The cloud isn’t for everyone

We often have to research and spec out hosting setups for clients and almost everytime the current hosting buzz word crops up: Cloud. Most of the time clients tell me they want cloud but they don’t know why, or worse – their reasoning is flawed.

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Posted in General
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WordPress, HTTPS, CDN and W3 Total Cache – Take 2

I’ve previously mentioned some of the workarounds of using the excellent W3 Total Cache plugin with a CDN and utilising HTTPS on some pages. The heart of the matter is that some CDN providers do not provide Custom HTTPS support out of the box or do but with a normally large monthly fee attached,

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Posted in HOWTO's, Performance & Optimisation, Tutorials
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A new lick of paint

Well as you can see, things look a little different around here! It has taken an exceptionally long time to get this out the door primarily because we prefer to focus on our clients when they need us rather than delay them longer than necessary when support issues come in.

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Use WordPress and Gravity Forms to submit a ticket to Sirportly

We recently moved our support system from Zendesk to Sirportly as its a cheaper and much cleaner and simpler solution. what i’ve been trying to do for sometime now is to be able to have a form on our site for general contact queries (as well as an old fashioned email address) that would log a ticket in a seperate channel on the support system,

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Posted in HOWTO's, Tutorials
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WordPress, HTTPS, CDN and W3 Total Cache

I’ve worked with a few sites recently that use HTTPS to secure certain parts of there site and also a couple of pages here are SSL protected due to the data captured. If you use the W3 Total Cache plugin like I do, and I really recommend that you do if you have a wordpress site,

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Posted in General, Security
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Nginx and SSL – PHP Redirect Loops

Small post, I’ve been struggling a little with getting ssl to work reliably with https. specifically relating to the following piece of code:

[code]fastcgi_param   HTTPS   on;[/code]

Lets wind back, I can get HTTPS working with nginx no problem and the above provided I do the following,

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Posted in HOWTO's, Performance & Optimisation
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Review: VPS.net

Its been a little while so why not start by writing a review 🙂 as a shameless disclaimer this is motivated by VPS.net’s offer of a free node for life over on there blog, eagle eyed readers may notice that I have previously blogged about them before:

http://antsomerset.co.uk/2009/09/29/vps-net-thoughts-and-review-kinda/
http://antsomerset.co.uk/2010/06/22/vps-net-9-months-in/
http://antsomerset.co.uk/2010/09/19/vps-net-san-2-0-early-thoughts/

I’ve used VPS.net in various guises over the last 2 years,

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Alternative’s to Cpanel: Webmin

I’m going to start a mini series of posts here called Alternatives to Cpanel, first you might ask why not Cpanel and its worth pointing out that Cpanel is arguably one of the most popular and most comprehensive control panel solutions for web hosting out there, it might not be good for some people or some use cases the first of which that comes off the top of my head is using Nginx (pronounce it Engine-X) instead of Apache.

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Posted in General, Reviews
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Choosing the Right Host

Customer support, or customer failure?

A good web host has good customer and technical support departments. People often believe that if their web host offers 24/7 support, their support is good. Often, this is not the case. Why? Put it this way; would you like to be working a night shift with your eyes droopy,

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Posted in General


HOWTO: Upgrade Debian Lenny (5.0) to Debian Squeeze (6.0) on Rackspace Cloud Servers

I recently posted on how to update Debian for vps.net servers and its intricacies, I have since been able to document the process for Rackspace and this guide also works for Virtuozzo or OpenVZ VPS’ where you don’t have direct control over the kernel from your VPS so here goes.

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Posted in HOWTO's, Tutorials
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