I was interviewed by Stefano Bellasio from HostingTalk.it. Big thanks to them for interviewing me on blogging about the web hosting industry. It was a bit unexpected as I am not even in the hosting industry and am just writing reviews (and rants) on my attempts trying to host some of my own projects. But I guess as an outsider I can provide a different point of view than those in the industry.

Stefano actually asked a few good questions that I still not have put much thoughts in. For example DreamHost delegates some email hosting to Google — which I think is actually a good thing (although many in the industry don’t agree). It also reminded me that I need to spend a bit more time on this blog. However with wife, 2 kids, full-time dev job + a few websites to manage, HostingFu has unfortunately been stalling at the back of run-queue for a while. :(

Here is the Italian translation of the interview for those who are privileged to know the language.

Year 2007 has come and — it is almost gone. It has been an interesting year here at HostingFu, my blog on web hosting. This blog was created back in 2006 when I was looking around for web hosting providers to host some of my hobby projects. 100+ posts here later, playing around with hosting accounts actually became the hobby itself! My main obsession has been virtual dedicated/private server hosting, which you can probably guess from all the VPS hosting related articles I have written. Well, I love the power of root, but (1) can’t afford the whole “real thing” (2) don’t have a big enough project to warrant the “real thing”. I guess I will be testing out more VPS hosting in 2008 then.

I have just realised that I have not written anything here for more than a week! Sorry I have really been busy, but let me assure you that this blog is still alive! Some of the things that I have recently been doing:

Last Updated: 16 June 2008

Why Advertise on HostingFu?

HostingFu.com is a web hosting related blog authored by Scott Yang, a software developer living in Australia. This blog focuses on different aspect of web hosting — shared hosting, VPS, hosting business, etc — from a software developer’s point of view, i.e. someone who is outside the industry.

This blog is read by others looking for web hosting reviews or related information, and it can be a great way to promote your service by advertising on HostingFu. Currently (as of June 2008),

• 500+ subscribers (source: FeedBurner)
• 11,000+ visitors and 17,000+ page views over last 30 days (source: Google Analytics)
• Page rank 4
• Alexa rank 156,767 3 month average

Banner Advertisement Packages

Banner advertisement on HostingFu are sold on CPM model (cost per 1,000 impressions). There are currently two spots where advertisers can place banner ads.

Minimum commitment is USD$20. You also get 15% more impressions allocated if you ordered $100 or more (which should get you around 3 months of top-centre banner placement if traffic level is constant).

Creatives can be in either JPEG/PNG/GIF or Flash format. Mild animation is allowed. Note if you are sending in a flash ads, please ensure you use clickTAG for tracking purposes. Ads will be served via Google Ad Manager.

I reserve the rights to refuse advertisement. All banner ads need to be manually examinated before going live.

Contact Us

Use the Contact form for further details.

Sunday evening. I sent an email to Unixshell billing with a request to terminate my account. A few email exchanges later, on Monday evening, my ex-7 month old Xen VPS stopped responding to ping, and I was no longer a Unixshell customer.

About HostingFu

I have been a user of the "web", since 1995. I have been authoring web pages and build web sites since 1996. I have been developing software applications that are delivered over port 80 soon afterwards — Perl, PHP, Java, Python, etc. Even my current job, which brings me bread and butter to feed my family, is focused on building a web-based software.

Sounds like I have been a veteran of the world wide web, but my experience with commercial web hosting has been very limited. In fact I have only had my very first shared hosting account in Oct 2005!

This is my journal on web hosting. I will be writing about this industry, tips on finding the right host, review of the hosts that I have been with, setting up servers, securing Linux boxes, and other web hosting related topics — from perspective of a software developer.

About Scott

My name is Scott Yang. I am a Christian, Taiwan-born Chinese from the mid-70's, Australian, husband, father, etc. I currently work as software architect for an Australian software company, developing web-based financial planning software. I usually blog random non-sense on my personal blog.

If you like to connect to me,

• Facebook Profile
• FriendFeed
• Jaiku Status
• LinkedIn Profile
• Twitter Status

Colophon

This website is currently hosted on a VPS at SliceHost, running Ubuntu Linux (see my review here). Webserver of choice is Lighttpd, running PHP 5.2 and MySQL 5.0. Current uptime is:

CMS is Drupal, with a hand-made theme. Drupal rocks. Need I say more?

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