Aug 17
Veerle now at home at pMachine Hosting
2006 at 02.10 pm posted by Veerle
Sigh! When you have a huge pile of work it is not a good time to sort out hosting trouble let me tell you. But I kinda got forced into it because the site had been down twice in such a short amount of time. There were moments that I wished that I was on the beach away from it all! After some research and the real good experiences that I already had with the folks at pMachine (now known as Ellislab) I decided to park my blog at the most logical place that I could think of pMachine hosting (now EngineHosting).
pMachine hosting (now EngineHosting)
It came recommend by a few people too and I’ve got to say I’m pretty pleased with the results so far. Julie did a marvelous job in helping me out and explaining the technical details of it all. Your brain can turn into spaghetti from listening to all the server and DNS terms. Today the DNS is also moving over and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that from now on it will be smooth sailing.
index.php
When my blog launched some people pointed out that it would be nicer if I removed the index.php part from my url. My previous host didn’t allow me from doing that so this was the perfect opportunity to start clean :) The team did a super job in testing out things. My blog isn’t exactly easy and you have to keep a lot of things in mind, for example the four different blogs when fiddling with server settings. The old ones still work because of all the links that are archived and people linking to them.
Expression Engine contest
I’m also glad that I can announce that I will gave away a few licenses for Expression Engine in a little creative game that I’m planning on doing. A little bird told me that version 1.5 is on it’s way and when it officially launches I’ll write about it and combine that with the contest. So start building up the creativity :)
29served
1
Although I consider myself a big “zero” when it comes to creativity, I might just participate for the fun of it. You never know if something creative comes from chaos ;-)
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I was hoping you could get things back up to speed! I was checking your feed the last few days and couldn’t get the page to load. Glad you got it all sorted out and moved to better hosting.
If it wasn’t for the fact that I do custom programming, I would be all over the EE license. I have worked with clients in the past and helped them with their EE package and it was pretty nice.
Anyway, welcome back :)
3
Excellent. I was about to give up on the site, it seemed like every other time I tried to get to the site is was timing out.
Thank you for your work and willingness to share it. You rock.
4
Awesome to see your site back again under a new host!
5
Expression Engine rocks! I’m waiting anxiously for your contest. I hope my creativity helps me this time. :)
6
Textpattern has been my tool of choice for a couple of years. I recently started to poke around with Expression Engine and I have to say i’m blown away. Your EE posts (and Collys BDS chapter) have been a great help in getting to grips with the system. Now i’m just disappointed I never tried it earlier!
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Expression Engine contest? Sounds like fun :)
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How generous of you to give away some EE licenses! Just today someone asked me to “sell” them on EE, and I wrote a novel :) I’ve also heard really good things about their hosting from a couple of clients of mine who had similar great experiences with Julie and Nevin. Their attention to customer service is unparalleled.
I’m very curious about this contest. And of course, thrilled about the release of 1.5 soon.
9
*Grabs his sketchpad and awaits anxiously* :^D
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I have my site with pMachine Hosting and my Mr. T site!
pMachine hosting has been great and the people there are really helpful.
11
Welcome to the ‘index.php’ free crowd of Expression Engine users :)
I had a similar problem but I was lucky that my hoster was switching to new servers so that I could make nice URI’s.
12
Awesome stuff! Seems to load quicker too. Can’t wait for the contest :P
13
Sounds like fun...and let’s hope that 1.5 includes e-commerce!
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I don’t know how Rick and his team keep churning out updates at this rate!
I still haven’t tried and/or tested all the new features of the last EE version :)
15
Yeah for the move! I only have good things to say about the folks at pMachineHosting. They know their stuff, and are very responsive with providing support when needed. Plus all the websites, I place there just zoom. I think a combination of MySQL optimization and separate database machine with just lots of broadband.
I’ve been trolling the pMachine Forums a lot more recently as well, because I can just feel the preparations for EE 1.5 release starting to fall in place.
16
sounds good! Thanks for all your insight!
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Hi Veerle,
it appears your server is having some troubles serving images. Your header image isn’t loading properly for me, as well as some images in your content. I’m rather certain that it’s not something on my side, as I’m not having any problems of this sort on any other sites.
I’m using Firefox 1.5.0.6 on WinXP.
Here’s a screenshot of your header as it loads for me after one standard refresh (no CTRL+F5, just F5):
http://tinyurl.com/ldk3q
And here’s how it looks on the site:
http://tinyurl.com/nd8jk
Perhaps someone else can confirm this?
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pff, I’ve been trying to remove the index.php from my localhost install all day today. but in vain. too bad I don’t have ‘the team’ available to me. I would kill for a ‘the team’.
19
drop trou, have you checked out the instructions in the wiki?
http://www.eewiki.com/wiki/Remove_index.php_From_URLs
I had a few issues removing it, too, especially since I had created folders on my server and was using them with the path file to call up templates. If you are doing something similar, you may find you need to use a find and replace plugin to extract the index.php. However, if you aren’t using server directories, the above instructions should serve you well.
20
The definitive guide to removing index.php has to be from iNet-Logic on the pMachine Forums. Read through the whole thing, because he has made further adaptations, but the process auto-adapts for server folders so that you don’t have to use the manual include or exclude process. Works like a charm.
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Jerome Dahdah said:
It is not a server problem that much I am sure. Because its only happening with one browser on one OS its very unlikely its a server related issue as the server does not care about browser type its just going to feed the images out when requested. Jerome, let me take a guess and say you are using ZoneAlarm. I have been looking into this a bit and my testing seems to confirm that it has something to do with the “Ad blocking” feature. When it’s set in the middle setting “block all popup/ pop under and animated ads” the weird loading behavior is there. FireFox keeps on saying in the progress-bar at the bottom “transferring data from…
When the slider is all the way down (off) everything works great. And I have it not only on my site but other sites like http://www.codeigniter.com/ or http://www.ssireview.org/ as well. Internet Explorer and Opera don’t have this problem and Firefox on Mac is ok too. Support is looking into this as well. Just very strange because most people here use Firefox and only two people have this so far.
@drop trou: reese and allgood2 are right, those two links are the best information on the subject of removing the index.php part.
22
Nope, I don’t use ZoneAlarm. I’m using a Linux box as a router, so my firewall and QOS is controlled via iptables. It doesn’t control content, all it does is regulate ports and bandwidth allocation. I have AdBlock for Firefox, but your site images are generally never affected by it. I deactived it while testing, yesterday, anyways. I’ve checked now, and it seems it really is connected to my Firefox. Your site http://www.codeigniter.com loads fine in IE, but in Firefox it stops loading at around 75%, leaving out the background image. Only a hard CTRL+F5 fixes this state.
I’ll let you know if I find out anything else, I still think it has something to do with the server, at least in connection with this version of Firefox. It’s also possible one of my FF extensions is acting up, though.
23
I suspect I know that bird fairly well…
24
Did thus said birdy tell you what new features there will be?
25
These sounds like very clever business. First they convince you to use pmachine software...once everything is made...it seems to work only on there hosting services.
I guess Microsoft and Google are learning a lot here.
26
Actually, Joplin, pMachine, Inc. and pMachine Hosting are two different companies that have a partnership. This partnership allows the two companies to share certain resources and provide collaboration in many areas, which over the years has led pMachine Hosting to become geared towards hosting high end and dynamic sites.
pMachine software will work on any host that has met the minimum requirements for the software, but in all things the host you choose must be of good quality.
27
Hi Joplin,
I don’t use pmachine hosting, but the EE on my sites and client’s site (also not on pmachine hosting) works very well. cheers! :)
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@Joplin:
The problem is that most of hosting companies come up empty on promises. When you ask can handle the traffic, most of them say “yeah no problem” but when traffic really gets going they want you out because you are too much of a resource on their shared server. That’s the reason behind the move here, no hidden agenda at all.
29
The hosting requirements for your blogs must be huge. Thumbs up for pmachine’s uptime!!