Solar VPS - Green hosting

Today I have received an email from Sean at zone.net stating that effective from four months now onwards all VPS (Virtual Private Server) business will be transfered to SolarVPS.

Sean speaks very highly of SolarVPS’ CEO and managing director and excuses for the “crap” level of support that zone.net customers had to endure in the past few months.

The official press release can be found on Solar VPS’ news section. Being transparent about communication is one of the major pillars of decent business – “I like”.

Some famous highlights include the multi-day downtime due to some failure and a for-ages taking check-disk (from 11:48 AM EST(11/7/2008) to 7:19 PM EST (11/9/2008), where as it would be more like 9am to 8pm, frankly)

Also some minor, less exciting downtimes of twelve to twenty hours recently can be recalled by some of you.

My phone-calls to the 001 yank-hotline have been answered but greeted with massive unfriendliness and really low level of knowledge stating “we are aware that our sites (cough and yours) are currently unavailable”.

I am curious what the time at SolarVPS will bring – the mail sent by Sean listed an email address by which management might be contacted directly.

If SolarVPS prolong zone.net’s sponsorship agreement I would be keen to give them a ride.

In the meantime, if you have any other recommendations or comments, feel free to contact me.

Oh- and the new site is coming, I am currently just looking into a way to politely tell IE6 visitors (still 26% over the past few months) to upgrade or switch.

Having worked in a major PR company in the last six month and having experienced the (probably worst) “almost” over-sea like IT support, I see the problems with upgrading, however believe it should be able to replace a seven year old piece of software with something newer (IE7, IE8 beta, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc).

Domain : H4X3D.COM
Primary IP address   : 72.249.95.103
Host         : zone.net
Organization : Colo4Dallas LP
Location     : US, United States
City         :  Dallas, TX 75247
Latitude     :  32°81'48" North
Longitude    :  96°87'06" West

Sometime around May I decided to have my website transfered over to zone.net as I outgrew Dreamhost.

Dreamhost, which now offers quite some cool setups (such as pimping up your server by additional ram etc), has kind of “chucked me” off due to excessive CPU use that was triggered by my WordPress install (running WP-Cache of course).
I was told, I outgrew a shared environment and should opt to either switch to their (at this time) 360$/month plan or get another hosting provider. when asked what to get, I was told “a vps with plenty of ram”.

I had a particular setup in mind and was thinking of either joining jaguar pc hosting or zone.net.

What I did like at zone.net at this point was the working live-support. I clicked “live support” – chat now and within seconds I was talking to someone who had a clue and cared about getting me to move over.

I opted zone.net as they promised to set-up my domain(s) in before of moving for free and making the transition happen without any downtime.

It worked this way, I sent my sql databases to them and uploaded a four gig rar-file to third-party server (always handy to have another one at hand). They downloaded everything and setup my VPS with CentOs, plesk and virtuozzo.

From my GoDaddy-domains I know there were plenty of discount codes around- as I couldnt find any for zone.net I blunty asked them if they had a promotion campaign running and if there was a zone.net discount code.
Their honest reply, which I appreciate, was “yes” and I was given the code to discount my setup and monthly fee by 10%. Seeing as I did not find any codes on Google, this was a good catch.

The transfer went smooth and the first weeks passed. Without any trouble, my site(s) ran smoothly, quicker than ever and with no downtime. Thanks to the watchdog module, that one employee installed, services that killed itself were automatically loaded again.

Ever since I moved my site to zone.net it has been growing prosperously with 15,000 visitors daily and increasing. WordPress and WP-Cache are working smoothly, Permalinks with htaccess are operational, too.

When I had trouble setting up WP-Cache (at one point you have to run a shell command to create a sym-link file), their Live-support helped me out in seconds.
I really liked the free and high-quality support at zone.net and the polite, yet direct employees.

The advantage of “sticking” with a company with a dozen employees is that in due progress you get to know everyone and they get to know you. You dont have to explain your setup and problems all over again, as your setup is known and sending passwords over etc has become obsolete.

Amongst my domains are also two German denic (DE) domains, the setup of them is very annoying, as you have to observe all kinds of regulations (like specific TTL time), different class C ips etc. – zone.net has been so accommodating to setup those different C-class ips for free.
I am quite sure that I would have had to pay additional money at almost every other company.

At my VPS I had Plesk and CentOS running, what I did not know is that you SHOULD not (seriously!!!) try to update your VPS (plesk) manually.
I pressed “auto-update” under plesk, and the whole vps went into full-out lockup mode. zone.net´s experienced techies had the website up within minutes, but still plesk was unaccessible.
This was the case for a week roughly and I did not receive any email for one week. This really annoyed me, but who to blame? It was all my fault- if I had not played around with things it would not have locked up so bad (internal errors all over the place). I decided to wait one week for them to find a solution, as the website was up, I was earning good money with it (around 40$ a day) and I did not care about emails… since it was only a secondary email address.

yet I wanted to have my plesk back.- so one employee worked on my vps for two days in a row and tried all kinds of hacks. still I did not work. so without asking, and I appreciate that, they cloned my “running” site and setup another vps and routed all traffic over there. wow. I did not know this was technically possible!!!

anyway, I had my plesk back and every setting I had done, was input kindly by the zone.net tech-man. If I had to do this all myself I would have lost valuable time at university that (at this point) I did not have.

Just a few weeks ago I received an email saying that my vps (and basically) every VPS had to be moved, as zone.net had bought their own network or net of servers or datacenter, I cannot remember what it was, anyway… my vps had to be moved, meaning starting at “zero”. A new vps was setup again, but since the ips changed, too I had to undergo the whole IPs annoyance with the german denic domains again.

luckily zone.net helped me out quickly and assured me things would work.
Indeed it did, the transfer went very smooth, as the old vps was not shutdown until the new one had been successfully “talking” with my nameserver.

Bad thing though was, that I lost several posts and comments, as in the meantime I was accessing (randomly) two different sites on different servers.
At one time, the old site loaded, the next hour the new one loaded and vice versa.

If you plan to transfer sites, you should not post anything and close comments. just as a matter of fact, that was my learning…

What I did not like about zone.net is that after the server move and in the meantime, they have seem to taken off the live-support. I loved to quickly address my problems and have them sorted out.

Now I have to reside to their (working!) ticket system, where I usually receive a reply within hours, but sometimes also days (but that´s my fault then again to not “bump” my tickets every now and then).

In general, I am very satisfied with the performance at zone.net, the level of support and the possibility of having almost EVERYTHING customized to my needs. I appreciate being a customer there, seriously! as soon as I experience something else, I will post it here, promised!

Yours,
jez

(lol this is almost a whole book of a post)

Sorry for any inconvenience!

1. Introduction
2. Order a Domain at Godaddy (detailed step-by-step guide)
3. Finding and entering a Promo Code (safe bucks in no time)
4. Zone.net Enterprise Hosting introduced (Quality VPS that work)

1. Introduction

I wrote this guide in order to help all those people that are confused by Godaddy’s spammy clustered Website.
There are some options you might want to click and others that you surely do not want.
In short, I wrote up an idiot-safe guide on “how-to-order a domain at Godaddy”.
After guiding you through the steps of ordering a domain I will shortly explain the so called “promo codes”, list some of the best that I collected over the weeks and then finish-off with a quick introduction of zone.net, the Linux people that keep this site running. Their Enterprise Hosting solutions are flexible and easily adaptable and priced. Even-though they do not list any promo codes on the net, I was able to sneak some out for you.

Update: Yay, I got featured on consumerist.com – thanks for picking up my articles, it means a lot to me!

2. Order a Domain at Godaddy (detailed step-by-step guide)

I have created screenshots of the Godaddy website and greyed-out the unimportant and confusing parts.
A click on a thumbnail will open the full-site overview with boxes that will point out the important areas.
The most important boxes are shown in details within this post, but why not take a look below:

Okay, so first of all go to Godaddy.com if you are not at the moment. Using a browser with tabs is advised.

The main site of Godaddy is so crowded and confusing that I immediately wanted to leave again and register my domain elsewhere, but Godaddy is the industry leader for Domains in Northern America (they have the most domains registered for end-users like you and me). Also their prices are the lowest available on the internet. You are looking for an area where to enter the domain you want to register, look below the lady in leather. An close-up excerpt is added below.

Enter your desired domain name and select the extension in the field below “Domain Name Search:”.
Press “Go!” afterwards. You will be taken to a page that is going to tell you whether your desired domain is still available or not.

Well, in this case the domain “h4x3d.com” is already taken. Surprise Surprise.
Look out for the area highlighted in the second box. It is a bit lower and titled “Search for another domain”.
Enter your domain name and press “Search”.

If you entered your desired domain directly, you will not get the screen above, but a “success screen”. It is listed below, please scroll down.

So you have entered your domain and it is available. Great! You will get a screen looking like the one below. I have selected the domain “some-cool-domain.com”, I know not quite creative, but it will do for now.

Yay, the domain is available, now let’s crush some confusion! Below the “(my domain) is available” you will find loads of options. Most of them will make no sense to you for now, and can be added later on. So ignore them unless you want to spend some extra money on stupid domains you are not going to use (most likely).

Scroll down the page till you real “continue”. It is kind of “hidden” below a long table of alternative domains and stupidity. See below screen excerpt for the position. I highlighted the box for you.

Click”Continue” to continue. You will get to a page with even more spam and uncool offers.
They say “STOP! You have found a great domain” – no doubt you have, but no need to throw stupid offers at us, is it? Scroll down till you see “YES…”, but DO NOT press it, select “NO-thanks, continue to check-out”, else you get even more spam. You might not want that. Again, see the highlighted boxes below.

You are almost done: A new page will open and ask you to input your personal information that is needed for the domain. See the below screen cap.

I have selected “make this purchase under my current Godaddy.com account”, but I could also have choosen to fill-in new registration information or selected “login to my account”.

Finally you reach the checkout options. This is where you get to select the contract length.
In most cases I select between 1 and 2 years. You get extra credit if you select longer periods. You can also specify whether you want to auto-renew your registration (you will get re-billed when the domain registration is about to run out) or do the paying manually the next time. Keep in mind that a longer registration period will generate a higher amount-due. Godaddy has some insane savings on amounts over 50$, but more under “promotion/promo codes” below.

Untick “customize my order”, and select “no, thanks, I am ready to checkout”. Press “continue” to get to the next page. You have not been charged or anything till now, so relax.

The next page you get to is interesting: here you get to see the full amount payable and an option to paste godaddy promo codes. Every code or change has to be “applied”. So once you pasted a promo code, press “apply code”. If you decide to change the registration length, be sure to press “update cart” (right side near “apply code”). A new amount due will show. Some promo codes work, others do not. Be sure to experiment with that for a few minutes. There is cash to be saved. Even with orders around 10$, you can save 30% and more. I just registered a domain yesterday and selected “private registration”: A promo code I found deducted 4$! Check chapter 2 (Promo codes) for Promo codes. I do not make money with promo codes, as I do not know how to issue them, but I have listed some that will safe you money!

Anyhow, select your payment option (paypal is available), accept their Terms of Service (TOS) and the Domain registration yadayada and press “checkout now”. Below is an detailed excerpt and even further below a screencap of the important areas.

Congratulations, you have successfully ordered a domain at Godaddy. Now was that easy?
Read about Promocodes for Godaddy that will safe you real money on at Page 2.

Google Adsense is taking the piss at the moment, that is why I changed the layout once more. See the images attached below.
Update: I changed the 468×60 banner to 336×280 in order to not break the layout for visitors surfing at lower screenresolutions (below 1024+). I use 1280×1024 if you wonder about the screenshots.

Before (three column layout)

After (two column layout)

Current layout (two column)

Internet Explorer renders it like this:

Update: The new ads are performing very good. In contrast to the mere $3,02 I made yesterday (no kidding), I already earned $7,64 today. Yay for some server money!

My website is hosted on a virtual private server by zone.net and costs $65 a month. If you want to help me fund it please donate some money. Thank you a lot!