UplinkEarth is possibly the worst host ever… that’s saying a lot

Joshua — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 05:32:38 +0000

UplinkEarth managed to make an enemy out of me today. I don’t use them for my personal blog or any new sites. Frankly, I’m not using Coldfusion much anymore and I don’t particularly care for Windows servers. I rely on Dreamhost and Media Temple for my hosting needs these days. (Yeah, I know that Dreamhost decided to charge me for 2009 a year in advance a couple of months ago, but they fixed the issue and my site was never down—just my available balance on my credit card.)

Hey UplinkEarth, I know it can be hard work to provide good support for a cheap price, but what the heck! Today, I was treated to the following issues:

The database does not reflect the data that was present as recently as last week. All event data is gone for the moment.
The files seem to be at least a month old—I had recently updated a couple of files with new code, so I know what they should have looked like.
Several files were not restored to their proper directory outside of the webroot (www). My site relied on that data as it was written in Coldfusion and used an application.cfm file, components, custom tags and a bit of magic to serve up a pretty decent custom app.
Also the “shared” folder is no longer mapped to the shared SSL cert that was related to the authentication scripts on the site.

I have never had such a crappy experience with a host. Heck, they’ve had their servers hacked three times in the last year. I’ve had javascript redirects take over the site in question several times.

So why did I stick around long enough that they really screwed up? It wasn’t my choice. The small organization that is currently using the site in question wasn’t ready to pay for a transition to a new platform and the coding costs that would entail. (They only pay about $300 per year for Coldfusion hosting and a shared certificate, so they weren’t keen on changing… I bet that changes now.)

So for all of you looking for a good host. Avoid UplinkEarth for the moment. Maybe they’ll straighten out, but until they do, even they seem to realize that selling more service is a bad idea—their site won’t let you buy anything at the moment.

Configure versus code

Joshua — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 14:27:46 +0000

I’ve been running into this conundrum a lot lately. What makes something a configuration task versus a coding (or programming if you like) task?

I’ve come up with a series of equations that I think explain the issue:

XML == config file
Apache != config file

GUI == configuration task
text file != configuration task

settings == configuration
syntax == programming

praise == configuration
profanity == programming or a really bad UI

So it comes down to this. If you want to produce software for people to use, make it configurable. I’m tired of running into software that has no discernible administrative features–just a giant text file that is titled “config” or something similar.

I recently used WordPress to help a friend launch a portfolio site. It ended up being the site’s CMS (Content Management System). WordPress is not the best CMS available, but it is a simple solution that has a well-developed configuration model. That is not to say that I didn’t end up programming a bit in PHP–I certainly got my hands dirty. About half of what I did in the end was configuration and the other half was coding.

Which do you prefer?

Joshuami » Programming

UplinkEarth is possibly the worst host ever… that’s saying a lot

Configure versus code