Shifting Creations

Of all things related to web design, hosting has quickly become my least favorite. In the past month alone, I’ve signed up with a handful of hosting companies (not all reviewed in this article) and have spent an overwhelming number of hours researching and testing available options. The reason for the change is simply growth and needing a better, more reliable home for both client and personal projects. Not everyone’s hosting requirements are the same so bear in mind, your experience with any of the following hosts may differ from my own.

LunarPages:

I started my first hosting account with LunarPages around four years ago and have been fairly happy with their service overall. The main benefit of a low-dollar shared plan is they can usually offer quite a package for very cheap and, as long as you don’t mind the occasional downtime, it’s a great starting point for personal sites. Obviously, the downfall is you’re likely to outgrow the mild performance and cannot trust the reliability if you intend to maintain any important websites, such as a business. As far as support, grab a ticket and wait in line. The response is usually quite vague and clearly from a list of ready, generic answers.

Media Temple:

(gs) - Personally, the Grid-Service is the ideal plan for my current needs. The package is right, cost is fair, and the control panel is intuitive and easy on the eyes. The pitfall is performance. Load times are comparable to cheaper hosts, at best, and from the short time I’ve been using their service, anything PHP or requiring MySQL is noticeably slower. My initial test pages were identical copies to those I had on LunarPages and the cheaper shard plan was quicker by at least a couple seconds. I turned to support for answers but, sadly, their responses were also slow and basically said, “We’re working on it.” Eventually, I found ways to tweak my page performance and now find the speeds livable. Another minor annoyance is you’re limited to just 5 cron jobs, which is barely enough if you’re hosting multiple sites and have any need for automated tasks.

(dv) - As expected, the dedicated-virtual is much faster than the (gs) or any other shared plan I’ve tried out. Unfortunately, my system resources were constantly pinned between 40-50% usage with no users or active websites. I can understand the server working to run Plesk and other installed software, but to find half of my resources maxed right out of the box was disappointing. Speaking of Plesk, the interface is straight out of the 90’s and ranks in my top ten for ugliest control panels available. I don’t expect my hosting admin to be the most beautiful site there is (afterall, I’m the only one who will see it), but I shouldn’t have to dread using it.

Finally, how hard is it to chase the rats out of the servers? I’ve experienced at least four different occasions in the last month where MT had posted an issue on their known System Incidents, all of them leading to a certain amount of unavailability to my websites.

Mosso:

Alas, a web host with an excellent reputation, great package, beautiful control panel, and even client billing! The load times were great, adding clients was simple, and support is 24/7 and fantastic. Let me say that again: Mosso’s support is by far the best you will find. You can call or chat online with a real person, anytime of the day, about any issues you’re having. The Achille’s heel? For me, it was pricing. There is only one rate at this time which is $100/mo. Also, there are many complaints over the recently implemented requests limit.

The control panel surpasses all others in looks and usability. However, I did find it very annoying that the client control panel lacked a billing area where the client could enter their credit card details. What this means is that after you add a new client onto your hosting, you cannot start billing them until a) you manually gather their credit card numbers yourself or b) send them the url for their billing overview which allows them to enter their data online. If you’re wondering what’s wrong with option b, try searching for said billing link. It’s simply nowhere, not in your admin area, not in the clien’ts control panel, nowhere. I only discovered it after bugging support for a couple nights and, even then, most of the Mosso staff were equally mystified over the missing link. Yes, I understand Mosso is a hosting company and billing services may not be their main priority, but if you’re going to offer that as a feature then it had better work.

The final verdict? If Mosso’s plan fits your needs and budget, do not waste another second hosting anywhere else. You will not find another company with such helpful support and so willing to listen to their customers. I was even offered an adjusted price by my account manager after explaining to him that I was having a hard time justifying the cost with my rather modest hosting requirements. You simply will not receive better support than with Mosso.

Choosing the right host can be a daunting task. I launched version one of Shifting Creations back in summer of 2004, the first site I had ever built exported from Photoshop (yikes). I spent nights after my internship researching and comparing hosts with hardly an understanding of the web technologies each package included. At the time, I thought PERLs belonged on a necklace, PYTHONs were dangerous, and MySQL would have been better off as yours.

With a limited college budget and still not sure if the web was for me (only the year before had I begun any sort of computer design, never mind considering it as a profession), I signed up for a LunarPages Basic hosting plan. The service was cheap, the plan included far more than my one site needed, and support had always answered my beginner questions.

Fast forwarding to present day, my hosting requirements have significantly increased with the number and complexity of web projects I’m involved with. Unfortunately, around mid-January of this year, I experienced my first major issue with LP when all of my PHP driven websites became extremely sluggish. Simple static pages that had easily loaded in under a second before were literally taking minutes to appear, if at all. I spent a solid night testing on all major browsers/platforms, reverting to older file versions, and checking every possible cause I could think of, all without affect on the poor performance. Finally, I uploaded copies of the same PHP pages to a different server not hosted with LP and found the problem non-existent, thus eliminating myself or my files as the culprit.

So in goes the support ticket and out goes my confidence in reliability. In a discussion with LP support lasting over a week, not one staff member could identify (or admit) what the problem was and I repeatedly received vague, rudimentary advice like, “Try clearing your cache,” or, “Use a different browser.” Four years after signing up with LP, I’ve gained a better understanding of PERL, PYTHON, MySQL, and now web hosts.

I’ve since opened an account with Media Temple and the difference, so far, has been black and white. The control panel is a dream compared to CPanel and setting up new sites and e-mail is a breeze. The transition has been smooth and couldn’t have happened at a better time as I’m now offering personally managed hosting services to clients. If I have any complaints with MT, it’s the slow response from support. However, their answers are usually quite lengthy and from what I’ve heard, contacting by phone is the way to go for urgent requests.

In the end, I would still recommend LP to beginning designers or anyone seeking decent, but not great, hosting at a low cost. One issue in four years isn’t terrible and, up to this point, I’ve been very happy with their service. That being said, I look forward to further exploring my MT account and seeing how their service handles my future needs (hint: big projects on the way).

During my quest for the “perfect” host, what shocked me more than the countless different companies available was the minimal amount of helpful reviews I could find. I kept wondering if other designers struggled with this same issue and which host they ultimately chose. So, I selected a list of designers I felt were top in their industry and kindly asked for input on who their current host was, reason(s) for choosing this particular company, and how they felt about the service. Without further ado, here are the results:

A big thank you to all who contributed. If you find you’re not on the list but have an experience you’d like to share, please feel free to do so in comments.

CSS Type Set is one of the projects I’ve been working on with friends, Travis and Tristan. The site serves as a hands-on tool for beginning designers and developers to interactively experiment with CSS in a WYSIWYG fashion. While similar concepts have been done before, our main focus was delivering a unique, easy-to-understand interface with instant CSS preview and output. When using the style controls, users are able to visually see how their entered text is affected and what code is used to achieve this specific look.

CSS Type Set went live on Wednesday and while we hope many will find the current version useful, there is already a list of additional features we’ll be implementing in the near future. Questions, comments, and suggestions are, of course, welcome.

I often recommend w3schools to anyone interested in learning more about web languages, specifically HTML/CSS. SitePoint now offers a similar resource which is up-to-date and very easy to understand. Both sites are worth the bookmark.

Anyone currently hosting through DreamHost? After a recent bad experience with LunarPages not being able to identify a PHP related problem on their servers, I’ve been host shopping for a backup plan. DreamHost seems the likely choice for my needs but I’m curious about their “Web Panel” that is used for controlling all aspects of your account. Unfortunately, there isn’t an online demo or even screenshots. Any input or advice on their service is welcome.

Raka Creative, a talented interactive studio in Portsmouth, NH, starts the new year off right with a fresh redesign. If you haven’t taken a peek already, check out their inspirational work and read the touching story on how Raka came to be.

Between YouTube down on Tuesday, my own hosting problems for the past couple days, and 37Singals having a bad morning, it seems everyone deals with hosting issues from time to time.

YouTube is down (or close to it), rendering little more than plain HTML text. Either they’re having technical difficulties or someone posted the funniest video ever made.

Among the countless IE annoyances, the duplicate character bug is one I’ve ran into more than once. Position Is Everything has a thorough write-up on the puzzling behavior, which seems to be triggered by HTML comments between floats and sometimes hidden elements. There are a couple different workarounds such as a -3px margin on the last float or using conditional comments in place of regular HTML comments. A colleague and I have found another way to fix this issue which has worked on every case so far and is a slightly easier/cleaner option.

If you place an empty element (it can be a p, span, div, anything) directly after the element which is duplicating characters and set the display to none in the CSS, the problem will disappear. What happens is because the last element within the floats is being hidden, there are no characters for IE to duplicate. For future maintenance, I’ve added a comment within the HTML (as shown in example) so that I’ll know why that extra element is there. I would never recommend placing unused elements within your HTML as it isn’t semantically correct but if you’re looking for a quick fix, this will do the trick.

HTML:

   ...
   <div id="footer">
      <p>This element was duplicating characters.</p>
      <span class="ie_fix"><!-- do not delete this,
      it fixes the IE duplicate characters --></span>
   </div><!-- end footer -->
</div><!-- end wrapper -->
</body>
</html>

CSS:

.ie_fix {
   display: none;
}

Inspiration comes from weird places. We keep receiving mail addressed to the apartment’s previous tenant, Valerie. It’s been a soap opera watching the letters pour in over the last six months, disgruntled debt collectors increasing the bombard of threats each week. We even found a letter personally wedged into our door, which is discomforting considering no one is supposed to be allowed into the buildings without a key. However, as odd as it sounds, the stream of bad news has actually spurred me to strive even harder and devote more time to entrepreneurial ideas. It’s sort of like watching Jerry Springer and being thankful your life isn’t that messed up.

Unfortunately, our own frustrating message came in the form of e-mail today via our landlord. Apparently the downstairs neighbors have complained that we were being loud yesterday from 9-11:30pm. Aside from being instantly annoyed, I found it hilarious that for once in my life, someone has accused me of being loud. The elderly couple with three cats claimed that they either heard “someone working out, or running in place.” I wish I could solve this mystery of the apartment jogger but I’ve been way too busy working on my computer, exactly what I was doing between 9-11:30pm last night. Kathy went to bed early so unless our cat was sending morse code through the floorboards, I think it’s time to keep house shopping. As nice as our current apartment and location is, shared living will always suck.

In tech related news, I’m currently reinstalling Windows on my PC in order to clean everything out and start fresh. Sadly, I’ve been more nervous about fiddling with XP than I was upgrading Tiger to Leopard. I appreciate both platforms for different reasons and will probably never switch back to using just one primarily, but I applaud Apple for making things so damn easy. Pop in the disc, hit Go, and the rest is taken care of. I’m also loving the new addition of Spaces, Time Machine, and other improvements. Features I could care less about are the universal folder view (Coverflow is cool, but I don’t want all my folders to view this way!), Stacks were a good idea poorly implemented and hardly useable, and I actually don’t mind the new shiny dock but jeeze, my 20/20 vision can hardly spot the tiny blue application indicators. TUAW has the solution for bringing back the triangles, along with tweaking the dock’s color.