hosting

New Blog Host & Face-lift


Just a quick post to say I have finally moved away from my old hosting on WebFusion and now im on the cheaper (and hopefully) more reliable hosting by STRATO.

Its the first time I have had hosting on a windows machine and I must say I really like it. I feel much more at home on a windows machine, I know where everything is and im more familiar in a graphical OS. I had a couple of permissions problems related to uploading new images on wordpress but a quick Google turned up this post:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/weird-permissions-with-iis7-and-uploaded-images

Apparently WordPress sticks new uploads in the c:\windows\temp directory, before it moves them to the usual \wp-content\ folder, so you have to ensure that temporary folder has the correct permissions for IIS_IUSRS too else it wont work correctly when the file is moved to the content folder.

You may also notice that I have decided to give the blog a little face-lift too with a new theme. I decided this time to go for a paid theme, as they aren’t that expensive (compared to hosting costs) and the quality and customization with paid themes are go much better than their free counterparts. I found it on the excellent themeforest site, the theme is called PixelPower.

Anyways if you find any broken links or anything off with the site then let me know!

mikecann.co.uk moved.. again.. too!

Well as my previous post was about how I had moved my personal presence I thought I would mention the move of my virtual presence too.

For a while I have been hosting my sites on Slicehost, and things having been going okay. Slicehost however is a basic VPS that simply gives you root access and then you are expected to know what to do next. I spent a long time setting it up in the beginning following various tutorials. I learnt alot of Linux along the way but unfortunately I dont think im ever going to have the time to learn enough to maintain this box, especially now that I have 7 domains of my own and am hosting two by other people.

So I recently started looking for a better solution. Thats when my partner in crime olip.co.uk recommendation that I checkout Web Fusion, so I did and was mightily impressed. For a very similar price to Slicehost I get a much bigger box with much more features, and ofcourse the awesome Plesk 9.0 admin tool.

So the last few days I have been moving over, its gone pretty smooth but there have been a coupple of growing pains, which others may wish to learn from:

Shared Rather Than Exclusive Hosting

If you wish to be able to create new clients using Plesk then allow those clients to create domains you must remember to set your VPS as “shared” rather than “exclusive” right at the beginning before doing anything. I found out the hard way that if you make domains on an “Exclusive” IP VPS then you can no longer set that IP as “shared” and therefore clients cannot make domains. The solution I was forced to take was to ring support (which was generally helpful, ive seen worse *cough* BT *cough*) and they were able to sort it for me.

Mod_Rewrite and .htaccess

This blog is wordpress and I wanted the pretty perma-links that WordPress is capable of so http://www.mikecann.co.uk/about/ rather than http://www.mikecann.co.uk/?page=about. To achieve this I tried many different things before I hit on the correct solution which was to use FTP to modify the permissions on the httpdocs folder to 777 then go to the perma-links section of the WordPress settings and allow WordPress to setup .htaccess for me! I then just went back and changed the permissions back to 750, simples!

 Scroll to top