The naming conventions of fields in tables of a database!  There seems to be absolutely no consistency between applications and in some cases even within the application it self.   My biggest gripe I would have to say is the naming of the primary key’s and foreign keys of tables.  I’ve seen the following recently in applications that have say the table customers

id
cid
custid
customer_id

I personally prefer the customer_id for the primary key but even consistency of one naming would be great.  The big reason I like using tablename_id  for the primary key is when joining other tables.  For example:

SELECT * FROM customers c
JOIN orders o ON c.customer_id = o.customer_id

I like this much better than having something like:

SELECT * FROM customers c
JOIN orders o ON c.id = o.customer_id

But this I can live with.  It’s when applications have no consistency what so ever.  They name the primary key “cid” for example then the foreign key is “cust_id” in one table and “customer_id” in another.

This can also be applied to pretty much all fields across all tables.  Some maybe are “tablename_field” while others are just “field”.  Pick one or the other in an application and if there are multiple developers it might be a good idea to come up with a convention that everyone follows.  But I doubt the developers could come to an agreement anyways I know from experience with an instance where the naming of a common foreign key in an application is still not consistent through out the application.  It is in the database, however the variable name for it seems to change from page to page with some using camel case on it while others believing it should be just one word.

Anyways I’m sure there are naming conventions somewhere that everyone is suppose to follow for these sort of things but no one seems to do it.  It also does not help that programmers constantly have a change of heart part way through resulting in the continued inconsistency.

I’ve read about people complaining about it using several GB of bandwidth in a short amount of time and visiting close to 100,000 pages with most of them being the same pages.  So it hits a site using say a gallery system and all hell breaks loose and it just causes a slew of problems.

So we’ve pretty much blocked all their IP ranges like everyone else out there in hopes that maybe they’ll fix their bot to maybe read robots.txt files and also crawl at a reasonable speed.

My duties today:

Update the accounting books to reflect last months revenue and gateway expenses.  Being that we’re not just some kid in his basement we do need to keep records.  I find doing the revenue and expenses at the gateway level at the end of the month keeps me more sane.  If I wanted it to be hectic I could go and do all the books the week before October (close to our year end).  But well that be just insane.

I’ll be updating the site to reflect the VPS offering on the front page opposed to it having the dedicated servers.  We don’t sell a lot of dedicated servers so it really makes little sense to have it as one of the front page portions.

I’ll also be switching the specials portion at the bottom of the main page into a link to our weekly specials.  We now have several offerings os it only makes sense to have a page dedicated to the specials.  It’ll just be a matter of keeping them updated.

Now just a random picture to end the post:   Here’s what a computer support tech got sent to them by a customer who’s computer was overheating:

The computer was loud so apparently this was the solution too bad it causes overheating

Poking along in the left lane? Prepare to pay

Maybe this rule should be everywhere?  There’s always someone in the left lane who insists on going below the speed limit and in some cases even at the same pace as the right lane resulting in a log jam.

Birthday party snub sparks debate

Absolutely ridiculous

The Website is Down - Sales Guy vs. Web Dude

Funny stuff

The Stalled Server Room

Wow?

That’s all for now

Along with that we’ve also upgraded our Bosco server.  Well to be exact we have a new server and named it Bosco.  We now have a 4TB system opposed to the small 1TB system we previously had.  Take into account each of our web servers only has 500GB of space on them we have no doubt this new machine will last for quite a while.

So as I type this the seeding of our backups have begun and I have no doubt next week we’ll be announcing the new backup system in our announcement forum as well as publishing this on our website.

Now as far as the subversion integration within cPanel.  I talked about this months ago and at the time I was under the impression we’d have it up and running soon.  Well I believe it’s very close to being a feature finally.  We’re once again testing the system and there is active communication between us and the developers of the software to get all the bugs figured out.  Based on this it’s just a matter of working out a few lingering bugs and we’ll have it on all our servers.

Now the More portion we’ll it’s most miscellaneous things but I think they’re worth a small mention:

Our phone system now works 100% of the time.  We found some issues sending the majority of callers to our voice mail.  We’ve fixed up that after we took a close look and found out we did not configure everything properly.

We’re seeing excellent growth in our shared and reseller offerings.  Every month we’re adding more customers than the previous month.  We can only guess that lots of people are recommending our services we do appreciate that.

Our VPS offering is not going as well as we had planned considering we had so many asking for it before we did not have it.  We’re currently working towards making it a more appealing offer and hopefully we should have that done soon.

Now personally I’ve never been near a large fire - but it’s killing my lungs making it hard to breathe. Theres a nice smoke screen throughout my whole area, everything is dry, and everyone is coughing and hiding indoors. It’s sort of surreal - in a nightmarish sort of way.

A picture I took outside of my window:

This is a nice sunny day - about 85 degrees outside. It’s been like this for about four days now and is only getting worse. The air quality stinks and makes you have a nasty cough. No fun!

Here is a little section in the local newspaper with coverage of the fire(s).

-Cody

First of all the back ground here.  The majority of hosts who post on forums as their main way of acquiring customers all go out of business in one way or another.  The most common occurrence is their server just suddenly go down and never come back up.  In these cases the host most likely got their money and ran, so for the hours of work they got a few hundred dollars maybe.  The next case is where they sell the company or at least that’s what the new owner says anyways.  In these cases the sale is for maybe a $1000 at most if that which isn’t a whole lot of money.

These happen for a few reasons and I’m going to go over them real quick.

The obvious one is the person running the so called company does not actually know what they are doing from the technical side.  If you are a entrepreneur and do not have the knowledge then you really should be hiring someone who has the technical knowledge.  Unfortunately for them they do not have the money to invest or are not willing to on staff that are actually qualified so this is thrown out the window.  As a result of this you have all sorts of various problems that come up.

One such example is a recent host who sold who did not even know how many hard drives they had on their server.  It was first five 500GB drives then it was seven and it turned out to actually be just one drive with another mounted as /backup.  This can look really bad considering it’s very easy for a user to see the number of drives on a machine that are not in a raid configuration.  Then on top of that issue the user in question had no idea what raid was so it was pretty obvious they had no idea.  So within a month after selling probably 40 accounts for pennies they were sold to another company for a few dollars.

It does not just end there however, I have read of cases where they’ve ran fsck on mounted partition.  Then the excuse they used was the file system was corrupted and everything was put into the lost+found.  But wait a minute isn’t that what happens when someone runs a fsck on a mounted partition?  Yep it is and I went and tested it on a test machine I have here and sure enough that’s what happens.  This comes down to not knowing what they’re doing and the cover up story having many holes in it.  This company is apparently still in business, but a blunder like the one they had would have me wagering they will not last very long either.

Now if they have enough technical knowledge to get by they still have the issue of not having any business sense what so ever.  Now this would not be bad if all their competitors had business sense but they do not.  As a result an endless chain of events happens where competing hosts try to out do each other.  So this has resulted on digital point anyways of prices they are not sustainable at all and each time the prices are getting lower.

Here’s some examples:

Reseller Account
30GB Space
Unlimited Bandwidth
$20/year

Now lets look at this even more closely that is just $1.67/month.  With a reseller account one user could add hundreds of sites and with allocations like that it is very much possible to do so.  TO put this into real perspective here at Hawk Host we offer the following

Reseller Account
30GB Space
300GB Bandwidth
$324/year

For every 1 account we sell they must sell 16 in order to have the same amount of revenue.  That is pretty startling and considering our prices are considered pretty cheap by some it’s just down right scary.

Don’t worry it does get worse there are master reseller accounts which allow you to make reseller accounts with space and bandwidth allocations of unlimited which are being sold for $20/year.  In order to make reseller accounts at Hawk Host you would require a VPS and probably a powerful one at that.  So I would say the person would be looking at a minimum of $400/yr to do something like that with us. They would also be limited in memory and CPU which these master resellers are not.

It’s pretty clear with prices like I just mentioned it’s not profitable if at all.  So what ends up happening is if they continue to get enough money to support these crazy prices the servers will become pretty unstable.  If they are lucky and their yearly prices are maybe high enough to sustain things for a bit they end up getting more and more servers.  But let me tell you quantity of servers will not solve the problem at all.  It is just going to increase revenue and profits (if any) will continue to be the same.  If only they’d realize that if they were to sell these packages even at $100/year they could sell far less and still have the same profits.

The next issue is they do not think long term which can be a big problem with a web host.  Offering life time accounts thinking yeah I’ll get a solid word of mouth then most people will pay monthly.  Problem is the only word of mouth is these life time account people.  Well the people they tell would want a life time account as well.  It’s clearly not going to work out very well at all and those life time accounts will become very costly very fast.  $20 one time payment does not last long when the user is using 500GB of bandwidth each month after they’ve settled in.

It’s unfortunate for people looking for hosts on digital point that it’s littered with soon to go under web hosts.  But with web hosting it’s so easy to get into with very little investment if any these problems are bound to happen.

Just my thoughts though,  maybe I am wrong and they’re all getting 20+ signups a day and making great profits.  I just highly doubt that

Here is the bandwidth graph for the month of May for our Bosco server

So how much bandwidth is that exactly?  Well that is 2000GB worth of data going into our backup server every month.  But wait a second Bosco isn’t even using 1TB of space in total!

Now here’s the bandwidth graph for one of the higher days of the month which generated 90GB of data!

What’s best about this is this is suppose to be an incremental set of backups and we do not generate archives or anything of that nature.

Thankfully we do not pay for bandwidth that does not go out to the Internet so that means we’re not actually being charged any money for this.  But even so that is a lot of data going through our backup machine each month.  As a result of this we’re looking at other solutions such as R1Soft and Evault as better backup solutions that are really incremental and could allow us to do 5 minute backups if we wanted to.  These systems would also generate lower load than our current backup systems do to their integration into the actual operating system opposed to just a rsync or some other fancy but inefficient way of generating backups.

The reasoning for adding it was due to all the requests for it.  I think maybe the requests most people did not have any plans on actually using it.  Maybe they had software which said PostgreSQL or MySQL and they attempted Postgres first.

So I’m wondering is there anyone out there in the shared web hosting world that actually wants or needs PostgreSQL?

I use Postgres all the time and I think it’s a pretty awesome and comparable if not better than MySQL in area’s.  I am starting to think however it’s lack of popularity is not due to the lack of web hosts supporting it but other reasons.  The one that comes to mind is there is no good way to upgrade versions.  In order to upgrade you need to dump your data then import it again in the new version.  This is just down right silly and probably means very few people want to use it even in development environments!

Anyways… Postgres is here to stay but we figure the usage will be in the range of 0.0001% of our user base.

At Hawk Host every month we deal with a three types of cancellations.

1)  The user logs into the client area and selects to cancel their package.  These are the former customers we like.  They have the etiquette to cancel the service.  As a result once the account is terminated we can easily fill the void with a new customer in no time.

2) The user does not cancel and moves their site to a new provider.  In these cases we let our automated system suspend their account then within a month the account is terminated from our servers.  This is absolutely the worst case scenario we can have.  We have a non paying user using space on one of our servers with no intention of coming back as far as we know.  We do not terminate the account instantly due to the work involved in doing so.  We let our automated systems handle it and we have a close to 30 day waiting period for the 3rd cancellation scenario.

3) The user does not cancel their service, however they continue to have their websites pointed at our servers.  These ones are especially tough to deal with since the user has not move their site they have simply failed to pay their invoice.  We give them 30 days and a few will actually eventually pay, but most will have their accounts terminated and in some cases these could be reseller accounts with 30+ accounts.  These are the cases where we wished the user choose credit card or a method we can automatically charge them.

I thought this was worth sharing since I know several people visit our blog.  So remember if you are using a service that has a recurring fee remember to be polite and cancel the service!  Don’t just run away without paying.  You never know there may be a company who will go after you for the funds then you could be in big trouble.