A cPanel Revelation

As a self-proclaimed “cPanel hater”, I have often stated in the past that I could not stand cPanel. There’s nothing like putting your foot in your mouth when chatting with a former cPanel developer.. sorry Matt!

Well ladies and gentlemen, I am about to eat my words.

cPanel is not a bad control panel at all!

I’ve discovered that it wasn’t cPanel that I hated all these years; it’s the simplistic, un-intuitive “x” theme. The default theme is far from being user friendly and is not appealing to the eye.

In the past, I have always been an advocate for hosts with custom control panels. From a host’s standpoint, there are definitely advantages and disadvantages when using a custom control panel. From a client’s standpoint, it’s merely personal preference.

Shameless Site5 plug – we use cPanel with a custom “shell” called SiteAdmin which allows us to add custom features and whatnot. Its interface is very easy to navigate and work with. I love SiteAdmin’s feel and power.

As an aside, here’s an interesting observation though. From my experience, custom control panels almost always indicate distributed services (http on one machine, mail on a different machine, and mysql on yet another machine) whereas cPanel almost always indicates that all services are on a single machine.

I’ve been maintaining websites for a long time now, and while the idea of distributed services is appealing and works wonderfully in theory, my experience is that consolidated services is far more reliable.

What Is Web Hosting?

There have been a few questions and misconceptions about what Site5 actually does, so hopefully this post will clear it up for everyone.

Site5 is a web hosting company. To put it plainly, web hosting companies make websites available (“hosted”) on the Internet. There are many different types of web hosting: shared, dedicated, and VPS are the three most common types.

• Shared – multiple customers and websites (into the hundreds) are hosted on one server. One website/customer can crash the entire server therefore causing problems for other customers/websites located on the same server. Shared hosting is the most basic type of hosting.
• Dedicated – one customer, but potentially multiple websites, is hosted on a server. Dedicated is a more advanced type of hosting.
• VPS – multiple customers and websites per server; however, each customer has their own virtual server. This means that one customer does not interfere with the other customers if they crash the server; the customer only crashes their “virtual” server. VPS hosting is between shared hosting and dedicated hosting.

Site5 is a shared hosting provider, so our servers each contain multiple websites and customers.

The most common comment I then hear is “so Google and Microsoft would call you guys to host their websites?”  No, not even close. Companies such as Google and Microsoft invest millions of dollars and host their own websites on their own servers.  We host the small and medium-sized businesses as well as personal websites (such as tomsepper.net).

What Site5 does not do is actually design and/or program the websites we host; that is our customer’s responsibility.

Any questions?

Observations, Ramblings, & Utter Randomness

This will be a hodgepodge post containing a random assortment of topics. So clear your mind, start reading, and try to keep up.

Family & Friends
Monica and I have some of the greatest family and friends. Everyone has been exceedingly generous with baby gifts. To everyone that has been kind enough to send us or give us cards and gifts, thank you from the bottom of my heart. Additionally, a huge thank you to my Mom, my sister Kim, Monica’s sister Amanda, and friends Dru, Stephanie, and Mandy for throwing two wonderful baby showers for Monica.

Fuel Costs
Gas costs significantly less in DFW then it does in Lubbock. By significant I mean $.10 – $.20 cheaper. Ridiculous.

Tollways
I love tollways. Sure you have to pay, but it’s worth the money. Driving from Irving to Frisco took ten minutes. Can’t beat that.

Texas Tech
I hate using this phrase, but once again, it fits. Typical Tech. Come off a great win versus Texas A&M, get cocky, get put in your place by Mizzou. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – Mike Leach is not the man to lead Tech to the next level. Until we hire a head coach that realizes a team is only as good as its weakest link, Tech will continue to be the red-headed stepchild of the Big XII South. On a happier note, we received our Red Raider and Lady Raider basketball season tickets in the mail. This is the first year we’ve bought both men’s and women’s season tickets, so we’ll have an abundance of games to attend!

Chicago Cubs
Swept out of the first round. I’m definitely not a fair weather fan, but it’s rather repetitive to have to keep saying “Just wait until next year”. I guess it could be worse..

NFL
The Bears are struggling for consistency. It’s too early to assess whether or not they can rebound and turn the season around. The best news is that Grossman was finally benched; he was given far too many chances and failed almost every time. On a happier note, I’m in a fantasy league for the first time, and through yesterday, in first place! Let’s hope I can sustain that for the rest of the season; I could use the $120 prize.

Work
I’ve been at my new job for over a month now and I’m loving it. Like all jobs, there have been some stressful situations – namely a rather large one that still is on my mind. It’s a different kind of stress than my former job, and I am much happier where I am now. It’s what I was born to do.

2007-2008 TV Shows
Lots of great shows this year – new and returning!

• Damages – GREAT new show on the FX network. If you haven’t been watching this show, wait until they start over and replay it from the beginning. It’s another “serialized” show in that you can’t just pick it up mid-season. It was a summer show that I would imagine will come back next summer. The season finale airs this coming Tuesday.
• CSI: Las Vegas. We have too many shows we DVR, so we’re only following CSI: Las Vegas this year. We don’t watch the Miami version as David Caruso is a horrible actor. We’ll put CSI:NY in our Netflix queue.
• Heroes. After a rather slow start in the first episode, it’s gotten far better. I don’t know how long this show will last after last year’s fantastic rookie season.
• Back To You – A new show on Fox staring Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton.
• Carpoolers – A new show on ABC staring Jerry O’Connell and a bunch of other people I’ve never heard of before.
• Grey’s Anatomy – This is more Monica’s show than mine, but it’s actually not that bad.
• Private Practice – As we watch Grey’s Anatomy, of course we’d watch its spin-off..
• Desperate Housewives – We’ve watched this show since day one, and this season is already far better than last year’s.
• Jericho – After the widely-covered fan outrage, CBS will be bringing Jericho back as a mid-season show to close up the storylines.
• Cold Case & Without A Trace – We love these mystery-type shows!
• The Big Bang Theory – This is definitely Monica’s show.. I’m not really that sold on it.

Hmm.. that list makes it seems like we have no life! Oh well – we enjoy it.

Well, that’s the end of this post.. I’ll be surprised if anyone makes it this far!