The Computer Blog

Thursday, June 26, 2003

Nose to the Grindstone

I’ve had my nose to the grindstone for the last two days. I’m in the process of moving this website to a different hosting company. You would think that’s no big deal; but my old host uses Windows servers running IIS (Internet Information Service), and IIS lets you get away with some sloppy web page coding practices. (And using any Microsoft product to code introduces a lot of them.) My new service runs Unix servers, so little things like capitalization mean a lot. I’ve had to spend a lot of time manually tweaking code. While there’s still a lot more I could do, I have the site on the new host running well enough where I can get back to more of a “normal” life. Frankly, running a website can eat up your life. That’s something I only have so much time to invest in since I’m doing this for free (Actually, it costs me money to do this!)

I’ve been with my current webhost provider, WebPanache (webpan.com) for about five years. Maybe longer. I’ve been pretty happy with the server speed and uptime. But over time, the company has remained static. They’ve offered no cuts in pricing or new services. Worse, I have a problem with the site publication process every time I put up a significant amount of new material. A couple of days ago, after publishing new content to the site and making corrections to some old pages, the webserver my site was on would not update the content on a specific page no matter what I did. It took six hours of trying to fix and diagnose it and a full day and two e-mail arguments with the owner/operator to get them to reboot the server. (In fact, I diagnosed the problem for them!) IIS 4.0 and 5.0, it appears, has problems with updating its cache. This was the second time I had gone through this with the company, so I decided it was time to move. There were too many other webhosting companies offering better prices and better service.

I’m giving Apollo Hosting a try. So far, everything has been going fairly smoothly. Their servers seem to be a tad slower than Webpan’s, but they more than make up for that with the controls I have available to me, 24 hour online chat for support, and the ability to host three domains within a single account. That’s important to me right now since I’m launching a video editing business and plan on having a website for it up in the near future.

I’ve already requested the DNS change, and I’m just waiting for it to happen. Since the website material on both my old and new webservers is identical, I tagged the “old” website with the statement: “Note: This website is in the process of being moved!”. If you go to the home page for the AndyZone and that statement is not there, the change in webhosts has taken place.

Now, back to the real world…

As you probably know by now, Apple did announce their new G5 PowerMacs this week. Like everyone, I was impressed by what they showed. I believe without a doubt that they will sport significantly improved performance over the G4. But whether they are, as Apple has been claiming, the fastest personal computers available today remains to be seen. From past experience, I know that Apple often hypes their performance claims. Indeed, there is already discussion on the “Net” that Apple has done just that with the G5; and the people waging those arguments are far more knowledgeable than me. I’m going to reserve judgment for now. I’m waiting until the production machines are delivered and I see benchmarks from real users using industry standard benchmarks and real world applications.

Apple also bumped up their price points by $500. That puts their top end machine at $3000. That’s a lot of money for a small business owner or a home power user. Indeed, though I’d love to have a G5, adding $500 to the prices probably priced me out of considering one for now. Frankly, I like the design of the Mirrored Door Drive G4 PowerMac’s more and can make a case that having two slower dual-processor machines for $ $1400 less than it would cost for the dual processor G5) makes more business sense than going after a G5. Dual 1.25Ghz G4 MDD PowerMacs cost $1600. I am sooooo tempted…!

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