Wood and Wire

I’ve been using US-based DreamHost as a web hosting provider for 3 months now and it has been a uniquely enjoyable experience.

I’ve been building web sites since 1993, and I’ve used upwards of 20 different hosting companies during that time, so I’ve experienced most of the things that can go wrong with a hosting provider, so it’s a joy to have finally found a company that seems to have got it right. I am now in the process of moving all my sites to DreamHost (including this blog as of yesterday), and recommending them to all my clients. In the interests of full and frank disclosure, I should point out that DreamHost offer a particularly generous referral program (such that if you follow one of my links to them and buy server space I score cash!) and that has prompted me to write this public review, rather than just verbally referring my clients to them - which I would be doing anyway.

What I was looking for in a host:

• The ability to administer many domains on one account (DH has no limits)
• Many MySQL instances (once again unlimited on DH)
• PHP4 and PHP5
• Ruby on Rails
• Plenty of cheap storage (I serve many GB of video to my corporate clients)
• Shell access (DH offers this via SSH)
• A powerful control panel

DreamHost offers all of this in spades, as well as somehow managing to be one of the cheapest services.

I had resisted the DreamHost hype for quite a while. Their advertising always seemed a bit tacky and “too good to be true”. I assumed that by promising so much for so little they had probably oversold their server capacity resulting in a service that runs slow and fails often. Nevertheless I signed up as a trial (they have a 97 day money-back guarantee), and I’m glad I did.

The service provides everything they promised plus a few pleasant surprises:

• Their control panel is the best I have ever used (I was initially sceptical that they didn’t offer the industry-standard CPanel)
• The server I am on seems very fast (at least faster than any other shared host I have used)
• There seems to be a strong sense of community among their users which they actively encourage. I get the impression that they are also quite responsive to feedback from that community.
• Little things keep impressing me – for example their one-click install of WordPress was upgraded to version 2.0 on the same day it went final.
• They keep improving the service – a few days ago they announced that they were increasing everyone’s disk allowance x4 and bandwidth allowance x8.

I don’t know what their tech support is like since I haven’t had to use it once.

Update: DreamHost have a special offer on their “Code Monster” plan. For an unspecified limited time, you can get a stonking great 60GB of storage and 1.6TB/month of bandwith for only US$15.95/month. What’s more your allowances increase weekly (by 480MB and 16GB respectively). This is the deal I’m now on and already I’m up to 101GB/2.8TB!

Welcome to the new WordPress 2.0 powered Wood and Wire.

Being a glutton for punishment, I decided to simultaneously upgrade my blogging software, change my blog design (using the fabulous, but still a bit beta/dodgy K2 theme), and move to a new web host at the same time as moving offices!

Anyway, it seems to be working reasonably well – I just need to fix some pages that don’t quite validate, and solve a weird display problem on the new archives page. Let me know what you think of the new design, as I’m still tweaking it and I could do with some feedback.

Update (2 hours later): I decided K2 is still a bit too flaky for regular use, so I’ve reverted to my old design — a hacked version of Clemens Orth’s Relaxation 3-column theme. In addition to the issues mentioned above I discovered that K2 goes completely pear shaped when viewed in IE for Mac (and I still have a number of regular readers stuck on OS9 who still use IE). I also noticed some weird rendering when I tested it in IE/Win, so I thought I’d can it for now. I’ll keep an eye on the project though, as I think it will be really good once the bugs are ironed out.

I’ve just uploaded 42 photos Ingrid took of the New Year’s Day bushfires at Woy Woy (NSW Central Coast). We were staying at the family weekender which is just a few hundred metres across the water from the fires at Phegan’s Bay. You can see the full set at Flickr.

I won’t bother describing the fires as Spike from Woy Woy has done an excellent job of recounting the day’s events on his This Isn’t Sydney blog. He’s also got some great photos.

I spent much of last night sitting on the end of the jetty watching houses burn across the bay. It was an unforgettable sight — if you were able to ignore the tragedy it was actually chillingly beautiful. In the morning, however, the tragedy was all too evident.

My good friend Moses Aaron is an author and storyteller. In his spare time (which seems to be plentiful) he is a logolept, verbivore, paronomaniac, and logodaedalus. Recently he mentioned to me that he had “tested” Google by searching for several known but very obscure words, but had not received any legitimate responses.

My immediate response was “why don’t you put them in the Google index”. He had no idea how that could be done, so I offered to do it myself as a demonstration of the democracy and immediacy of the web.

So here we go:

mooftah

a man who sniffs women’s bicycle seats

quibblequork

to winge or kvetch in a pathetic manner

quibblequorkist

one who quibblequorks

While we’re on the topic, here are some web sites that might appeal to Moses and his ilk:

• The Phrontistery and in particular its Compendium of Lost Words
• Luciferous Logolepsy
• Dictionary of Difficult Words
• A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia
• Weird Words
• Curious Words and Phrases

Things I did since I last posted:

1. Got enough sleep for the first time in 2005
2. Ate too much
3. Hung out with the people I love most
4. Enjoyed air-conditioning (the temperature in Woy Woy where I was staying on xmas eve hit 41°C)
5. Saw The Chronicles of Narnia — for the most part this helped me catch up on my sleep (while enjoying air-conditioning with the people I love most), but I did wake up in time to see how hot the White Witch was. By the end of the movie I was barracking for the wrong team.
6. Marvelled at the web-standards compliant beauty of the Kutztown University Communication Design Department web site
7. Marvelled at the stupid-brilliant audacity of the Million Dollar Home Page and tried to come up with a similarly naff money-making gimmick of my own
8. Came up with a similarly naff money-making gimmick which I might get around to trying out next year
9. Had a good play with Wayfaring.com’s very slick interface to the Google Maps API, and wondered if it might actually be useful for something
10. Played the guitar
11. Played the mandolin
12. Wished I had an Irish bouzouki
13. Spent an hour pondering the Long Emergency
14. Started reading Good Morning Midnight by Reginald Hill
15. Compulsively watched every additional feature on the 2-disc 24 Hour Party People DVD
16. Decided I quite like the Happy Mondays after all
17. Tried not to think about 2006

Rick Eyre has posted a lucid and detailed eyewitness account of Sunday’s riots by Benjamin Amy, a Cronulla resident who was there as a bystander. As a first-hand account from someone outside the media, I think it deserves to be read far and wide.

My last post about the Cronulla riots prompted some soul searching — why was I so much more disturbed by the actions of a violent mob of 5,000 white Australians, than I had been by the violence of 4 Lebanese gang members a week earlier? (more…)

I found the news of the race riots in Cronulla depressing and alarming - yet another symptom of Australia’s slow inexorable slide towards a new kind of fascism. Like most Australians, I want to believe that “it couldn’t happen here”, but it’s getting harder to sustain that idea. (more…)

It’s a great relief to be back in production on The Pure Drop, after a hiatus of about a year. We’re hoping to have a first (skeletal) version of the site online by Christmas, and aiming for launch mid-2006.

The best news is we’ve just signed up Reg Mombassa of Mambo, Mental As Anything and Dog Trumpet fame to do graphics for the site.

Reg is a wonderful man to work with — probably the least precious artist I have ever met. And he lives just around the corner!

Just uploaded another 30 or so snapshots from last year’s Pure Drop film shoot in Europe to my Flickr account. Most of this batch are from Iceland, including some good shots of Sigur Rós in concert. The guys were very accommodating, actually letting us film from the side of the stage, so we got some good angles.

By the way, if you want to see some truly great photos of Iceland, go to Pascal Fellonneau’s wonderful Iceland Image Bank site. Pascal has managed to perfectly capture the bizarre combination of funky scandinavian design and frontier town that typifies Reykjavik.