"It can happen anywhere, at any time. You’re doing your job, minding your own business, and it suddenly dawns on you: you’re the company’s webmaster."
--Shane Schick, "Accidental webmasters rejoice – help is on the way", GlobeandMail.com, September 5, 2007
A few months ago I mentioned that I was hosting my site using a "budget shared hosting plan through my reseller site which is comparable to the hosting plans offered by GoDaddy". In that same article, I also mentioned that although I prefer to run my sites on a Virtual Private/Dedicated Server (VPS/VDS), I wanted to try experimenting with the cheap shared hosting plans despite the plans not offering full MySQL functions such as CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE. For the most part, my sites have been running fine on the shared hosting plans but I wanted better control (oh how I miss Linux command line via secure shell). So, I began searching for a better reseller hosting plan. Unfortunately, my search for the perfect reseller host plan still continues.
I thought my hosting requirements were pretty simple. I wanted a reseller hosting plan that provided CPanel, PHP5, MySQL5, secure shell, and a license to a client billing system such as ClientExec. Oh and I wanted to be sure the hosting plans provided were Drupal friendly. While I host more than just Drupal sites I've found that if the server is configured properly to run Drupal then it can run almost any other PHP-based CMS out there. All in all I wanted a shared hosting plan where I spent less time managing the server, yet had the controls I needed via a Linux shell. Simple enough right? In fact I thought I found a great reseller plan through ResellerZoom (RZ). However, after spending most of my weekend hours trying to work it all out, I've come to the conclusion I'm still looking for something that works better.
If the project leaders and users of your favorite content management system are still debating when they should drop PHP 4 support, it looks like the PHP development team has helped make that decision for them. PHP.net just announced the End of Life for PHP 4. Starting in 2008, only security updates on a case-by-case basis will be provided...and PHP 4 is dead in August 2008.
First, let me say thank you for everyone that stops by to reads my blog as well as seeing the latest articles I bookmark on content management systems. You people are the greatest and this has been a very fun year for me! Secondly, let me say you may not be able to read this post through the weekend.
I'm currently in the process of moving CMS Report and some other sites I manage to a new VPS. The original reason for the change was to move my sites off of a legacy version of Linux (Fedora Core 2). However, I'm also making the server change because of too much bleeding edge experimentation by yours truly that has brought my server's stability into question. Believe it or not, a reboot of the server doesn't fix everything!
When I originally started hosting my own sites on a server (VPS/VDS), I opted for the easy way to manage those sites by using an online control panel. I originally started with Plesk but eventually moved to cPanel. cPanel at the time seemed to be the control panel everyone was talking about. However, I quickly found that although I liked cPanel it seemed to be dated by the fact that its primary web server support was for Apache 1.x. Support for Apache 2.x was promised in the next version of the control panel, cPanel 11, so I waited patiently for its arrival.
This past week saw updates for both Wordpress and Wordpress MU. While both open source packages are blogging applications they are not quite the same software. Wordpress MU is intended to run up to hundreds of thousands of blogs with a single install of WordPress. Hence the MU in Wordpress MU stands for Multi-User.
A security update is available in both branches of Wordpress as 2.1.3 and 2.0.10.
Michael Kaply has been writing a series of articles on how to deploy Firefox 2 within the Enterprise. I wrote last year that one of the difficulties of deploying Firefox and Thunderbird in the enterprise was the lack of tools Mozilla provided for deploying the software. I'm happy to say that Kaply's articles do a fairly good job on providing some solutions for those organizations that need to manage a large network of clients. Kaply's original intent is to cover the following topics regarding deployment of Firefox 2 within the enterprise:
As we mentioned earlier, phpBB.com was down due to drive failures on their RAID system. Late Sunday evening, phpBB.com not only brought their site back online, but also redesigned their site. An announcement was posted in phpBB's forum explaining the details.