TCH-Tim

Glad to hear it. Consider this your pre-emptive welcome to the family, just in case I forget on Friday. We're here to help, so feel free to ask as many questions as you like.

1. How long has your company been in business? Bill has been doing web hosting and server support for over 7 years. TCH as you see it today is about 3-4 years old. 2. What plans do you have for the future, as far as features, upgrades, etc.? We recently added Fantastico (at no extra charge) and upgraded all of our shared and reseller hosting plans (at no extra charge). We have Ruby on Rails in the works (at no extra charge) and we're still reviewing some cPanel theme add-ons (at no extra charge). We keep our hardware fresh - most of our boxes are Quad Xeons with anywhere from 2GB-4GB of RAM, some of them have RAID setups - and we like to continue adding value to our offering by increasing disk and bandwidth quotas or tossing in 3rd party add-ons. We always have secret plans churning in the background. 3. If I request x-feature/module, etc. will you at least look into the possibility of installing it? Never hurts to ask. 4. "Stuff" does happen. What are your procedures for notifying your customers about server problems or other problems? Like they said, subscribe to your server's forum. Also keep your cPanel and billing email address up to date. 5. If I have a problem installing x-application, will tech support help? Never hurts to ask. We do prefer you start here in the forums though as we don't technically provide third party software support. 6. Do you offer credit for unusual downtimes? I've never seen a server down for more than 24 hours. We constantly monitor services and server health to reduce downtime, and if a server ever does go down we're on it immediately and nobody sleeps until it is back up. 7. If you could add/change one thing about your company or services, what would it be? Once you're around for awhile, you tell me.

Amen to that. Glad they got you all fixed up.

Our backups are run once weekly - the particular day of the week varies by server. We backup to a secondary drive in your server and we backup to a remote server in a different datacenter than your server (you know, just in case your datacenter blows up). While we do our best to maintain the integrity of our servers and your data and will go to great lengths to help you in the event of data loss, the hard reality of working with computers is that sometimes stuff happens. The Terms that Thomas pointed to are absolutely correct - you are ultimately responsible for having good backups of your data. If you require daily backups of your data, you need to make daily backups. There have been plenty of suggestions in these forums as to how that might be accomplished with minimal effort. Like they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Did you try connecting to the IP, not the domain?

Hmmm, it was updated.....but yes, new accounts get the new number.

For most customers the Pentium4 is a fine chip in terms of performance versus price, and there are also plenty of them around. If you need something else just open a ticket in and we'll be happy to work something out.

The c:> is just the prompt. Whatever the prompt looks like, just type ftp ftp.yourtchdomain.com and hit enter. dang, Bruce is too fast. I'm slowing down in my old age.

Congratulations?

Finally got around to installing LifeType this weekend. Had one or two bumps but it is up and running without too much swearing. My take is that this is a great script to use if you want to host multiple blogs easily or allow people to sign up for their own blogs (a la Blogger). There are tons of options, you can upload templates so users have choices, and admin control for the whole thing is laid out pretty well. Documentation and user forums seem to be fairly well organized and I didn't have much problem finding answers to some question. For a single blog installation I'd be inclined to stick with WordPress. I just want to throw in the disclaimer that in no way am I suggesting you attempt to start up the next Blogger on one of our shared servers - we do monitor loads so it won't last long. Also, you are responsible for any usage on your account, so anything your visitors say, do, or upload may come back to you. That said, this is a pretty cool script and worth checking out.

I'm up to level 25 on the 2d game. My nuclear engineer brother is up to 39 (he really had to beat your 38). I beat the 3d game, I think. You get to a jail cell in the end, and as far as I can tell that's it. Not so much of an "escape." There's also a really, really easy way to beat it, which you're bound to find, but that way's not much fun.

I like to install with Fantastico so it takes care of the db and config setup, and then update with patches and such. Easy cheesy.

The 3d one crashes a lot if you go certain places, or jump certain ways, or jump on the shiny rotater thing just right.

I have an optical mouse too....

Our prayers and happy thoughts are with you. I'd go with Thomas' suggestion of WordPress with the SpamKarma2 plugin (it's amazing at keeping spam out). It will be very easy to post updates and news, allow family and friends to comment, and keep spam out. If you want to keep it private you can use the registration function and make people sign in.

I look forward to the full Rob Review. I'm mostly interested in its capabilities as a multi-blog hosting platform. Downloaded it, just haven't taken the ten minutes to install it. Easier to just let Rob fill me in....

Dreamweaver will work just fine on any plan you choose. We only list FrontPage on our feature list because it requires special server extensions, whereas Dreamweaver does not.

You da man Rob. This LifeType thing worth checking out?

Chuck, To ease the pain of renewal, a good plan for a domain name is to register it for the max period of time. At TCH it's 10 years, so at least for that long you don't have to worry about it. I don't know what to tell you about that 10 year mark - hopefully by then the business is successful enough that they can afford to pay someone to keep track of that sort of thing. If this person is a client or friend of yours, why not just keep the domain name yourself and send them the bill? You know that these things expire, it's no big deal to renew them, and it builds good relations. I do that for quite a few people that don't care to learn about how this stuff works. No money off it, but good karma. Hosting you can only pay a year at a time. You can put it on auto-renew, and as long as there's a valid card it will renew. Paypal never expires, just have to make sure there's money in there. There's only so much you can do though. One might suggest that if someone is responsible enought to own a business, they are responsible enough to pay the bills and read email. But then I'm no businessman.

All part of Google's plan to take over the world. I trust them with my calendar and a little email. Will keep my credit cards to myself, thanks.

Finally getting off MT, eh? You try WP yet?

Nick is awesome.

Thanks Rob. Best review I've read in awhile.

And Tom. And Alex. Credit given where credit is due.

She is. Stitches are out, hair is starting to regrow - she's back to her crazy self again.