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Host Review: Media Temple

  • Monday, 26 April 2010 21:42
  • Written by Dan Knauss
Media Temple

Media Temple (mt), based in Culver City, California, is probably the most professionally marketed brand in hosting that's affordable to a broad customer base but expensive enough to suggest an elite cachet. 

Media Temple first achieved a significant following for quality shared hosting among prominent bloggers, especially in the design community, and the company has always solicited this kind of support. If Zeldman gets a free (dv) that doesn't make the (gs) good, unfortunately.

The Grid-Service (gs) is probably the best known offering from (mt) along with the (dv), a semi-managed VPS plan, since they are the company's lowest-priced and most used services. The (gs) is slated to be replaced by the cluster service (cs) in 2010, but the (cs) has been in development since 2008 with unmet promises of a 2009 delivery, so it's not really clear when it will arrive, or if it already has. A new, utility VPS option, the (ve), is now in public beta as of April 2010. It appears to be a competitor for Rackspace's Cloud Server and similar services. Pick your flavor of Linux and go. The (dv) is a scalable, semi-managed VPS that I have little experience with, but I can't say anything bad about it. Nearly all of what I've heard from others about the (dv) is good.

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Host Review: SiteGround

  • Thursday, 25 February 2010 20:42
  • Written by Dan Knauss
SiteGround

SiteGround in years past (pre-2007) did not disclose much about its people and their location(s). More recently they've become somewhat more transparent, professional, and personable. They have been and are even more so today a decent source of inexpensive shared hosting with frequent promotions and discounts. Since 2007-2008 occasional slow service and outages seem to have become a thing of the past on individual Siteground shared hosting accounts I use or maintain. Response times under 1s, zero to minimal downtime. These accounts reside on dedicated servers leased from ThePlanet (Houston, TX), which is also used by Site5, WebFaction, and many other hosts. Siteground's VPS and DS accounts are on servers based in Chicago and Virginia. (This may have changed; they now specify Houston, Dallas, and Chicago in 2010 and it's not clear who is providing the servers.) The 2010 VPS plans seem overpriced.

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Host Review: Nexcess

  • Thursday, 25 February 2010 20:40
  • Written by Dan Knauss
Nexcess

Nexcess, based outside of Detroit, is a family business that grew big. (On some ISPs there is a very direct, fast route between Milwaukee and Nexcess servers, which is nice.) They have their own first-rate data center, and the owners frequently handle even the lowliest customer support issues.

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Optimizing Joomla!

  • Sunday, 07 February 2010 23:04
  • Written by Dan Knauss

...and optimizing your server and database resources for Joomla

I recently went through the available extensions and best advice on the web for optimizing performance for Joomla 1.5 and put it to work on a couple of sites that needed improved load times. (It's all relevant to any other PHP/mySQL applications too.) Here are the best of the best methods, summarized in a handy checklist. Most of these tips apply to any other LAMP-based web application, especially other "CMS" software like Drupal and Wordpress--and vice versa. See this list of 13 Great WordPress Speed Tips and Tricks for Max Performance.

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Joomla News and Security Bulletins

  • Saturday, 06 February 2010 17:15
  • Written by Dan Knauss

Here is an expanded version of my previous "Pipe" to aggregate news of compromised third-party Joomla extensions, which I notice has been cloned by several Pipes users. 

This feed filters the National Vulnerability Database feed (http://nvd.nist.gov) to show only Joomla!-related alerts and adds the latest news from Joomla.org sources, including Security Alerts for Joomla! and Third Party Extensions.

 

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