This week I will mostly be getting my head around the following;
I will be trying out some of the latest features in the dev version of Netbeans (including rectangular selection, something I have yearned for for a while).
I will also attempt to finish the excellent Design for Hackers
Recently I had to move all my websites from one provider to another, this is always a bit of a pain and I held off on it for a long time. The reason I finally had to move though was because about 2 months ago one of my sites started acting very sluggish, it was experiencing high load and as a result all sites on my VPS were being quite unresponsive and I was getting a couple of hours of downtime a day – not acceptable.
I spoke to the hosts to see if there was anything they would suggest, I explained how I was unhappy with the amount of downtime given all sites are straightforward CMS driven sites with optimisations in place to try and reduce server load. They said the only way forward was to move to a cloud based server, which I agreed to and paid for.
Pretty much from the day and hour of the move things were not right with my sites, the main site on my server is a football betting site that received around 7000 hits a day – nothing massive, but enough that I don’t want to lose them! The load on the server was at a constant 4 when it was idle (the lowest I every saw it was at 2.3 and that was with Apache and MySQL turned off) and during times of any traffic it would shoot up to around 13-15, crashing out when it hit around 17.
As I say, this went on for a couple of months, almost daily I was onto support for one thing or another trying to get this resolved, I ended up shelling out for more RAM and all through this I kept on asking them what the issue could be and kept on getting told it was just the Footy Tipster getting too much traffic. I must have had 30 conversations being told the exact same non-information over and over again.
Anyway, long story short I have now moved hosts onto a smaller and cheaper server and the load barely hits 1, sites are responding in times you would expect and my general stress level has decreased. A massive thanks to Big Wet Fish for that!
That is some background, now onto my open letter.
Dear EUKHost,
Since you failed to respond to any of my emails that included the following I figured I would post it publicly and allow you to respond via the comments;
I am moving things away from eUKHost because over the past couple of months I have received a sub-standard service which has cost me money, both in terms of having to spend more of it, and lost revenue from my websites.
I have a list of things that have happened;
I genuinely feel I have been wronged by your service – I have been a member of yours for several years and even convinced a company I worked for to buy a dedicated host with you guys, what the hell has happened.
You need to sort out your support system to allow you to see old tickets so you don’t cover old ground again and again.
I am not the first customer who has left due to shitty service, and I certainly won’t be the last.
Thanks,
Toby Osbourn
This post was prompted by the fact I wanted to leave a status update and couldn’t immediately figure out where.
That is mental, I shouldn’t have to think about being social online and where I should be doing it, something needs sorted.
I think the reason I have issues with where to put stuff is because up until now I pretty much post to whichever networks I find the most convenient at that time. Which is messy to say the least and leaves my Facebook friends with a stream of tech articles when (most of them) aren’t techie types.
Some people link all three together, so you post to one place and it posts to them all. I used to do this but have grown to dislike it, a lot of people have profiles on all three places and if you see the exact same thing posted three times at the same time in three different places it starts to look like spam.
So, as from right now this is how I am going to break my usage down.
Twitter is going to be used mainly to find interesting links / snippets from people in my industry and people with similar interests to me and to post (hopefully) interesting links / snippets to my followers.
Google+ is going to be used for personal rants and to keep in touch with most of the people I know online, also for sharing interesting content I find from other people on Google+
Facebook is going to be used to keep in touch with friends who aren’t on Google+ and to maintain the Pages I administer on there. There are also a couple of groups I want to be more active in on there, so I will maybe start doing that.
I think that makes sense.
By the way, did you know you can follow me on Twitter, add me on Google+ and friend me on Facebook? You do now!
Has anyone else put thought into what they post to what social network? Would love to hear your thoughts.
If you are a tech (chances are, if you are here, you are) then you probably already have access to Google+
If not I have a load of invites to give away, feel free to use one and pass the link around;
https://plus.google.com/i/MVajf87nnzk:8IP5yMBNc0A
If you have been living under water for the last while, it is essentially a social networking site much like Facebook. It is pretty neat and you should give is a whirl if you haven’t already.
My profile on there is – Toby Osbourn
If you write content for the web you should take steps to let Google know you are the owner of the content.
Among other things it helps to create a more semantic, connected web – this is a good thing.
Once you have that in place it is fairly easy to then get your profile information to display beside Google results, this includes your image, which I have read can improve click through rate.
The exact steps will vary depending on the CMS or content you are providing but here they are in basic terms;
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