Site5: A Family Affair?

My Life

No, this isn’t an entry about Billy Joel.. It’s been quite a while since I have actually blogged about something meaningful, so I figured tonight would be a great night to write.

Where to begin..

Monica is now out of the first trimester and into the second. All is going well, and we’re looking forward to the big sonogram in six weeks. Just as we did (or didn’t) with Katie Lynn, we’re not going to find out the baby’s sex. So few things in life are truly a surprise, so we are just going to let the baby’s sex be a surprise. To keep up-to-date with baby news and goings-on, feel free to use subscribe to the RSS feed or just follow our updates over at tomandmonica.com.

Katie Lynn continues to amaze me. She’s growing up so quickly; it’s hard to believe she’s already sixteen months old. She’s enjoying her day care, her friends there, and her teachers. I love the social interaction and skills she is developing at this young age.

Wrigley is doing so much better. For those that don’t know, she had ear surgery a couple years back to resolve a condition affecting her ears. The surgeries went well but, in the end, did not seem to stop the condition. The vet in Lubbock said this was normal, so we took the “professional’s” word. When we moved to McKinney, we naturally had to find a new vet. Our new vet took a look and in five minutes knew there was a problem and how to treat it. The vet also diagnosed Wrigley with hypothyroidism, so she simply has to take one pill with her food.

Work is going great. Site5 was recently bought out by a couple of industry veterans. I had known that was the plan for quite a while, so naturally there was this sense of uncertainty. I’ve got to say though.. I could not be happier how things have turned out. Ben and Joel are exactly what the company needed, and I’m excited to be a part of the “new” Site5. I do miss working with the old owners and CEO, but luckily I still get to chat with them on a frequent basis as they’re all great friends.

I turned thirty last week. My wonderful wife planned a great surprise party for me. I had a great time, and are thankful for my family and friends that attended.

I’m still loving the MacBook that I bought back in October. I recently purchased an Acer LCD monitor to use while working. I used one back when I worked at DC, and I had forgotten how much I loved having one.

I’ve somehow gotten addicted to Twitter.. it’s even linked to Facebook. Who would have thought that I would be so into this whole social networking scene after being anti-MySpace for so long.

Instead of writing some corny summation paragraph (oops, too late), I’ll just end with some great pictures.

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!

New Beginning

As Semisonic said in “Closing Time”:

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.

As you know through a recent blog post, I resigned from my previous job in order to fulfill a dream opportunity. And that opportunity is..

..working in the web hosting industry at an innovative and progressive company; that company is Site5.

I have joined the management team as the General Manager. Quoting that page, my responsibilities include:

…handling “completely random and important stuff at large”, overseeing Site5’s finances, managing the Site5 Community Forums, assisting in the management of the Site5Wiki and Knowledge Base, and aiding the various Site5 departments through the use of his versatile “jack of all trades” skill set.

There is a great group of people working for Site5 and I am truly honored to be a part of the team. Everyone has been extremely welcoming and helpful to me in my first week of learning the ins and outs of the company.

Be prepared for lots of web hosting related posts in the future!

The End of an Era

Friday was my final day at Director’s Choice after five and a half years.

It was a bittersweet day. DC was great to me and I acquired an insane amount of knowledge and experience from the job. My coworkers were a great group of people to work with and were like a second family. When asked what I would miss most, my answer was without question the people.

DC as a company has its fair share of problems – just like every other company on the planet. I hope that they realize what the problems are and corrects them.

However, an opportunity presented itself that I simply could not pass up. I will post additional information on my new job in the coming days.

A Nice Surprise

I went to San Antonio on business for a few days. Every summer, my company attends the Texas Bandmasters, Texas Choral Directors, and Texas Orchestra Directors conventions. For the past five years, I’ve simply gone down for our booth setup and flown back on the first day of the convention. It works out fairly well; I don’t mind going to down to do setup. In fact, it’s actually fun to an extent. This year we actually setup our entire exhibit in a record four hours; we were done at 11:30 am!

Monica picked me up at the airport yesterday and had an absolutely wonderful surprise for me at home. I walked by the mantle (where it was sitting) without even seeing it. I went into the bedroom, threw my bags down on the floor and got changed. Monica was laying on the bed, and I start to head out into the living room when I look up and see an orange and white AT&T bag.

And I knew it could only be one thing.. my iPhone!

I’ve been using it for about half a day now, and I’m blown away by it. I’ll be writing up an initial review in about a week.

I have the sweetest wife.