After two years of hosting with Doorhost.net I was forced to change hosts since the company was sold and the new owners (IHSystem.com) ruined the service overnight by providing no support and leaving the servers to run mostly on their own with harsh consequences. There were several cases of servers being down for a few hours a day.

So, I spent some time searching around. I was mainly interested in a reliable host with a good reputation, knowledgeable support, a user forum, ssh access, possibility for multiple add-on domains, with around 500MB of space and 30GB bandwidth. Python 2.4 (as opposed to the usual 2.2), Ruby on Rails and Subversion would be a big bonus.

After quite a bit of searching on FindMyHosting.com and reading the WebHostingTalk forum, I narrowed the list down to the following hosts:

• Dotable.Com
• A Small Orange
• Hostgator
• Site5

These are all very fine, highly respectable hosts, although Site5 seems to be having some hickups lately. Hostgator is the most recommended one around but it doesn’t offer ssh which is a must for me so my choice dropped down to ASO (A Small Orange) and Dotable.Com. I wrote to both of them with questions about the service, and both replied with detailed and fast replies. I chose ASO because they are more developer oriented and offer Subversion and Ruby on Rails. They are also a bit cheaper, but this is due to the reseller nature of all Dotable accounts, which I do not require at this point in time. However, Dotable remains a service to consider in the future. They left a very positive impression.

A few days ago I started migrating all my major sites to ASO and it’s been an easy transition and a very smooth ride since. The speed is great (isn’t it?) and I have my peace of mind back. I will report back in a few months with longer term impressions.

Tags: Hosting, ASO, A Small Orange, Hostgator, Dotable.Com, Site5

I’m always somewhat late in discovering new cool music sites. This is probably a sign of aging . Anyway, I discovered Last.fm a few days ago and it left me speechless, it’s what I was waiting for for a long time. Although the main idea is similar to Pandora’s (find out the music that you might like based on what you already like), Last.fm wraps this into a cool social aspect. It is based on a little cool app, the “Audioscrobbler” which sends information about the songs you’re listening in your player to Last.fm. This enables them to provide excellent statistics, like “The most popular Offspring’s song is Self Esteem” or “People who listen to Molotov also listen to Control Machete or Cafe Tacuba”. Now, this is really useful info since it is based on real user stats and it is just plain cool and it also really works - I discovered a few new excellent bands and found some fantastic songs of artists I already know, all in just couple of hours.

A weak point is that Audioscrobbler can’t run on my Creative Zen Nano (apparently they don’t support Creative at all) which is where I listen 90% of my music, so my stats are based only on the stuff I listen on my PC, which is not very accurate.

Last.fm also follows Web 2 trends, providing groups, tags, APIs and RSS feeds for many things such as the lately played tunes, top played artists (check my sidebar), and so on. The API and RSS are still in the works, so they are not yet perfect (the top artists are refreshed once a week). Oh, and it can stream a personalized radio station specially for you, based on the songs you listen to.

In brief, this is one of the coolest and most useful sites I’ve seen in a long time.

Tags: Last.fm, Pandora, Live 365