ProBlogger.net reported Idol Blogger got kicked out from shared host due to exceesive resource usage. Duncan Riley responded with his own experience with shared webhosting, which is quite an interesting read. Basically he went through several shared hosts, ranged from $6-$10/month budget hosting to $22/month Site5’s “premium account”, when his blog network grew over the last few years.

I had a problem with Lighttpd and PHP on the default Gentoo install. The configuration that comes with Gentoo, and the “official recommendation” use bin-ath in the mod_fastcgi to point to PHP’s CGI executable.

Josh Jones of DreamHost wrote about the truth of overselling. A great and insightful article, with an obvious bias towards DreamHost, the web hosting company that introduced 20Gb storage + 1Tb bandwidth for budget hosting at the beginning of this year. In this blog entry he talked about why “overselling” is the only feasible business practise for web hosting companies, and how DreamHost handles these issues.

BlueHost seems to be quite a reputable web hosting company. They are young (less than 3 years old). Their banners can be seen almost everywhere. 15Gb storage + 400Gb bandwidth for less than 7 bucks a month. Secure Shell is enabled (but probably jailed). Great service reviews, and even the sucks test did not bring up anything too disturbing. Moreover, their CEO Matt Heaton has a blog.

Spammers — they do not always have something to sell. And this morning my previous post on DreamHost promo/discount code has been spammed, by someone trying to post their own promo code that saves only $90 for new registrants of DreamHost (instead of maximum $97).

A few days ago I upgraded/emerged MySQL installation on my Unixshell Gentoo box from 4.1.14 to 4.1.19. As it emerges, it also replaced the default configuration file and now uses utf8 as the default encoding to database and client libraries. I also re-emerged dev-lang/php-5.1.4, and it turned out all my unicode on PHP sites are broken! PHP pulls junks out from the database and can’t display them. Meanwhile, anything unicode you put in there becomes a series of question marks ???? in the rendered page.

One of the first thing I look for in Un*x/Linux shared hosting is, whether the host provides Secure Shell (SSH) access. As the hosting market becomes more competitive, more and more budget hosts start to provide this feature. However, many, especially ones under big names like GoDaddy and Yahoo, do not offer this essential feature as part of their package.

But what is so essential about SSH?

Saw this special on WHT from Server Axis. You get the entire month of May free when you quote a promo code when signing up their Xen Opteron Virtual 1 or 2 plan for $30 or $45 per month.

DreamHost discovered the dirty laundry of web hosting review sites. Very interesting read. Great revelation right from those in the industry on the dark secrets of all those reviewe sites as well. What have I learnt?

Note: This is a re-post of this same-titled entry on my blog.

I wrote this quite a while ago on Whirlpool forum over a debate on Australian verses overseas (usually US-based) web hosting. Thread has since been closed (not my fault :) but I think I will jog down my thoughts here, looking at what is the most suitable web hosting solution for Aussies.

This is the first blog post on HostingFu, a new blog/website that is intended to document my experience with web hosting.