It’s going to be a new year in a few more days. Similar to what I have done last year, I think it will be worthwhile to look back what I have done over here in 2008.

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: 3 June 2009

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),

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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
• 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 Nginx, 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.