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Let's get a real hosting provider

Capsi

For a few years now, this site has been hosted with Powweb: cheap but not extremely reliable. Like many hosting providers, Powweb appears to be overselling their servers resulting in less than optimal performance. And first line technical support is pretty much clueless, answering questions from scripts and lacking even basic knowledge about the technologies they use. It's not that I need help with these, but it's kind of annoying when they break RFCs and URLs with a quote in then don't work even when some journal tags would like to use them.

Still, I don't really care about that for a small personal site. For Capsi however, I have higher ambitions and even though I don't expect it to become an instant hit I want to make sure hosting problems are not going to be an issue. So after some research I've decided to go with Engine Hosting, formerly known as pMachine Hosting. They're not as cheap as some others, but you get what you pay for: reasonable limits on data/bandwidth and a support staff that actually knows what they're talking about. I'm no longer interested in "technical support" asking me for my password so they can check my e-mail account when I ask about the IDLE feature of IMAP. EngineHosting's response to my pre-sales question was a lot more useful:

> Does your IMAP server support the idle command
> to provide push e-mail for mobile phones?

Here is a cut and paste of the IMAP CAPABILITY command from our IMAP port:

* CAPABILITY IMAP4 IMAP4REV1 ACL NAMESPACE UIDPLUS IDLE LITERAL+ QUOTA ID
MULTIAPPEND LISTEXT CHILDREN BINARY LOGIN-REFERRALS UNSELECT STARTTLS AUTH=LOGIN
AUTH=PLAIN AUTH=CRAM-MD5 AUTH=DIGEST-MD5 AUTH=GSSAPI AUTH=MSN AUTH=NTLM

While I have not used the IMAP / IDLE function from a mobile phone it has been
tested/works from desktop client applications that support the IDLE command so there
should not be any problems on the mobile side as long as the software on the phone
supports it well.

Now that's a hosting company I can do business with!

As for Capsi, this means that I will be moving the technology preview away from its temporary URL shortly, finally making it available on www.capsi.com. Once that has been taken care of I will do my best to finish enough basics to allow for beta registrations and finally get the site up and running. :)

Crippled tags update

Software

Small update to my previous post on this matter: I now actually explained the problem to Powweb (as opposed to reporting it, they need some help sometimes). Hopefully all of my tags will work again soon, including Panic! At The Disco.

Crippled tags

Software

If you're attempting to access tags such as "Panic! At The Disco".. tough luck. This is what you'll get:

Invalid character in /tags/panic!+at+the+disco.html

The URL can only contain alphanumerics plus the following characters: /.,=:_-

While I understand the safety concerns behind this setup, it is a major regression from Powweb to break RFC 1738/2396 so blatantly. I'm demanding a fix, or I'm taking my money elsewhere.

Welcome to the new platform

Software

If you read this: the migration of Powweb (my IPP) has been completed. You are now on the new platform, so feel free again to leave comments or to make changes to your profile.

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Tom has more friends but mine are prettier! (#1/1)