

I found the answer to (Q3) at: https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=35 though they obviously won't disclose details about how their proprietary click analysis technology works.

I’m a PHP / MySQL web developer, and planning a site where businesses pay me when site visitors click on their entry in a directory (which takes the site visitor to a detailed business description etc.) (Q1) What I want to know are there any methods available to me to count genuine clicks, and to reject automated/multiple clicks, say from unscrupulous competitors. This is in order to present affidavits to merchants, which give an accurate total of the amount of people who clicked on them. Is there anything on the server side that can authenticate these clicks, in ADDITION to my script just storing a time/date, IP address, and incrementing a database counter etc. when a link is clicked? i.e. my database entries could be forged, and I want to know if any third-parties can be involved in logging clicks. (Q2) Also, are there any other other additional (legal) documentation I should present to my customers, stating such things as: "This document represents a true and accurate total of clicks made, for the period Jan 01, 2005 12:00AM PST - Jan 31, 2005 11:59PM PST" which is then signed and dated? (Q3) Where might I find Google's position/statement for the "authenticity of clicks" made on their AdWords? Thanks in advance for any replies. Miner2049er.

Thanks for the reply. I'm currently on a shared server - and will be monitoring traffic closely to see whether it necessitates jumping ship to a less-restricted environment. And what's the difference between semi-dedicated and dedicated? A quick Google search just now wasn't very enlightening. Have a good weekend!

I'm just putting the finishing touches to my website, which as one of its elements involves subscribers signing up. The site has a client-side of HTML, CSS and Javascript, with server-side PHP and MySQL. Here’s a miscellany of questions - especially directed to those who have created such a website (that signs up people), or know of someone who has. (1) The overall experience. After launch of your site, how did the reality compare with the expectation, and what issues, if any, came to light only after you went live? Did things appear suddenly, or did they creep up on you over a few days/weeks? (2) Load testing. I’m particularly interested in hearing tales from those who had a flood of visitors in a short amount of time, and how their site coped. There are various stories over the years of websites grinding to a halt – such as FriendsReunited.co.uk and Ebay.com - due to an influx of visitors or shaky architecture. Did you do any load testing before launch – seeing how the site would cope with multiple users accessing the site simultaneously - either using techniques/applications of your own, or external applications to simulate the users? If yes, what sort of things did you do/use? (3) Error reporting. How does your live website store and report errors back to you – by email, log file and/or SMS alerts? If errors do occur, what if anything, gets displayed on your site to users? (4) Prevention. Do you have any sort of early-warning system in place to alert you of any potential upcoming problems – such as exceeding bandwidth, or other resources such as CPU usage? (5) Site Updates. When updating your code and/or database, do you shut the site down and have it show "Under Maintenance" - or do you have some other scheme – such as rotating sites, or live updates with table locks - to allow the site to stay up 24/7? (6) Backups. What backup methods do you use, how often, and where do you keep the backup(s)? And if your database has ever been corrupted – how was your experience recovering data? Any other bits of advice you can throw my way would be much appreciated! Thanks in advance, Simon.

Thanks for the reply. (1) What are the indicators of my script taking up "excessive resources" and how can I measure this? (And how do you?) Is it measured by execution time and/or CPU processing? (because some operations can be more CPU intensive, such as heavy math.) (2) If just by execution time, is it like "your script cannot consume a timeslice of more than 10%" i.e. for every minute the server is running everybody's scripts, my script can only be executing for 6 seconds of that minute. If it hangs around for longer it's in trouble... (3) How can my script detect WITHIN ITSELF if it is using up "excessive resources". Are there any functions I can call, and/or flags I can read? (4) What do you mean by "getting suspended." Do I get any sort of warning, automated or from a human? (5) If my script does start to use excessive resources, can't the server jump in immediately and ( a ) pause my processing or ( b ) just stop the script without resuming? Kind of like a parent observing a child taking a drink, and the child not coming up for air, so the parent steps in saying "OK, that's enough for you at the moment."

A couple of questions: (1) I have some PHP code that may take a while to execute - say 30-45 seconds or more - and I'm concerned that a browser may give up, and report an error because a page is not returned within a certain amount of time. How can I handle this? Should my PHP script (that generates the webpage) call another PHP script to do the long-processing task, allowing it to exit earlier (with a generated webpage), or what? (2) ( a ) I'm interested to know how some of these travel sites (Orbitz, Priceline etc.) can go off and do a search, that sometimes goes on for a while. ( b ) And sometimes I've noticed these types of pages will refresh, saying things like "Hang on in there... we're still searching." Does anybody have any advice regarding these questions, or pointers to more information? Thanks in advance, Simon.

I'm looking to do something similar to a feature found on Ticketmaster.com, where you select your seats at a venue, and then you have two minutes in which to take or leave them. QUESTION 1a. Inside (or just after) the same query that searches for available seats, I need to SIMULTANEOUSLY mark those seats as "on hold". I've only read about, but not yet used MySQL transactions, and wonder if this simultaneous "search-and-hold" would/could be done in a transaction (of multiple queries) or if possible inside just one query? Either way, how would I do this "search-and-change" of data? (i.e. changing fields in the rows that are returned by the query.) QUESTION 1b. So the seats have been put on hold. But by putting seats on hold, the user may leave them - by either going over their two minutes, or just navigating away, closing their browser, or even the browser/computer crashing etc. So I can't set a seat on hold as a binary yes/no flag, which may never get cleared if the user goes away abruptly. I also can't lock a table for two minutes, which is way too long, and I can't have an automated script scanning all the time through all tickets to see if they were on hold, but were never taken, and make them available again. So I was thinking, place the seats on hold by attaching to them a time two minutes into the future. During the next two minutes, these "on hold" seats are passed over by other user's searches because the current time is still before the "hold-until-time" - but if they never get purchased, then they become available again after two minutes. What do people think of this, and what methods have you used in similar situations? And so, if the user likes (and then pays for) this set of seats, I can just go through all the seats and mark them as permanently taken. QUESTION 2. While I'm here asking time-related questions, how can I determine in a MySQL query if a certain time falls between two others, because of the dilemma arising due to the circular nature of times i.e. any time can occur both inside AND outside of two times. I want rows to be selected, say when a certain event happens between 9:00 PM and 6:00 AM, and not sure if something like the following would work in all cases: SELECT stuff from table WHERE ($time > start_time) AND ($time < end_time) Thanks in advance! Simon.

A few questions: (1) For privacy, while testing my web pages, how can I access a page so that it loads fine on my PC - but to anybody else who tries to view it they get some sort of error or message? i.e. what does my PHP code need to do in order to allow it to just work when I view it in my browser? (I know I can develop a site locally on my PC, but that is NOT what I want to do here - I wish to load the pages off my host's server - just as regular visitors would do.) (2) I would like to continue development on my site, while a version of that site is also live. I want my site to be running 24/7, and don't want to shut it down to add updates or do maintenance. How do sites like Amazon.com, CNN.com etc. handle this sort of thing - does anybody have any advice on working with such a system - how is the switch over to updated code and database made? Can anybody point me to any articles, resources etc? (3) Anything else I should consider when developing a site that is simultaneously live - any other tips? Thanks in advance, Simon.

I still want to get to the bottom of this, as I'm not a person to sweep things under the rug. I guess it comes from being a video game programmer - when faced with very elusive bugs that have to found before the disc or cartridge gets shipped to 100,000s of customers. Here's the latest reply I got my from the originating host, networksdata.com. Though I have no idea what the tracing data means. Does anybody out there? They (networksdata.com) also add "it's Totalchoicehosting's responsibility to fix the problem". Each party seems to be blaming the other, and both seem to know their stuff (i.e. web hosting.) Could it possibly be someone in the middle causing problems? Thanks, Simon. -----Original Message----- From: support@networksdata.com [mailto:support@networksdata.com] Sent: Monday, August 02, 2004 9:36 AM To: simon@XXXXX.com Subject: {ND-2335} Help Desk Response Support Team has responded to your help desk request. ----------------------------------------------- (Support Team) ----------------------------------------------- Time: 3-8-2004-02:35 : We're sorry for the delay in responding to your ticket. However we are certain that the network on which totalchoicehosting.com resides has routing problems and thus a connection between our server and theirs cannot be established. The result of a traceroute to totalchoicehosting.com is below: # traceroute totalchoicehosting.com traceroute to totalchoicehosting.com (69.20.61.172), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets 1 69.57.160.1 (69.57.160.1) 1.019 ms 35.119 ms 4.760 ms 2 69.9.165.1 (69.9.165.1) 1.389 ms 1.375 ms 1.341 ms 3 GigabitEthernet3-0.GW2.EWR17.ALTER.NET (157.130.3.121) 4.351 ms 316.475 ms 8.714 ms 4 0.so-6-0-0.CL1.EWR6.ALTER.NET (152.63.28.46) 10.232 ms 4.866 ms 11.733 ms 5 0.so-4-0-0.TL1.NYC9.ALTER.NET (152.63.0.173) 4.431 ms 4.312 ms 4.413 ms 6 0.so-1-1-0.TL1.DCA6.ALTER.NET (152.63.1.117) 236.562 ms 8.839 ms 8.267 ms 7 0.so-6-0-0.XL1.DCA6.ALTER.NET (152.63.38.70) 8.538 ms 11.453 ms 8.493 ms 8 0.so-6-0-0.GW6.DCA6.ALTER.NET (152.63.41.221) 8.005 ms 8.274 ms 8.212 ms 9 * * * 10 vlan901.core1.iad1.rackspace.com (69.20.1.10) 10.334 ms 10.430 ms 10.744 ms 11 aggr2a.iad1.rackspace.com (69.20.2.7) 11.297 ms 11.119 ms 10.630 ms 12 * * * 13 * * * 14 * * * 15 * * * 16 * * * ..... Interestingly, the problem only happens with totalchoicehosting.com, we can connect to 69.20.61.171 and 69.20.61.173, which are on the same subnet as totalchoicehosting's IP, just fine. We are afraid that we can't resolve this issue for you, it's Totalchoicehosting's responsibility to fix the problem. If you still have questions regarding this issue just let us know. ------------- Best regards, NetworksData Support Team support@networksdata.com

How can I determine the validity of networksdata.com response: Totalchoicehosting seems to use firewall to block our mail server so our mail server cannot connect to their mail server to deliver email. I.E. what questions can I ask networksdata.com about this statement?

FYI here's a bounced-back email that I sent to TCH last week. The only editing I have done is replace my domain name with XXXXX to ward off spam email. Is there any useful information here? -----Original Message----- From: Mail Delivery System [mailto:Mailer-Daemon@jupiter.robustserver.com] Sent: Saturday, July 17, 2004 4:04 PM To: simon@XXXXX.com Subject: Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender This message was created automatically by mail delivery software. A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed: support@totalchoicehosting.com Connection timed out: retry timeout exceeded ------ This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ------ Return-path: <simon@XXXXX.com> Received: from c-24-126-199-165.we.client2.attbi.com ([24.126.199.165] helo=any6y9npzqss39) by jupiter.robustserver.com with asmtp (Exim 4.24) id 1BlyAT-00057M-J2 for support@totalchoicehosting.com; Sun, 18 Jul 2004 09:00:33 +1000 From: "Simon Clarke" <simon@XXXXX.com> To: <support@totalchoicehosting.com> Subject: test 7-17-2004 4:00 PM Date: Sat, 17 Jul 2004 16:00:37 -0700 Message-ID: <000001c46c51$e03a3b80$a5c77e18@any6y9npzqss39> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.6626 Importance: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1441 no message

The previous thread I started "No Replies To My Pre-sales Emails " was closed by TCH saying that it was nothing to do with them - but I've just received an email that suggests TCH may be involved in the non-delivery of my emails to them. My current host has been very helpful in looking into this matter, and just now (July 21 2004, 6:45 AM PST) they sent me the following response, reproduced below. Does anybody have any comments? Thanks in advance, Simon. Support Team has responded to your help desk request. ----------------------------------------------- (Support Team) ----------------------------------------------- Time: 21-7-2004-4:51 : Totalchoicehosting seems to use firewall to block our mail server so our mail server cannot connect to their mail server to deliver email. ------------- Best regards, NetworksData Support Team support@networksdata.com Thank you, Help Desk

(To Head Guru) I never asked anybody to troubleshoot my email problems - I'm just asking the questions that anybody else would. I'm happy with my current host - it was a 24+ hour outage last week that made me consider changing hosts, and then I found out that TCH also had the same extended outage, because they used the same facilities. So, rather than being told to "switch hosts" to alleviate the problem, can anybody offer any suggestions on how I might be able to get to the bottom of this and find out at what point in the chain my emails are disappearing? For example, if a certain application is crashing my PC - I see what could be causing the behaviour - bugs in the app, driver updates needed etc. - I don't switch to a new computer or purchase a new copy of Windows. So regarding my matter, what questions should I be asking and of whom? What diagnostic measures can I take? I don't want to sweep the matter under the rug, but would rather find out what is happening, so I can learn from it, and possibly avoid or reduce the possibiity of it occuring in the future. Any assistance would be appreciated! Thanks in advance.

The mystery deepens... Why are the emails not getting through? I sent the following to Networksdata.com: For some reason, when I send an email from <my biz email address> to any address at TotalChoiceHosting.com, they never receive it. But when I send emails to them from < my email address @ yahoo.com> they have no problems receiving. Any advice? And their reply on 7-17-2004: Email received from Support Team has responded to your help desk request. ----------------------------------------------- (Support Team) ----------------------------------------------- Time: 17-7-2004-6:19 : We don't block TotalChoiceHosting.com or any domains. Maybe TotalChoiceHosting.com blocks our mail servers, please contact them to resolve this matter. ------------- Best regards, NetworksData Support Team support@networksdata.com Thank you, Help Desk

Thanks for looking into it TCH-Mike. So, for whatever reason, my current host could be not sending mails addressed to competing hosts? Does anybody have any knowledge/past experience of this? FYI, my current host networksdata.com had a 24+ hour outage last Sunday.

Out of thousands of successful email deliveries to hundreds of different recipients, yours (TCH hosting) is the only one <supposedly> not receiving emails from me. How do I know that the emails ARE in fact reaching you, and they are just not disappearing into a black hole upon arrival? Is there any way I can definitively test at which end the fault lies?

Latest update. It seems my emails MAY not be reaching TCH, or at least getting rejected upon arrival - for whatever reason. I just did a test and emails sent from my personal Yahoo email DO get an autoresponder email back from TCH and a ticket initiated, but after sending a few more, there are still no response to emails sent from my biz address. My current host is networksdata.com Because I'm using my current biz server for my POP and SMTP email, I would have thought my biz emails would arrive OK, but my Yahoo emails would not, because I use a Yahoo email address in the "from" field. But the opposite is happening. My biz emails are not getting through to TCH, whereas my Yahoo ones are. Any advice?

I've sent dozens of emails this week with no delivery problems. And Aromal in sales says (in the transcript) that emails would not get answered. Is everybody on the same page? I sent an email to you folks on Monday and Wednesday and NEITHER were replied to. And a few posts back in this thread you (TCH-Mike) told me that you didn't have my email address - I then told you that you DID have my email address, and then you found it. Any observations/advice from others would be appreciated.

That was NOT an email - it was a Live Support session (like my previous session transcript I posted.)

Apparently, emails to support@totalchoicehosting.com won't get answered. Here's a transcript of a Live! conversation I had with sales on Wed July 14: miner2049er : how long does it take for you to respond to an email? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ** You are now speaking with Aromal, Sales Department. ** miner2049er : Anybody there? miner2049er : I sent an email with questions Mon 7/12/2004 3:55 PM (Pacific) but no reply yet. Aromal : hello Aromal : did you send a support request miner2049er : It was an email to support@totalchoicehosting.com miner2049er : As I just said Aromal : if so , please give me the ticket id and i can update you on the status miner2049er : Please read my msgs. It was an EMAIL sent to support@totalchoicehosting.com miner2049er : No ticket ID miner2049er : (well none received anyway) Aromal : you need to post tickets from https://ssl.totalchoicehosting.com/supportdesk/ Aromal : and not email support@totalchoicehosting.com miner2049er : How was I to know that? Why do you have that email on your website? Not a good start when I'm choosing a web host... Aromal : i'm extremely sorry about it but we handle requests which come in via the support desk as it logs directly into our ticketing system miner2049er : Other web hosts allow emails to start off a support session, with an associated ticket miner2049er : I need a web host that allows me to send emails - so I can keep a copy of my first email sent. miner2049er : Anybody there? miner2049er : Then you need to remove the erroneous information from your contact page: http://totalchoicehosting.com/contact-web-host.html Aromal : you can start off the session from our support desk and the responses will be recieved by you as emails miner2049er : So you folks were never going to answer my email? Aromal : yes i know..i shall make a note of it and pass on the message to the authorities concerned miner2049er : That's not too good. miner2049er : I'm going to send my questions to presales@totalchoicehosting.com to see if I get a response from that email address Aromal : okay Aromal : if you have any support/technical requests please post it via the support desk miner2049er : That is not obvious. Bye. Aromal : Bye, sorry for the trouble