ArticHost -- October Newsletter - Introduction & happeh bday artichost! - Round... It's round... cube? - Billing system... That BUGGER! - Plan enhancements! Double It Up! - Ajax... I JUST LIKE AJAX! X) - Windows like Mac OS X? Yup sure! - LAMP! I'm a LAMP! XAMPP IT! - Final Words --- Introduction & happeh bday artichost! --- Hiya, It's been exciting month! Well, more like weeks, since last newsletter. Last time we tried .PDF format, this time it's just a regular text e-mail... Why? Well, not anyone really bothers to open the .PDF file... If you want it, just send us an e-mail... NO! Send it DIRECTLY to me to aleksi@artichost.net! In any case, this month it's a bit of a different format too... You'll like it! All comments are welcome, and for bright ideas, you just might get rewarded, so don't hesitate! ;) We've got something EXCITING for you all! Yup, we like to roll the dice and multiply things... ;) and rounding...em up! No, now i'm not talking about invoice sums... Oh yeah, the problems we've been having with performance issues are history now! Oh, don't feel like it? Just send an e-mail to me directly, and i'll do my best to answer your questions and solve the problem! yummy yummy crunchy configuration files! Let me fine tune just a little bit! Oh yeah, i was a little bit late with this for you guys, last newsletter should've been the time for this... But ARTICHOST as brand, is now 2 YEARS OLD! 27th day of september 2004 i registered this domain. It's been VERY INTERESTING 2 years! Lot's of new stuff for me, and you guys. A slashback to 2004/06/04: Economy Shared Hosting: 50Mb HDD, 500MB traffic / YEAR 13e/Year Bronze Service: 100Mb HDD, 2Gb Traffic / Month, MySQL 25e/Year! Shell Bronze: Webspace 75Mb HDD, 3Gb Traffic / Month, MySQL, 2 Aliases, 3 processes, 36e/Year Colocation 1:4 Shared Best Effort, 1 IP, IPv6 tunnel upon request 99e/Month I have almost tears in my eyes, those days, only thing which mattered to me was having fun :P Lots has changed since... and ALL for better for you guys! --- Round... It's round... cube? --- It's round, it's a cube! Yup, a pretty darn good looking Webmail that is. It's still in beta, and has some bugs, but point your browsers to http://www.artichost.net/mail and hold your horses! be in AWE! It's still completely testing, and works only for e-mail accounts on homer.artichost.net, so if you are on that server, go and try that! Others can bugger me for a @artichost.net e-mail address for testing Tell me your opinions, and we shall see if we would make it a standard choice of webmail application! Round Cube project resides at: http://www.roundcube.net/ --- Billing system... That BUGGER! --- So, some of you know the problems that our billing system has been having... Well, no we didn't get rid of them, it's out of our control! But thought to let you guys know of what to do when it buggers: - Contact support IMMEDIATELY if it is fatal! - If moneybookers payment is SCREWED head to http://www.moneybookers.com and make a manual payment to: orders@artichost.net and mention your billing username and/or invoice on the message box. How it buggers us? Well, assigning same payment ID at times to invoices, and not allowing to edit them, resulting in moneybookers payment to fail! :~( Not allowing to change the payment id! Other way: it makes you multiple invoices, due dates being next to random, then suspending you 5-20mins later! oh, and relating: it seems it likes to mark just about anyone as fraudster! i HATE HATE HATE fraudsters, but Fraudgrabber is the only anti-fraud measure integrating well with AWBS and being sanely prices... from the same provider! I went ahead and relaxed it a bit... hope it catches SOMETHING now... Oh, why do we bother with this system? It has all the features needed! But, the main thing is that building a PROPER billing system can be a really daunting task, and to be honest... Before this, AWBS hasn't bugged so much that i would start to work on my own system. The time has come, and too many grey hairs appeared to my head due to AWBS, that i'm finally starting to code my own... ETA on it? No idea! Are we going to lease/sell licenses? Future shows... We just might as well go open source! Truly: only time will show, my plate is quite damn full! (Those reading my personal blog: you just might be aware of it!) More propaganda of awbs: http://www.awbs.com --- Plan enhancements! Double It Up! --- Actually... we did some huge upwards rounding too! The biggest enhancement is that one plan got 3 times the BW as before. How is this achievably? Well... You could say that at sometimes, i'm just a monster on negotiation... Just this week, one company gave us almost -50% off for a single server! Took me... uh, what, 15minutes? to be safe, let's say 1 hour to get to that deal... Oh yeah, and that was a helluva deal for a european cPanel server... Whups, you wanted to hear about the enhancements? Well, i basicly DOUBLED every HDD & Transfer quota... Then rounded it up a little bit, and this is what i got: Now i'm gonna bore you with some BORING figures: Bronze 2Gb -> 5Gb || A CRAZY 150% INCREASE! 20Gb -> 50Gb || What do i see? 150% AGAIN! Silver 3.5Gb -> 8Gb || Wait a minute... Again, OVER 100% 65000MB -> 150Gb or 153600mb || Whups, i did it again! Gold 8000Mb --> 20Gb || Excuse me? Do i see an 150% increase -- AGAIN?! -- 110000Mb --> 300Gb || Now you gotta be kidding me, now it's almost 200%?? Platinum 25Gb -> 50Gb 333Gb --> 1Tb ! || *pinches himself* Am i dreaming? 1 TERABYTE TRANSFER! Now you could really call Platinum SEMI-DEDICATED! That's hell of a lot from QUALITY SHARED HOSTING! What did i say? During the previous couple months, we have not only doubled, or tripled our transfer & hdd capacity, but actually gotten about 6 times the HDD capacity, and 3 times the transfer capacity than before! Now, i'm hereby giving you the benefits! I managed to keep the costs per server just about the same, while enhancing every aspect of them! We already offer quality support, and you know... There's no other place where you get this kind of support, with these features! Support in itself is very valuable, but having the ability for these amounts of traffic & hdd, combined is ... GOLDEN! ... no wait... that's HYPER! - Ajax... I JUST LIKE AJAX! X) Ajax is great when used properly, as you might have noticed there's a little ajax feature on our page also, on the shared web hosting portion, for more information... Yes, that's AJAX :) Gmail is "AJAX", live.com is "AJAX" uh and what else... Well tons of stuff! You can do really exciting things with Ajax. Check out: http://vyk1.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!EBE3A761F939F926!1051.entry Top 126 Ajax Tutorials! --- Windows like Mac OS X? Yup sure! --- FlyakiteOSX does JUST THAT! I tried it, and while it isn't flawless, it just looks A LOT like Mac OS X! A recommended try out, especially to have fun on your friends! ;) Check it out at: http://osx.portraitofakite.com/ --- LAMP! I'm a LAMP! XAMPP IT! --- Nope, i'm not a lamp... i'm not even emitting any (green) light! Now i'm talking about (L)inux (A)pache (M)ySQL (P)HP/(P)erl, that's LAMP. Xampp is a very powerfull LAMP (dev) environment installer, truly couple clicks with your mouse gets you going! I totally recommend it, it had me developing on my new workstation in well under 10 minutes, instead of the 2 hours by manually installing all the components. Check it out: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html --- Final Words --- Well, that was quite a package? What do you think? I thought so, i'm glad you liked it! Like always, i like chatting with you guys on my spare time, so if you have MSN add me (my personal account) skaltura@czmb.net and let's have a chat! That way you'll have a direct way to give your ideas and feedback directly to who gets to decide about things! (Btw, czmb.net is my personal project... or hobby, and not by any means finished, polished, or anything else than experimental...) Oh yeah, if you don't wanna receive my (in)sane blabbering about what's been happening around, here and there, just direct your browser to http://www.artichost.net/awbs and login to change your settings! Now, let's go, and make ArticHost the dominating force in hosting industry! Oh yeah, you can also find this from: http://www.artichost.net/ah%20october.txt