At least nothing burned down…

Posted by Markus Langenfeld - 06/02/08 at 05:06:34 am

A Small OrangeWe made it! I essentially used up my entire weekend but this website along with the others I maintain and host are all moved over to A Small Orange. I can’t say it was easy, in fact I ran into some head scratching (and hair pulling) roadblocks along the way. However I’m fairly confident that the big issues are behind us, and it’s always reassuring to know that it could be worse.

I’m really digging A Small Orange so far. The support has been great, it’s reliable and they have some neat programs and tools set up for their customers that I haven’t seen before. In fact, I have a little something for you guys – If you’re in the market for affordable, reliable, web hosting you can save yourself $5 on your order by using coupon MARKOSENTME or 15% off with 15%FTW.

Also, although there are much better things to donate your money to, ASO has set me up with a donation link if you want to help out with my hosting costs… You know, if you’re into just giving away money.

I’ve already referred my work to ASO, so we can continue development on the new company website. In other words, don’t be surprised if I mention them more often as I’m sure I’ll run into more headaches that tend to come with any development project.

Explosion at The Planet’s H1 Data Center

Posted by Markus Langenfeld - 05/31/08 at 08:05:24 pm

I got an interesting email tonight, apparently there was an electrical fire at The Planet’s H1 data center in Houston Texas. According to some sources there was an actual explosion powerful enough that it knocked down walls in an equipment room. So far there are no reports of damage to servers or networking equipment but power is offline at the facility and approximately 9000 websites are affected. This will surely be all over the tech news websites by morning.

Here is the official release that was sent to The Planet clients -

Dear Valued Customers,

In the interest of keeping you updated, tonight at 5:45 p.m. here in Houston, a transformer in our H1 data in Houston caught fire, which required us to take down all generators as instructed by the fire department. All servers in the H1 data center are down, as is our ServerCommand customer portal, which are working to move to another data center.

None of our other data centers are affected.

Our management team and facilities staff are on site evaluating the situation. In our latest assessment, we have determined that networking gear has not been damaged, but we are without power so assessments continue. All disaster recovery systems are in motion, and we have teams already working in the data center.

We are posting messages in our forum, in Orbit and on our customer support phone system.

We appreciate your patience. We are working around the clock to resolve these critical issues.

From Silicon Valley to The ATL, we’re moving.

Posted by Markus Langenfeld - 05/30/08 at 10:05:59 am

In between my ever expanding daily routine at work and trying to keep up with everything going on in life - I’ve been moving websites all week to a brand new web host. I recently expressed my dissatisfaction for Media Temple (MT), and although I’ve been in contact with MT management since then, and they did their best to make up for the many problems I’ve had with their services, I just don’t feel that they are living up to my expectations in terms of reliability and value. However, this might not be good bye forever. The upcoming developments at MT sound very exciting and I really hope that they iron all of the little issues before it’s released. If they do it right the next time around there’s a good chance I could come back, but for now I’m able to get a competitive plan with solid customer support for half the price and I’m not about to pass it up.

After shopping around and actually signing up with and trying a couple different hosts I’ve decided to choose A Small Orange as the new home for my little internet empire. So far A Small Orange (ASO) has offered very quick support and a few nice features I was missing with MT. The pricing is very competitive but most importantly they are already offering very reliable service. ASO’s data center is located in the state-of-the-art AtlantaNAP Colocation Facility in Atlanta, Georgia. Just for the record, Media Temple’s data center is in 365 Main’s new El Segundo, California facility.

Anyways, this entry will be my last with Media Temple. When I return (hopefully everything will return) later this weekend I will be bringing you my captivating ramblings from my new home.

Time to say my goodbyes to (mt)

Posted by Markus Langenfeld - 05/21/08 at 08:05:17 am

It’s been a rough ride Media Temple. I’ve put up with you guys for almost 2 years now and since I’ve signed up I waited patently through one false promise after another in hopes that you would finally work out all of the bugs and glitches that come with your Grid Service, once and for all.

I’ve paid a lot of money for your services, a lot of hard earned money, and I did nothing but promote and praise your company. It almost brings a tear to my eye as I sip my morning brew out of my Media Temple coffee mug to think about actually moving everything to a new host. But that will be my big project this holiday weekend.

You guys are supposed to be the best, you host countless top notch designers and big name bloggers and granted many of them are not on the Grid, I almost wish they were so they could see what’s going on. Daily downtime. DAILY, even if it’s just for a minute or two we pay a premium price for premium hosting that should never go down. Why are there so many problems? I know you know how bad it is, look at your status blog once, you guys don’t even bother apologizing for the intermittent problems anymore – “DOWN: 10:15AM Pacific Time, UP: 10:25AM Pacific Time” That’s it, what is that?!

When is it going to get better? When will my website be online for a month or even a week straight without a hiccup? And why is everything so freakin’ slow?

Your support is amazing, the various features and flexibility of the system is unmatched. But none of that matters if you can’t provide what matters most, Uptime.

Don’t make me do this.

Posted by Markus Langenfeld - 05/16/08 at 03:05:44 pm

I’ve been having a lot of problems with Media Temple lately. In a given day there could be multiple short instances of downtime, last month I actually risked losing advertising money because of it. Media Temple is supposed to be one of the best hosting providers there is, I mean they host countless big time designers, bloggers, and corporations. All of a sudden the Grid-Service is becoming a very unreliable product and it’s forcing me to shop around and explore my options.

I’m not totally decided on moving my internet empire just yet, but I’ve been on a few comparison websites to gather reviews for some of the other big names in the industry. One website I have checked out is WebHostingRating.com, they have a list of the top rated web hosting providers along with a massive articles section containing information for everything from windows web hosting to cPanel tutorials. The articles are nice because you can learn about the different options that are important to your web presence, making for an educated decision on your next web host.

Anyways, I might stay where I’m at for now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I find myself a better deal in the near future.

Give the gift of web hosting.

Posted by Markus Langenfeld - 12/08/07 at 11:12:11 pm

Jon Lee just blogged about this new offer from MediaTemple but I thought I would mention it here as it is a good deal if you looking to get some premium web hosting for yourself or as a gift for someone this holiday season. Right now MediaTemple is offering ‘The Hosting Card’ which is the Grid-Service Lite plan and a free domain name for only $95.00 a year, that works out to just under $8.00 a month! Grid-Service Lite was a plan offered to some of the Shared Server (SS) customers when the Grid platform migration went down in 2006. I’m actually surprised that MediaTemple is actually marketing (gs) Lite as it was sort of designed to be a “grandfathered in” deal.

I know I brag about MediaTemple all the time, but it’s all for good reason. They might not be ultra-cheap like some of the competition but the service and support is rock solid and very reliable. You can get more info on what (gs) Lite has to offer and grab yourself one of these new hosting cards by Clicking Here.

However, be sure to check out some of the other plans MediaTemple has to offer as they have a solution to suit every webmaster’s needs.

10 Reasons why MediaTemple Rocks my Socks.

Posted by Markus Langenfeld - 09/17/07 at 08:09:59 pm

Next month MarkLangenfeld.com will have been hosted with MediaTemple for a whole year. It feels like I just switched to them not long ago but maybe it just seems that way because I’m waiting to find a legitimate reason to go to another host as I’m normally never content with my hosting provider… Honestly I can only find reasons to praise their unbeatable service and recommend them to others.

10 Reasons why (mt) MediaTemple Rocks my Socks, Go! –

1. Prices. Plans starting at $20 a month may scare you away but did you know that most hosts out there actually oversell their services? It’s true, I’ve been in the business and I know how it all works. I’d say 60% of web hosting firms, especially the little no-name hosts don’t actually have the infrastructure to support all of their clients at full capacity and often go under rapidly after starting up. You get what you pay for and with MediaTemple you get a lot.

2. Reliability. I admit that MT was looking very bleak when I signed up. The uptime and reliability of the (at the time) brand new Grid Service (it was called Grid Server back then) platform was crap. But MT made good on their promises and they worked out most of the bugs. Don’t let the not-so-great reviews of the Grid scare you away. It’s overall reliable, very reliable.

3. Support. MediaTemple’s support is amazing, especially the telephone support. You will call in, sit on hold for a maximum for 5 minutes and a cool, friendly, knowledgeable representative will pick up the call and resolve whatever issues or questions you may have. The support ticket system could have a faster response time but it’s good enough for general questions. MT has 24/7/365 support. They don’t sleep, they don’t celebrate major holidays, and they don’t take vacations.

4. Features. MediaTemple is constantly adding new and innovative features to their lineup. The control panel system is nice and simple yet packed with everything you could ask for. Everything from 1-click installs to Rails containers, MT has it all.

5. Amazing. Take the last 4 reasons, multiply them by 2 then add 2 more and you will get 10 good reasons to switch to MediaTemple. Think I’m getting paid for this? Think again, although I do have a nice referral link, MediaTemple speaks for itself but don’t take my word for it, check out their own list of reasons for switching.

Learning Something New

Posted by Markus Langenfeld - 03/09/07 at 11:03:46 pm

Ruby on RailsFor a while now I’ve been wanting to get into a particular development platform and really focus on it. I’ve been a member at Dream.In.Code for nearly 6 years now and although I have learned just about everything I know when it comes to web development and programming from DIC, I still have a lot to learn to even consider calling myself a professional in any development field. I never wanted to be a “programmer” per-se; I’m not big into staring at code for hours at a time. However if I could find a language that’s very dynamic, fresh, and easy to work with and implement… I just might be able to learn it well enough to use it, professionally.

I’ve been toying with the idea of getting into Adobe ColdFusion. However the problem with CF is that it’s hard to come by a host that supports it these days. My current host, (mt) MediaTemple did support CF until they launched the (gs) Grid Server platform. Another problem with a language such as CF is that it’s very proprietary. It may be easy to work with but it seems the overall support and user base behind it would be very limited. So I was looking for something that was easy to get into, easy to use, and has a solid community backing it, also it would be helpful if my current webhost supported my new platform of choice.

I’ve been looking into Rails, namely Ruby and Ajax on rails and the amazing stuff that can be easily done by them. I really think it could be precisely what I’m looking for, I mean it’s a fresh newly adopted technology and (mt) just so happens to support ROR Bins. So this week I’ve been looking around on Amazon for a couple books I could pick up to dive into Ruby on Rails, I also joined Working With Rails a ROR resource and development community I came across. I mainly did it to set up a profile for later use, you can check that out Here.

I’m actually very interested to see how much I get into this, perhaps 5 years from now I’ll look back at this post and remember the start of my path to becoming a Ruby guru? I’ll stick to the ‘Ruby on Rails for Dummies’ for the time being.

If any of you have book suggestions, ROR resources you would like to share with me, Drop me a line.

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