Well if you are reading this post then you are doing so from my new MediaTemple hosting account. I have managed to move over all my applications and have even managed to update all the software to the latest versions. I might as well kill two birds with one stone hey

I am already pretty impressed with the MediaTemple software and so much so that I will be moving over SmellBeautiful.co.uk sometime soon before I finally open (about time) the store. I’m just trying to work out a plan for how it is all going work. As always, everything tends to be a lot more complicated that you originally thought so I need to make sure that I have everything covered before release. Most of my thinking goes into how to spend the advertising money wisely and that usually means trying to come up with something clever to gain the most amount of eyes without using the money required for the traditional methods. I will of course be using some of the traditional advertising method, as they are proven and they do work – just for more money than I would hope to spend right now.

You may have noticed that my site had been down for quite a few hours this morning. This was due to UK2 updating my hosting package but then completely fecking it up by deleting all my files and removing the DB.

After deciding that I did not want to pay 50p/minute on their support line for something that they had caused in the first place, I sent them a mail (not very nice one at that) and then it took them about 4-5 hours to get a backup copy of my files. I still had to reset all my settings and then create a new DB etc by importing the old data but at least it is back up again. The one thing that has annoyed me the most is that no one from UK2 has actually apologised for doing this to my account. Now that it is working again it seems slower than it ever has. I have to say, with all the other problems that I have had, UK2 is absolutely crap. I would never ever recommend them for anything. I had my other domains pointing to a folder in my account (part of my shared hosting) and for some reason they decided to change the DNS of these domains to point to some random domain parking sites. They seemed especially interested in my cheapestgamesonline.com domain which completely pissed me off. I have started transitioning my domain management to another host and will continue to do so until I have everything off of UK2.

Anyway, I have now signed up with a proper host (mediatemple) and will be trying them out for a while. You should soon notice a period of transition, but I will provide more details when I finally do it. Hopefully you should also notice a significant speed improvement. Well it should’nt be that hard not to get a speed improvement with how slow UK2 is now. I expected more from UK2 and they have completely let me down.

This was basically the communication through the support system. Notice how they never say sorry!

Me: Posted On: 28 Aug 2008 10:29 AM

I received my bill this morning for my host account. Along with that email was another informing me that I have now cPanel on my account.

ALL MY FILES AND DB HAVE BEEN DELETED AND ARE NO LONGER AVAILABLE!!!
MY SITE IS NOW NOT ACCESSIBLE BECAUSE OF THIS!
I NEVER ASKED FOR CPANEL AND ESPECIALLY WOULD NOT IF IT DELETES SETUP!!

I am not very happy at all. What kind of host deletes their clients files and completely messes up the configuration. I expect to get my files and website back ASAP.

Please contact me as soon as possible. You are able to contact me at the following number (If you think I am paying 50p/minute considering you fecked up my system in the first place think again): 020 —- —-.

Sincerely,

Landon Wainwright.

——————————————–

Them: Posted On: 28 Aug 2008 11:00 AM

Hi

The ticket is now being sent to our 2nd level support team.
They will assist you soon.
Please wait.
Regards,

—
Alexander M.
Technical Support
UK-2 Ltd

Account Login Page: http://www.uk2.net/index.shtml

Domain Control Panel: http://www.uk2.net/domains.shtml

Knowledgebase & Frequently Asked Questions:

http://support.uk2.net/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=view

——————————————–

Them: Posted On: 28 Aug 2008 01:26 PM

Your files are restored, database .sql dump is in “dbbackup” folder in root of your space.
Please create brand-new MySQL database, username and password via your Cpanel:

http://landoweb.com/cpanel/

user: landoweb
pass: ipodmini

Once it’s done, we’ll restore your SQL-dump data.
Regards,

—
Alexander M.
Technical Support
UK-2 Ltd

Account Login Page: http://www.uk2.net/index.shtml

Domain Control Panel: http://www.uk2.net/domains.shtml

Knowledgebase & Frequently Asked Questions:

http://support.uk2.net/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=view

——————————————–

Me: Posted On: 28 Aug 2008 02:46 PM

I have now done the backup myself so the site is running again.

——————————————–

Them: Posted On: 28 Aug 2008 03:47 PM

Hi,

So may this ticket be closed or you need more help?
Please let me know.
Thank you.
Regards,

—
Andrey R
Technical Support
UK-2 Ltd

Account Login Page: http://www.uk2.net/index.shtml

Domain Control Panel: http://www.uk2.net/domains.shtml

Knowledgebase & Frequently Asked Questions:

http://support.uk2.net/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=view

——————————————–

Me: Posted On: 28 Aug 2008 03:54 PM

This ticket can now be closed.

——————————————–

Them: Posted On: 28 Aug 2008 04:11 PM

Hi,

Thank you for using our service.

If you have any issues please contact us.
Regards,

—
Andrey R
Technical Support
UK-2 Ltd

Account Login Page: http://www.uk2.net/index.shtml

Domain Control Panel: http://www.uk2.net/domains.shtml

Knowledgebase & Frequently Asked Questions:

http://support.uk2.net/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=view

  ”Thank you for using our service”. – Yeah and thanks for the apology.

I was reading through HackerNews when I came across an article (from ElReg) explaining Hadoop. Althought I wouldnt have expected so the article is pretty funny and worth a read. In case you were wondering, Hadoop is a high level Apache project for an open source MapReduce (Google) cluster system written in Java. It was designed by the same guy that brought us the amazingly good Lucene indexing system.

I have to quote a part that I found particularly funny when he was comparing Hadoop (when adults do open source) to Starling (Twitter’s messaging system).

Twitter decided they would be cute and trendy. They wrote their code in Ruby: the official state language of the hipster-developer nation. Doug Cutting, on the other hand, decided he would get shit done, and wrote Hadoop in Java. Starling was hidden away in some corner and forgotten (it’s hosted at RubyForge…what the fuck is that?). Hadoop lives prominently at the Apache Software Foundation. Starling is a re-hash of an existing Java Enterprise API called JMS that has several open source implementations. Hadoop is an implementation of Google’s MapReduce, a system that publicly only existed on paper. Hadoop has the added benefit of actually working.

Perhaps this is a feast of apples and oranges. Starling is a messaging system, Hadoop is a distributed data processing system. Don’t worry. There’s plenty of failure to be had elsewhere in the open source world. Let’s take, for example, a project called Starfish), which is a pure-Ruby implementation of MapReduce. Eh, well that’s not entirely accurate. Starfish is a MapReduce-inspired framework that’s simple enough for even Ruby developers to understand. That means there’s no actual “reduce” phase in the MapReduce, and it works on MySQL database records. In other words, this project is virtually useless in every way, aside from getting the author a quick beatoff from the blogosphere. It’s a half-baked implementation of an algorithm from Google, it’s written in Ruby and it integrates with Rails. That’s so warm and fuzzy it could turn Clint Eastwood gay.

Well you cant get more honest and plain talking than that . The guy who wrote it is Ted Dziuba who is a co-founder and the CTO of pressflip.com which happens to be a search engine that will keep on searching for results even after you have finished (if you ask it to) in the hope that it will learn more about your search habits to fine tune the results and It would appear that they are using Hadoop for their application. I must admit that I have (and do) hope that someone can actually produce a new search engine that could compete with Google, but unfortunately there is nothing (in my opinion) that really seperates them any of them apart, especially in the browser space. I still think that there is a good possibility of getting somewhere in other search spaces such as mobile phone/mobile internet device areas. The results that you want in your phone are usually very different to those that you would want to get in a normal web browser and I think that excellent usability is something that could win in these areas. Take a look at Taptu which I think is a great mobile search engine.

Basically though, why cant more internet companies use their talent to try and solve some problems that people actually have. There are a million problems out there that must need solving but most of the startups tend to be in the same space with the idea of selling out to Google in a couple of years (or months) with no clear idea of how to make money now. Wouldn’t it be a crazy idea eh, that companies might start to create things that people actually want and are willing to pay for? Businesses that actually make money, now that’s something new