Tag Archives: Websites

Do You Charity Click?

I admit I have a serious problem with the overwhelming amount of vacuous and rehashed sites out there in Cyberland.  Unfortunately for me, I can’t complain too loudly as I am one of the offenders.  So in an attempt to make right and balance the karmic negatives from my offenses I like to highlight some of the gems out there.  My previous post was about Wolfram|Alpha which is a great way to gather high quality information.  This time, for the big moral boon I’m pulling out The Hunger Site.  It is likely you already know about them as they’ve been around since June of 1999.  So, if this is old news please consider this a gentle reminder.  If not, welcome to the world of charity clicks.

What is The Hunger Site?  To boil it down, its a means for anyone with an Internet connection and a few minutes a day to make the world a better place.  At The Hunger Site all it takes is one click to help feed the hungry, another click to help sponsor free mammograms and another click to help pay for child health care.  There’s three other clicks you can give with: help provide books for those in need, help protect endangered habitats and help with animal rescue.

6 clicks is all it takes to make a difference.  Well, it is more like 12 considering you’re moving from different pages.  I’ve done it for years and recently have passed the torch on.  My three year old daughter and I take time out every day to “help people”.  She knows the purpose of each page and who or what it is helping.   She likes hearing stories behind the images on the site and quite often she’ll make up her own stories and tell me about them.  We get a lot out of it by knowing we’re helping people and the extra bonus for us is additional quality time together.

So, if you have a few spare minutes and some of your clicks why not drop by and check them out?  I’d really like to hear of any other sites that are similar in nature and legit.  Anyone know of others?

The Search for Quality Information

Is it possible? Is it truly, really real and possible?

In case you haven’t already heard there is a very interesting and exciting ‘computational knowledge engine’ website on the Internet. The site is Wolfram|Alpha which launched May 15th of 2009. They have a lofty goal in mind.  To paraphrase, they mean to deliver any and all computable data and information to the masses.

Although some have touted Wolfram|Alpha as the next big search engine I believe it is exactly what they market it as: a computational knowledge engine. A computational knowledge engine is much different than a search engine.  A search engine grabs reams of existing pages and dumps them to a search result while the other computes specific information for the final result. To better understand in part what the computational knowledge engine does we can see some examples from the current search engines. To name a few, the calculator, mapping, distances, and language definitions.

What excites me about Wolfram|Alpha is the potential for high quality information. Wolfram|Alpha will gather good information from trusted sources, systematically compute it and only then provide you with the results. Our current crop of search engines typically grab mass amounts of pages or data from any and every source that may or may not have valid information.

What excites me is Wolfram|Alpha’s focus on starting with solid data and information. This helps resolve the problems that often occur with the current crop of search engines. The existing lack of quality control by current engines can be summarized perfectly with a term used in the IT world known as GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out. Wolfram|Alpha’s focus on good information in will translate to less time sorting through garbage results from bad sources. The assurance of quality results will save me a lot of stress, frustration and cut down my Aspirin expenses.

See Wolfram|Alpha computational knowledge engine in action at http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Examples of what it can do: http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/

Home, Home on the Host Monster.

After being neglected for some time umgy.com has a new homestead on a different host.  The previous host is not to blame for the neglect – that’s a different story and this is about why we’ve moved.

Over a year ago we (that’s Umgy and me and a few other sites) moved to Host Monster in what was supposed to be a temporary and cheap stop over.  I was looking for a more appropriate and affordable hosting package.  Life being what it is, mostly busy, we’re still with Host Monster (that’s me and the other sites, not Umgy).  Before I digress further, I’ll explain why we’ve moved and are trying a new hosting company.

First reason, with Host Monster being a budget hosting company that has one plan and no room for growth I wasn’t expecting the world.  With no way to grow to a VPS, dedicated server or reseller account I knew it wasn’t a long term relationship.  The response from my inquiry on such services also indicated they didn’t want me long term if I was needing more.  I do admit they offered a lot for the price.  Besides the standard features and almost unlmited everything I wanted PHP 5 which wasn’t on all hosts at the time.  They also support PostgreSQL and Ruby, both of which I was interested in playing with.  The support for telnet access was important to me as well.  They do continue to move with the times and are now offering Python in their plan.

The second and major reason is how they meter their accounts.  Host Monster has a system that meters/monitors server load/system resources.  The general gist of this is that if your website(s) take “too much” system resources they will deactivate your account without warning.  Their support will claim this is due to inefficient scripts that are bogging down the whole server.  In theory this makes sense and seems fair but where the problem occurs is how much is “too much”.

Consider you are their customer.  You have purchased a plan which includes “Unlmited Disk Space” and “Unlimited Gigs of Site Transfer”.  I bet you’re expecting you can run basically any website you want?  Consdiering that you should be able to max out their OC-48 Backbone 24 hours a day with as many visitors that your site software can handle.  Unfortunately, you would be wrong.  Granted my example is a tad extreme and most of us wouldn’t expect that much but how much would you expect?

My one business site would not be considered a busy website.  With under 10,000 visitors a month it’s not a large site.  My business, Umgy and some other very low traffic sites are all I have running.  Even so my account has been suspended in the past due to the load.  The reason for my suspension had to do with MySQL taking too long on the site logging which was basically a shock to me.  I’ve have also come dangerously close to their “too much” load when I first copied over my site and other times when I’ve installed one of their supported applications.  That’s not mentioning how risky it is when you’re being indexed by a search engine and have maybe 1 or 2 users on at the same time.

To state which I hope is obvious by now, their “too much” is next to nothing in my opinion.  If you plan to host a very small site with them then you’ll be fine.  If you’re at the starting stages of your site you’ll be fine.  Just be careful as you may soon find yourself growing out of an unlimited host.  If you won’t take my word for it, you may, like me, have noticed sites you’ve surfed to that come up with a page that shows one line indicating the account has been suspended.  It is very likely a budget hosting company and the site has become too big for them.

In closing, it is my opinion that the best and honest business practice would be to indicate they are a host dedicated to casual and small websites and follow that up with less bandwidth, disk space limits and to mention the system metering.

As a bit of a disclaimer and warning I would like to mention that Host Monster is not the only company that has these limits.  So be careful with what host you choose.  Do a search for reviews on the company you’re interested in.  I basically knew what I was getting into when I joined them but as I said it was supposed to be temporary.  Also, for a bit of trivia, the word on the web is that Host Monster is owned by Blue Host.

Any comments or notes about how Umgy is currently running would be very helpful with evaluating the current host.

Host Hunting.

My father is someone who enjoys spending. In my younger days he would often chide me about being cheap. I am certain he was disappointed that I never had it in me to work my way up to his lofty purchasing indiscretions.

On the flip side, in the early stages of my relationship with my wife I was able to shock her at how I wasted my hard earned money on frivolous things such as take-out. I have been with my wife for some years now and she has had an effect on me. What may not have come as a surprise to my father, my wife has been quite successful in guiding me to becoming more… lets say, thrifty.

I’m not sure I can say it any clearer. As you must have deduced from my wordy intro and such a descriptive title, when it comes to web hosts I can be down right tight fisted.

Seeing as I’m on the search for another host you get to see me rant about them. I could be the responsible type and argue both sides of the topic but that is beyond the scope of this ‘article’ and my current interest.

Now, lets consider some of the options on hosting plans. There are hosts that are setting limits like: Number of Domains (1), Addons Domains (None on this package), Email Accounts (3), Mailing Lists (No), FTP Access (1 Account).

What the..? They’re giving away what costs them money when providing ‘free’ domain (sometimes ‘free’ domain for life) and ‘free’ site transfer (they have to pay their employees to do this). These are items that actually cost them something but they limit options that cost them nothing or next to nothing.

Is it really fooling any prospective clients into thinking they get a great deal when they can have 10 email accounts instead of 3? The fact is, from day one they would have been further ahead by pretending these extras were the lost leaders instead of having true lost leaders like domain names.

Ok, before I go any further, I will admit this post is coming a little late in the game. Most of the plans I’ve seen have become much more reasonable and have updated offerings. Sadly, I would speculate the change is due to pricing wars (or option wars) and not from customers complaining that they don’t appreciate the strategies.

As I hinted this reminds me of the strange pricing model you used to see fairly often in software. You know, that completed software package that allows one user at one computer for $39 but with a flick of the software switch you can have 12 users for only $3000, 64 for $50,000. Same software, same code. Where did this pricing idea come from?

There are a few things that should be the main focus in the cost of plan. Those are: Storage Space, Bandwidth (Traffic) and Server Load (CPU/memory usage). Some of the other features do increase some costs, but they are secondary. A plan should mostly be priced and monitored on the said three items.

For example, does it make sense for the poor sucker who had to purchase a Gold Plan at $30 a month to park 50 domains that are taking up zero bandwidth, a minuscule amount of drive space and basically no resources? Specially when the other guy has a Copper plan, for the low introductory price of $4.99 a month, and is hosting 1 site, taking up 2 gigs of space, 2000 gigabytes of bandwidth and is burning out CPU’s like crazy with custom coded software.

I’m just trying to say, as I search for a new host, my crazy mind keeps bouncing back to the whole idea that it would make me much happier if they would just be straight forward. Oddly, I’m not the type who appreciates the marketing garbage and the attempts to convince me how beneficial the Ultra-Diamond package is because it has a mailing list option.

Now before everyone goes crazy and wants to debate, obviously the pricing schemes must allow for facility costs, hardware purchases, employees and various standard business costs. That’s standard business and of course the company needs to make something. Further I do understand that some of the pricing schemes have to do with targeting specific buyers but I wouldn’t have had as much fun writing about that.

If you were able to last this long, I’m surprised. I’d be happy for any comments or suggestions on good, affordable hosts. I’m quite interested in slicehost but $20 a month for a hosting plan is downright painful for a ‘thrifty’ person.