Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
The Birdhouse FAQs/How-Tos have been thoroughly updated to reflect the new cPanel hosting environment. Please let us know if there are questions you’d like to see answered in the How-Tos.
Dang, that was a big job. Documentation is always the least-fun aspect of any development job (which explains why documentation is so poor in so many open source apps). I think we’ve nailed the basics and beyond though…
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes covercopy.com: “Bookish tidbits in fits & starts,” by Justin Nisbet. Literary observations, publishing news… very tasteful design!
Also new: Anto Printing, a Berkeley-based print shop featuring top-notch offset and other printing services.
Birdhouse Hosting is proud to announce the launch of its brand-new, completely redesigned hosting site, along with all-new pricing and features for hosting customers. All Birdhouse users will be automatically upgraded to the new hosting packages as their accounts are migrated to the new server. We’ve also added a new business-level “Plan D” super package for gonzo users. All accounts now come with full-featured cPanel account management access, plus a big bump in the number of email addresses, lists, databases, etc. per plan. It’s like Christmas in April.
Birdhouse is in the middle of an ongoing transition to a new server. As of tonight, I’ve moved about half of our customer domains over, and all is well. Tonight I moved birdhouse.org (and hosting.birdhouse.org) to the new box (pardon our dust if you stopped by during the transition; had to fix a few paths in the blog).
Multiple reasons for the transition:
One is speed; the new server is beefier, studlier, mas macho. Just moving from a 1.7GHz Celeron to a 2.4GHz P4 doesn’t sound that dramatic, but try commenting — we’ve gained about 5x performance in some operations. Still 1 GB RAM, still redundant 80 GB drives.
Another is ease of use (both for me and for customers). Control panels are becoming the norm for consumer hosting, and we didn’t have one. By moving into a truly massive datacenter (20,000 servers, anyone?), we’re able to piggy back on economies of scale – we’re now using cPanel/WHM for most account management tasks (sadly replacing all of the blood sweat and tears, home-brew shell and PHP scripts I had built to manage the old server). Same goes for Urchin stats to augment awstats, which we provide now (awstats will remain the main stats package). Same goes for the Fantastico über-installer (customers can now set up their own galleries, guest books, and weblogs rather than relying on me…)
Another is email. I’ve grown to truly love CommuniGate Pro. It’s fast, it’s solid, it’s supported, it’s used by some of the biggest ISPs in the industry. But I pay per-seat for the CGP license, and Stalker recently doubled their fees (“focusing on the enterprise, blah blah blah”). If you’ve ever wondered why some hosts offer 30 email addresses where Birdhouse offers 3, now you now. As a small host, I can’t afford to compete without doing everything open source. cPanel will allow me to offer a butt-load more addresses per customer, and provides integrated mail management for customers so I don’t have to provision and customize accounts for them. That’s groovy, but not without a downside — I’m spoiled by the completeness of CGP by now, and have been less-than-impressed at the comparative absence of controls in cPanel that Stalker builds in, and annoyed by certain assumptions cPanel makes. But overall, this move is a big win for Birdhouse mail users — more accounts, more user-level control, better customer interfaces. Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you.
The cPanel system works so differently than from a vanilla server that it’s been impossible to move everyone over en masse, so I’m transitioning one account at at time. We’ll get there soon, and I’ll be able to breathe again. Famous last words.
At long last, added a Terms of Service document to the Birdhouse signup process. Wanted to keep legalese out of it as much as possible, and common sense in. What I ended up with was cobbled together from multiple sources (all of which I found to be in wide usage), with my own modifications plus contributions on Harassment and Background Processes from mneptok.
Have recently noticed a huge uptick in the amount of non-English (especially Chinese) spam, which slips through the SpamAssasin nets much more readily than English spam (at least it does in most Western SA setups; not sure how different things are for, say, Chinese hosts).
Turns out you can tell SpamAssassin to give higher ratings to messages written in languages other than those you’ve explicitly sanctioned. Higher ratings mean more likelihood of messages getting tossed to /dev/null or saved in a junk box. In your local.cf or user_prefs, just add:
ok_languages en de la th sv
(e.g.) to accept messages in English, German, Latin, Thai, and Swedish. Full list of language codes here. Works a treat.
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes German Camera Productions:
Brent Huffman is a former student of the documentary filmmakers Julia Reichert, Jim Klein, and Steven Bognar, responsible for the Academy Award nominated human rights films Seeing Red and Union Maids. Brent Huffman has been making documentaries in the cinema verite style about human rights violations and social issues for seven years in Ohio, California, Afghanistan, China, Haiti, and Puerto Rico.
Huffman’s latest production is Welcome to Warren, an “uncensored and intimate examination of Warren Correctional Institution in Southern Ohio.
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes dissemination.org, a collaborative weblog headed up by Eddan Katz, Executive Director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Still using default MT templates, but it’s a good read.
Before I continue, I must disclose that this past Halloween, I dressed up as an emoticon. It was quite by accident as it turns out, but I went as a sleazy patriotic emoticon. I was on my way back to New Haven from New York and I stopped in a costume store around Union Square on Hallows Eve scavenging for something to wear, when I found a puffy round smiley that seemed just right. Seeming not to be quite enough, I decided to add an American flag eye mask to my outfit, and a cheap clip-on toupee. At that point and on my ride up the Metro-North, I considered myself a smiley face, but it was’t until halfway through the evening that someone suggested to me the explanation that I was an emoticon. The experience made me curious about the history of the emoticon and impressed upon me a possible connection to its 60s Smiley progenitor.
Dissemination has actually been running on birdhouse for a while; just realized I had never announced it!
I’ve added a new Environment category to this weblog, though I haven’t gone through the entire history of posts and added historical entries to it.
Also moved the birdhouse server status subdomain off my home Mac (so I can set it to sleep when unused). Wrapped it in a much more attractive WordPress template while I was at it. Thanks mneptok for hosting the new status server.
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes NewWest.net.
New West is a network of online communities devoted to the culture, economy, politics, environment and overall atmosphere of the Rocky Mountain West.
NewWest is our first client to be hosted on an independent, dedicated server separate from the main Birdhouse shared server. Their site is driven by the excellent Expression Engine content management system.