The best place to put a project that outlives the money behind it.
slophost has hosted other people's work since 1996. This year a fair amount of what is on these machines has outlived the concern that started it, and nothing about a site changes on the day its funding stops being funding.
Where this company stands
The industry's daily reading this year has been a website that lists companies as they fail, and we have been on the other side of that page every morning. We are privately held, we have no outside money to lose, and the racks, the spares in the racks and the lease on the room are ours. There was no round to fail to close.
In May a retail chain opened its first two shops and the trade press explained in detail why they would not work. We have no view on shops. We mention it because being explained at is a condition we recognise.
There was a football league in February that lasted until April. A site about it is on this network still, kept up by one person on account of one player's jersey, and that shape — the thing outliving the concern that paid for it — is most of our year.
What is on the machines
Apache 1.3.22, on Red Hat Linux 7.2 and on FreeBSD 4.4. PHP 4.0.6 across the shared machines, with 4.1.0 going on as it is released this month. It brings $_GET, $_POST and $_SESSION, which are visible inside a function without being handed in, and it is the beginning of the end of register_globals. Nothing of yours breaks this year. Something of yours breaks in a later year, and you will have had this paragraph.
MySQL 3.23.36 and later, and the 3.23 line carries the production label now. That is worth a sentence, because a good deal of what is already running on it was put there while the label still said beta, by people who did not ask us first.
Perl 5.6.1, with your own cgi-bin running as you. Managed machines are Cobalt RaQ 550s: one rack unit, the little screen on the front that tells you its address, and the root password is yours.
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On every account: SSH2 · your own cgi-bin · MySQL · cPanel 5 with WHM |  |
Windows, ColdFusion and the panel
Windows 2000 Server with IIS 5.0, Active Server Pages and MS SQL Server 2000, on their own machines, under Helm. The .NET Framework is still a beta and is not underneath anybody. We will install it on the day Microsoft ships it and not on the day somebody forwards us the diagram.
ColdFusion 5 is licensed and running. Macromedia bought Allaire in January; the licence, the server and the one person here who is fluent in CFML are all unchanged, and the difference at this end is the name printed on the invoice.
cPanel 5 with WHM on the shared and reseller machines. Ensim Pro where a reseller asked for it by name. Plesk has put out a 1.0 this year and one machine is on it so that we can find out what it does, which is what a 1.0 is for. Console remains on the accounts old enough to have been given it. A SOAP toolkit sits on the Windows machines and has not yet been asked for by name.
The table that used to be on this page
For three years this page carried a table setting our specification against four other companies. It has come off, and we are not going to pretend that was a decision about page design.
Winstar Communications filed for Chapter 11 in April. Exodus Communications filed in September. Excite@Home filed in September as well and is being taken apart in front of everybody. Rackshack is still there, will rent you an entire machine, and expects you to know what to do with it; we have never competed with them and are not starting by drawing a table about it.
Two of those networks carried traffic for sites that are on this network now. The moves were done in the same fortnight as the news, by people at both ends who did not know on the Friday whether they still had a job. Our transit is diverse and paid up. That is the whole of the claim.
Shell access, and the small print underneath it
Telnet has been withdrawn and replaced with SSH2. Your password stopped travelling in clear text on a Tuesday and nobody noticed, which is the correct outcome. The shell itself is unchanged and is on every account, as it has been since the first machine.
Compliance: Year 2000 (assessed 1998, still current). Section 508 accessibility, effective June. We have kept the Year 2000 statement on this page because removing it would require somebody to decide it was finished.
Anonymous FTP is off on new accounts. Statistics run nightly from Analog and Webalizer. Backups go to tape and leave the building on a Thursday, in a car, which is the least modern sentence on this page and the one we would defend hardest.