The best place to host your weblog.
A weblog is a database, a template and about two hundred lines of PHP. Within three years it is going to be the most common thing on this network, and everything below is us getting ready for that. You can have one answering on your own domain in about a minute, without opening a shell.
One minute, from the panel
Every account carries cPanel 8, with WHM for resellers and Fantastico De Luxe for the installs; machines rebuilt this quarter carry cPanel 9. Fantastico lists Movable Type 2.661, WordPress 0.7, b2evolution, phpBB 2.0.6, Mambo, Gallery and osCommerce, in the versions it is carrying this week rather than the versions on this page.
The installer unpacks the release, creates a database and a user with rights to that database and nothing else, writes the configuration file and mails you the password once. It is the five things a careful person types over SSH, in the same order, done by something that does not reach the fourth one and decide to finish in the morning.
Shell accounts are included and are not going away. What changed this year is that the shell stopped being the door.
What is on the machines
Apache 1.3.29 on the shared machines and Apache 2.0.48 on anything built this quarter. PHP 4.3.2. Perl 5.8.1. MySQL 4.0.12, the first 4.0 marked production, which brings UNION and a query cache that stops your front page asking the same question forty times a minute. PHP 5 is in beta, and beta is not a thing we put a weblog on.
Unlimited databases, unlimited FTP users, unlimited parked domains.*
Windows, if that is the requirement
Windows Server 2003 with IIS 6.0 and ASP.NET 1.1, under Plesk 6, and Plesk 7 on new builds now that SWsoft has bought it. ColdFusion MX 6.1 runs on the same machines and is asked for about once a month, which is once a month more than the licence was bought for.
Names and mail
SpamAssassin 2.60 and ClamAV run on the way in. In September a registry pointed every mistyped address in .com and .net at its own advertising page, and for nineteen days a filter could not tell a typing mistake from a domain that exists. We spent most of those days explaining it to people who had done nothing.
The secondary nameserver is still corvus. It is seven years old. Replacing it means changing one record at the registrar, and every quarter that is the item that does not get done.
The SCO licence claims
We are not affected and neither are you. Nothing on your account will move because of them. There is a longer document about this, and its length is the point.
Distribution change, first quarter
Red Hat has discontinued its consumer Linux. Machines on Red Hat Linux 9 will move to a rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux compiled from the published sources, which is the same operating system with the badge taken off. Fedora Core 1 is on the bench and is not going underneath a customer. The FreeBSD 4.9 machines are unaffected and their owners have already written to say so.
Uptime and the network
99.9% uptime, guaranteed, with a published credit schedule. The credit is calculated on the affected month rather than the year, which is in your favour and is the only part of that document that is.
In January a worm doubling in size every eight and a half seconds took the cash machines with it, which is the first time this work has been visible from a car park. It wanted a Microsoft database we do not run, and the weekend went on the machines where it might have. In August the cabinets ran six hours on batteries and then on diesel, while fifty-five million people found out that a cordless telephone needs mains power.
Compliance
Year 2000. Section 508. Sarbanes-Oxley §404 controls documentation. CAN-SPAM, effective 1 January, which we have read in full and which is shorter than our own acceptable use policy. Certificates are GeoTrust QuickSSL, issued the same day, or VeriSign for an auditor who knows the one name.