Ever since this blog started picking up momentum, I get a lot of email from companies launching new products or features. Most of them aren’t very interesting to me (like iPhone apps when I don’t have an iPhone), solve problems I don’t have or are simply hoping to be the next Twitter. I discard most of them. But sometimes one of these projects actually looks like it’s going to fix an important issue, like with HostMonk.
More HostMonk: hosting reviews without the monkey business

When I first heard about Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) in 2006, I wasn’t sure what anyone was ever going to use it for. It was not quite a web hosting service, because there were no extra services like PHP or MySQL. Or even FTP access. This was clearly aimed at developers, but most of those would probably have their own dedicated server boxes with tons of storage, right? Until I stumbled across a ‘use case’ for it this week. I signed up and found it to be a very flexible and useful service.
More Amazon S3 -- pay-per-view online file storage

I changed themes mid December, and according to googlebot’s stats, pages have been taking twice as long to load since then. This got me thinking. What was it I added that caused this? Surely I didn’t make the pages twice as heavy?
More What’s slowing down my blog?

I’ve written before about how hard it is to find a good hosting provider, and how Ipowerweb and Hosting Zoom didn’t quite work for me. It’s hard to get good advice with all the lucrative referral programs, which seem to have spawned a whole genre of fake hosting review websites. That’s why I thought I’d share my experiences with Pair Networks. If you’re looking for a good, reliable host and are willing to spend a bit more, I suggest you read on.
More Pair Networks experiences

Imagine renting a big-ass car, with pretty much unlimited mileage. But when you get in the engine turns out to be too weak to actually move you forward. That’s how this feels. This site too has been hosted with Hosting Zoom for a while now, as are some of my other sites. Recently however, I’ve been getting 500 errors (internal server error). So was a friend of mine, and she eventually got HZ’s support department to fess up. WP is exceeding their memory limit for PHP scripts.
More No WordPress on Hosting Zoom?

When I need a new web host, I tend to go by other people’s recommendations. People I know in real life that is, because online hosting review sites tend to be fake, with everything geared towards making money from affiliate programs. Some hosts pay more than $50 per sale, so many hosting review websites just recommend the highest paying company.

Suzero recommended Hosting Zoom to me and I thought I’d write about my experiences with them so far.
More Hosting Zoom experiences -- Update

Slashdot is de meest populaire site ter wereld voor techies. “News for nerds, stuff that matters” zeggen ze zelf. Naast erg veel computergerelateerd nieuws komt er ook veel ander nieuws voorbij. In een opwelling dacht ik er gisteren over om mijn TIME/SPACE experiment aan te melden bij Slashdot. Lijkt me echt iets voor hen. Maar als jouw site op Slashdot genoemd wordt kan dat ook heel erg fout gaan…
More Het Slashdot effect