The reason I’m writing this post is because there are a lot of people who have heard bits about it or just haven’t spent the time using it and really can’t see  why this is such a big deal. Hopefully this post will go some way towards convincing you of it’s merit, but feel free to add your own insights in as comments.

Google Wave has been described by Google as what email would look like had it been designed in the 21st century.  Wave is standing on the shoulders of giants, it reflects the evolution of internet communication by bringing together mature concepts as the principals or requirements of their system and uses new technology to hold it all together. It’s worth keeping this in mind when you think about the future of Google Wave. It may be new, but there is so much to this that we’ve seen before. My first reaction on using Google Wave was, “Is that it?”.  The real shocker was when after a short time using Google Wave I was coming back to my trusty MSN messenger and finding it unpleasant to use.

In order to explain exactly what Google Wave is, I want you to focus on what email is today. These are the differences:

• Forums and Threading
  If you have multiple people involved in an email conversation or you are just talking to one person about multiple things it starts to get ugly fairly quickly, email is not designed to handle this. The reason is that email is plain text, there is no natural order to it. Any complex communication is going to require the ability to separate out who and what each piece of the communication is in reply to. In a forum it is designed to allow you to reply to a particular part of a post letting everyone know what was the communication you replied to and who wrote the communication in the first place. The majority of forums don’t use threading, so it’s quite likely that you have never actually seen it in use even if you’ve visited forums.
  Threading is about when a reply is made to a post where does that post go on the screen. A modern web based forum would place it at the bottom because that is the simplest solution, and back during the time when any 2 browsers were unlikely same html page the same way, back when forums on the web emerged, keeping things simple was essential to get people onto your website. What used to happen before the web took off was that the post would appear under the post it replied to and slightly indented to the right so that you end up with a tree of posts. This makes conversations far more readable. Each communication has context, even if many other communications have taken place since.
  Another thing that Wave has taken from Forums is the idea of a topic, a topic in a forum is a posts container. A topic is similar to the first mail in an email conversation. It defines the subject of the conversation and that mail is replied to. The difference between a topic and
  So why not just use forums instead? Forums focus on an idea, it’s a place that people go to discuss with the other people that have decided to do the same. Email and Wave are about communicating with the specific people you have chosen to communicate with.
• Instant Messaging
  Email takes a while to arrive at it’s destination, it has to go from your computer to your Internet Service Provider’s server and from their server to your recipient’s ISP’s server and from there to your recipients machine. This process is not designed to be instant, if you want instant communication you should use instant messaging. Unlike email you have to be sure that the person is online at the time, and while most instant messaging clients are able to keep logs the logs are seen as separate to the current conversation. A conversation ends when you close the chat window. Unlike email where the conversation ends only when you stop replying to it, that could be several weeks from when it started. The benefits of both are brought into Google Wave. When both your recipient(s) and yourself are online, messages appear instantly, and when one of you goes offline, you can still continue communicating and they can see what you have sent when they return.
• Wiki
  You can’t go change what you’ve written in an email. Once it has been sent that’s it. A wiki is a website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages (taken from wikipedia). With a wiki you are able to create a page, edit that page, have someone else edit that page and have a history of all the edits that have been made. That is what Wave allows you to do, the history function isn’t fast enough or detailed enough at the time of this writing but you can edit any communication that you have made as can anyone else involved in that conversation. That means that you can correct any information or update it as information changes. The communication is marked as unread as soon as it is edited, it displays above each communication which users have contributed.
• Blogging
  If you read a lot of blogs you need a feed reader, it lists all the posts you haven’t yet read and the good ones allow you to read the post without visiting anyone’s website. Unfortunately not everyone is aware of the feed reader and Blogs tend to have a smaller number of regular readers as a result. The email alternative to this is a newsletter, a regular email is sent to each person on the subscription list and this allows people to passively check for updates. The problem with this approach that I’ve discovered from an end user perspective is that everything that is developed around email including the email receiving software itself isn’t designed for this type of communication. There is no in built way to subscribe and unsubscribe from a newsletter within the email client you have to rely on the sender to provide a method of removing yourself from their mailing list. Google Wave allows the creation of read only waves that you can follow and unfollow as you choose. The difference is small but important. Users have the power over what they subscribe to and any actions associated with the wave apply to any future posts on that wave, you also get a full history of that wave once added so you can see any future communication in context.

I didn’t try to cover everything that Wave can do. I just picked on a few things, try it out for yourself, give it some time and comment your experiences.

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This made me think of the principal that more important than the prices you are given is the attitude of the company you do business with. If they show attitude that they intend to make you very satisfied with their product then take that into account as well as the cost of the service, it matters. I believe that O2 do not aim to make you satisfied, they aim to make you slightly less dissatisfied than you would be with another provider. The example above is limited to people who use smart phones and use that smart phone in foreign countries. Here are two others.

O2 used to be the underdog, then meteor, now 3. O2 hit the point where it had the same coverage as vodafone and those who didn’t make a habbit out of throwing money away when it got dirty switched to the cheaper provider. Another reason you would switch is that texts were not included in the vodafone monthly contract, you would pay x amount a month and get y minutes and even if you didn’t use any of your minutes they would still charge you for them and every text. Where as with O2 you would pay a certain amount per month, some would go towards rental and the rest would be credit for calls and texts. This meant you could make calls and texts to whatever number assured in the fact that it wasn’t charging you unless you went over the credit.

Then they changed to the vodafone model only it’s calls/texts rather than just calls, now whenever I ring a 1890 (low cost) number I see the charge on my bill. I could have 169 or my 170 minutes still left on account and yet that 1890 number would still be charged. This is designed to make you spend more money than you intended.

I moved out of home a good while ago but never bothered to move my mobile from out my dad’s account. Recently I decided it was time to do so and was told that I’d have to restart the contract in order to do so. So I’m 8 months through my contract with o2 and in order to transfer it over to my name I have to start the whole contract again. I told them forget it and instead I pay my dad who pays for the bill. Not ideal, but better than an extra 8 months of lock in.

As a sub point, o2 are in Britain and in Germany, if you decide you want to move to either of those countries, ignore the fact that the networks are owned by the same company, they will not allow you to switch over while on contract.

After this experience I would be very tempted to buy a pay as you go phone. It may be dearer on a per call basis and the phone itself may be more expensive but you don’t spend 120 euro on a pay as you go phone without noticing and while your phone is locked into the network, you aren’t locked into a contract.

Finally, right now, every phone provider in Ireland attempts lock you in to their service, it won’t last forever, people crave convenience and within a few years someone will provide them that. While it does it will continue to be a very expensive essential service and we can only rely on the EU to step in on our behalf, because the Irish people aren’t prepared to make a stand on this issue and I don’t think anyone knows how to make them. It just seems too small but it’s something everyone has to deal with it.

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How it works

The ideal itself is fairly simple, they have a large amount of equipment that is treated as a pool of memory, processors, hard drive space etc and each virtual machine running on the cloud makes use of the pool. From the customer’s point of view the solution is cheaper than the equivalent physical hardware and the Virtual Machine instance(s) act just like physical machines do.

The cloud platform in theory

The ideal hosting platform is one you don’t need to worry about, you don’t need to plan for scaling,waste, special configuration, backups, redundancy and maintenance. The cloud platform doesn’t allow you to be worry free but its a big step forward.

• Scaling
  When using the cloud you can add and remove memory, CPUs and hard disk space on the fly, so scaling is far less of a problem. You will still need to have multiple virtual machine instances once you reach the operating system max but even that is simpler as machine instances are much easier to clone than physical hardware.
• Backups
  Because its all virtualized backup disks can be attached as hard drives, this backup space can be much lower speed than your live data and hence much lower cost
• Redundancy
  Each hard drive are in a redundant array, all the memory and processors are taken from the pool so if any part of that pool no longer works its simply removed from the pool and replaced by a technician. So you don’t have to worry about your hard drive dying on a friday evening at 5:30.
• Maintenance and Monitoring
  The only part you really have to maintain in this system is your software, all the equipment is taken care of by the host.
  Also, you can arrange with the host that the machine instance be monitored and should the monitoring software pick up a hard drive filling up or some other resource being overused it can add on the fly extra resources.
• Initial Setup
  As its a virtual machine, no operating system installations are necessary as the host can simply use a standard disk image for any given OS.
• Utility Costing
  You only pay for what you use, if your website has shifting requirements, the cost shifts with the requirements.

The h365 cloud platform in practice

Here are some of the good and bad things I found about the system

• Fast hard drives
  On pretty much any system the hard drive speed is a major issue and bottleneck, on the h365 cloud your OS runs on 15000 RPM hard drives which is super fast. You really notice it when you extract a file.
• Expense
  This is not a cheap system, before going for this system you want to seriously look into the cost, particularly for backup, firewall, cost for hard drive space, cost per CPU and cost per GB of RAM. All of which may shock you a little if you compare it to other hosting options number for number it won’t come out well unless you include on the fly system changes, up time and load balancing into your calculation. The benefits to the system like reliability and performance have to be essential to you and not just nice features. As of this writing there is a significant discount in place for Microsoft Biz Spark customers, be sure to mention that when you are asking for prices.
• No automated control panel
  This is something I’ve been told by H365 is in development, I haven’t really found this to be very inconvenient as I wasn’t under pressure to get the system live but creating an instance took about a week and it took a few weeks after that before I had everything sorted. Still they set up the servers with all the software I required with the configuration I requested, all I had to do was deploy my application.
• Great Support
  I found the support excellent, I’ve sent in quite a lot of tickets and they’ve been dealt with quickly and professionally, I haven’t had any trouble with the solution yet but I feel confident that if anything disastrous were to happen it would be resolved quickly and to my satisfaction.
• Backup
  This is something you have to pay for but its done off site and stored redundantly. Very simple to configure.
• Firewall
  Its possible to create a network of virtual server instances and remote control them over VPN so that nothing bar port 80 and 443 on your web server are exposed. This greatly enhances security, also something you have to pay for.
• Run Book
  This is a description of the system as well as any procedures the support technicians should follow in the event of failure of any monitored condition. Rather clever idea, I thought.

Conclusion

I’m generally impressed by the system, having come from Blacknight its been nothing but a breath of fresh air but without the Biz Spark for a starter business like us it would have been cost prohibitive.  What I would have expected from their system would be a charge for each CPU hour rather than each CPU so that the hosting costs would be correlated to the income. However I’ve used a few enterprise level systems before and I’ve never had to worry so little about maintenance and the future. I may not be as excited as I was when I first looked at cloud but I’m genuinely looking forward to the things I will do with this one.

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These aren’t going to be on every persons list but if you implement them correctly, they are going to make your site a lot easier to use.

• Don’t be afraid to add too many options
  You can hide them behind advanced tabs and expanding sections but please don’t leave me with max, min and location. I don’t want to go through every letting in Dublin City.
• Use free tagging
  Its a lot cheaper to add free tagging to the add property screen with auto complete for popular tags than trying to keep a track of what people are looking for currently in houses.
• Right input control for a piece of information
  If you have a large number of locations to choose from, don’t make me use a multi select box, I’m not going to hold down the ctrl button every time and at some stage I’m going to click away accidentally. Use a number of check boxes, that way I’m not getting frustrated on your site.  Similarly, don’t use a drop down, very few people decide I want to live in that particular town, most people decice I want to live within easy access of work or loved ones, drop downs just don’t suit it. Just think about it.
• Save my searches
  It can take a while for me to enter in every location I want to live in, particularly when they are all spread out along bus routes, so please for the sake my mental stability provide me with a save function. This makes sense from a usability point of view but it also makes sense in that it helps lock users into your system. Daft have the email system which is meant to send you an email whenever a property matching your criteria comes on the market. Very clever but like their save search function it doesn’t allow you to use the advanced search functions (with the time consuming options) thus defeating the whole purpose.
• Let me know if I’ve viewed this ad before
  I don’t know how many people I’ve called up at this stage but at once but undoubtedly I’ve missed properties that I hadn’t seen thinking I had or called up advertisers twice thinking I hadn’t read the ad. If there is an option to login, why isn’t there a function that tells me I’ve seen this one already.
• Give me all the properties that are beside a public transport route to location X
  Daft claims it can do it, I found it just gave me a lot of properties around town. Why aren’t myhome, property.ie and let.ie trying to up the ante?
• Google Maps
  Its free, there is no reason not to use it and its woefully underused by property websites, don’t just show the property I’m looking at in the area. Show all the properties that match my search too, and while you’re at it, allow me to define the area in which I want you to search for properties with google maps.

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The idea is simple, you tell google that you want a new Google Apps account, you tell them your domain name, the user accounts you want and they tell you to point your mx records at them, you can even set up a CNAME (mail.yourdomain.com) so you and your customers/employees/friends don’t have to remember the mail.gmail.com/a/yourdomain.com. As soon as the MX Records are transfered you are ready to go. Here are some points (good and bad) I considered before switching:

• Massive Storage
  The main selling point of gmail is never having to delete a single email, this is rather handy when you’re using it for a business where emails from a year ago can often become relevant today.
• IMAP and POP3
  This means you can use mail clients like outlook and thunderbird, you can also use it to transfer all of your emails from one gmail account to another, all of your mails can be left on the server just archived for you to pick up at any time. The only problem with the service is that there is no unsecure IMAP/POP3 available and some clients don’t support that.
• Secure Mail
  Whether you get it over the web or through IMAP/POP3, its nice to know that you can send information without it getting picked up by someone it wasn’t intended for. Rather handy from a business perspective for passwords to servers and the like
• Google Ads and Information Security
  It was starting to look too good to be true, here is the one major issue for a lot of people about google. They reserve the right to do whatever they like with your information. For me their actions speak louder than words, they have only used the information to put those subtle ads on the screen which unlike hotmail don’t appear at the bottom of every message you send.
• Spam Protection
  These days I don’t tend to bother much checking my spam mail, if someone notices I haven’t replied the spam remains there for 30 days and I can spot it there. In the 3 years I’ve had one person complain about getting caught by the gmail spam filter.
• Google Docs
  Whether I’m viewing a pdf/Word Doc/rtf/whatever someone has sent me its nice to be able to hit view and have the html version openned up much quicker than my machine can load up adobe reader, download the latest unnecessary update and eventually show me the document.
• Google Chat
  If you are adding multiple people to your domain they are automatically added to your google chat contact list which runs in your browser everytime you start the webmail. You don’t have to download a client although its just jabber so you can connect with most IM clients that cover more
• Zero Downtime
  I’ve yet to see any downtime, which is understandable because think of the vast amount of revenue the google would lose from advertising for every second of downtime.
• Easy to use interface
  Its simple, it makes sense, its quick and it doesn’t require some particular browser or plugin to make it work.

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I recently called up Digiweb to get a quote for a Windows Virtual Private Server, I got an answering machine the first time I called. The second time I called I got someone who didn’t really seem to understand what we were discussing. I asked him would .net be preinstalled on the machine and he answered “Yes, .net, .com, .org will all work” or something to that effect, I then clarified I meant asp.net and he put me on hold, presumably to find out what I was talking about. Of course while he was away he must have discovered that the VPS he was offering was not yet available and so when he returned he appologised and said that he’d cal when it became available. I got a call just there today from him telling me how unprofessional it was  that both my boss and myself were calling their sales department seperately about the same server.

In contrast, I was on the Rackspace website and used their live chat function and talked with someone who really understood what they were talking about, they even asked what kind of business it was for, not just my requirements. She then took my number and said one of the sales team who was more suited to deal with my requirements would call me. An hour later I recieved a call and was absolutely wowed by his competancy. I’m generally left feeling like I’ve just had a conversation about quantum physics with an 8 year old after a call with most service providers, particularly that guy from digiweb, but on the call with rackspace I felt like the 8 year old. I felt like their managed hosting solution would cost more, but it would save the company I work for money on maintenance and downtime, I felt like they knew more about what they were doing than I did.

And last but certainly not least I got an email from NamesCo, a provider I had only heard of in relation to their take over of register365, the shared hosting and domain registration part of hosting365. They had read my blog on blacknight and when my blog went down due to a logic/usability error* with their cp they thought that Blacknight had taken it down. They offered me 3 months free trial as a rescue package by which time their servers would be upgraded to their new cluster that apparently will blow anything else in Ireland out of the water. I was utterly chuffed, wasn’t even sure if anyone was reading the blog. There was a strong urge in me to say fuck the year worth of hosting I have with blacknight, but the recession is strong with me and so I just asked for more information about the new cluster.

*http://lacy.ie/downtime

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I had wordpress set up using their cp, I clicked install it worked, I was impressed. Then I noticed that the upgrade feature wasn’t working, I tried even chmoding recursively to 777 (publically writable), no dice, it kept saying I had to ftp the upgrade. Unfortunately you can’t create an ftp directory that points at the folder of one of the cp installed web applications so that wasn’t an option. So then I tried moving the directory to the website root and removing the application because I had it setup on ‘/’ (http://www.lacy.ie/). Of course what is the first thing you forget to do when you delete something, that’s right backup! Miracle of miracles I actually remembered, funny thing is, the database names of the cp created web applications are restricted and so I couldn’t restore the database once it was deleted by the web app uninstall because I couldn’t recreate the database, oh and I forgot to mention you can’t choose the database you want to restore to. So my blog was down for at least a day while I waited for BK to get back to me and fix the problem.

Eventually they did and it was all fine, they even explained to me that the problem with permissions was actually that I had it set to php4 as well as php5 and php4 was used by default. The reason php 5 handles this better than php4 is probably something to do with how php5 is running, what should be happening is that the script is being run by the script owner but what was actually happening under php4 was that all php processes were being run as the same user. Now imagine my surprise when I couldn’t find php4 control panel. All I could find was “PHP Support” and “PHP5 Support”. Ok I want php, and I want php5, its just php4 I don’t want. But wait, I said to myself, this control panel wasn’t designed to make sense, and so I unchecked the php support option and my php based application worked fine. If you are looking for hosting, come down the rabbit hole at blacknight

See PHP Support AND/OR PHP5 Support

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Right, I’m going to assume that you are nothing like me and actually went searching for an article like this before you dived in head first. Either that or you are making use of the restore function and shock and horror its actually working.  I recommend you follow this to the letter, I’m not going to try it a couple of different ways because I have neither the time nor inclination, the first time everything worked I breathed a sigh of relief and returned to some work that actually makes money.

First off you’ll want to install MSSQL, you’ll need x64 version. You’ll need to go into iis and on your default ftp site enable writing to the home directory before you can upload the installation files. Make sure you upload both the server and the tools into the ftp site, I’d recommend zipping them beforehand and I’d recommend using 7z to do it. It has an x64 version, its free and its on sourceforge. So once you have the two folders on the server sitting side by side called SERVERS and TOOLS then you need to download the native client from the following URL: http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?familyid=50B97994-8453-4998-8226-FA42EC403D17&displaylang=en, put it in the same directory. So that you have SERVERS TOOLS and the native client exe all sitting in the same folder. Click on the native client exe and install it. Then you can click on the setup in SERVERS, install everything bar reporting services which won’t install because you are running 32 bit IIS on x64 windows. Yes there is a way around reporting services breaking by preventing 32 bit from running as x64 but that will break plesk and probably other stuff.

Next you’ll want to install .net. There are two ways you can do that, either you download the stand alone installer from microsoft.com or you use windows update. Now if you have delved a little into the machine you’ll have discovered windows update is disabled. This is because Blacknight handles all the updates themselves (apparently). To start windows update you will have to go to the start menu, click run, type services.msc and hit enter.
Right click on automatic updates, set to automatic, click apply, click start then ok. Right click on Background Intelligent Transfer Service, do the same. Open your browser, go to http://update.microsoft.com You don’t need IE 7, so select the other priority update option and clear selection. Then go to optional updates and install 3.5.

Next you want to tell plesk to add your www subdomain when you add a domain.
Do the following:

To set this up automatically for any new domains you add to your Windows Plesk VPS go to (in Plesk):
# Server >> DNS Settings >> Add new record
# The record you are adding has to have the following details:
Record Type: CNAME
Domain name: www
Canonical name: <domain>

Next go to the blacknight domain control panel and add your domain using Plesk as hosting. Once that is complete you should have the domain listed in plesk. You’ll need to add physical hosting for it. I’m not going to tell you how to do that but you will probably notice that you aren’t able to run .net 3.5 apps yet. You’ll need to do the following to get that working on whatever site you have.

To change over an IIS website (even if you created it in Plesk you are going to have to follow the following instructions)

Firstly you will need to find what folder the version of .net you want to use is located and you will need to know what number IIS has assigned the domain you want to change.

For example if you wanted to set up .net 2.0 and configure a domain to use it the folder is most likely the following (though you will need to verify):
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727

If you look up the domain in IIS Manager you should see what number it is using*

Once you have confirmed the directory you can open a command prompt in Windows:
Start >> run >> type in ‘cmd’ and press enter

In here you can change to the directory in question:
cd C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727

If you run the following command you can see the different vhosts (domains) on the server and what version of .net they currently have installed:
aspnet_regiis /lk

A sample output of this would be (please see below for how to tie these numbers to a domain name*):
W3SVC/14382/ROOT/ 1.1.4322.573
W3SVC/17058/ROOT/ 1.1.4322.573
W3SVC/17090/ROOT/ 1.1.4322.573
W3SVC/17123/ROOT/ 1.1.4322.573

To add .net 2.0 to a vhost we run:
aspnet_regiis /sn *vhost*

where *vhost* is the vhost name taken from the above results.

For example to set W3SVC/17058/ROOT/ to .net 2.0 we do:
default path> cd C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727
then:
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727> aspnet_regiis /sn W3SVC/17058/ROOT

If you run the ‘aspnet_regiis /lk’ command again it will look something like this:
W3SVC/14382/ROOT/ 1.1.4322.573
W3SVC/17058/ROOT/ 2.0.50727.0
W3SVC/17090/ROOT/ 1.1.4322.573
W3SVC/17123/ROOT/ 1.1.4322.573

*You can find out what the number between W3SVC and ROOT is through the IIS Manager on the server.

Hope it all works out for you.

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To surmise, over the past while I’ve found them to be inadequate on so many levels, the company has spent more than the difference between the average insanely expensive provider in Ireland and any Blacknight shared package in my time trying to make their solution work.

Here are the more annoying of the problems I’ve experienced with them.

• Everything you do on the control panel becomes an action to be scheduled, these have become locked at least 5 times, once on a Friday evening. It was a database restore, the database was inaccessible on a production environment for the whole weekend. They dealt with the ticket on Monday.
• As of a week ago, incremental backups of the VPS don’t work, you only find out when you try to restore.
• Blacknight handle all the windows updates of your VPS, you don’t find this out until you file a ticket saying why doesn’t windows update work (service is disabled)
• Its x64 windows 2003 with IIS running in 32 bit mode with plesk running on top of that in 32 bit. Precarious to say the least.
• Installing MSSQL 2005 was a pain in the head, I spent hours and days staring at the same error screen, I tried support on the issue, it took them a long time to figure out. Given that MSSQL is a pretty standard thing to wish to install on a Windows VPS there should really be a doc on this. I explain how its done below
• Support by phone is a myth, they are pretty much just trained to redirect you to the ticket support where they can ignore your ticket for 1 hour minimum.
• Domains are assigned web spaces, web spaces have to be activated in order to ftp files to them, you can only activate one at a time. Whats wrong with a folder you have access to with sub folders where each domain goes. The way they handle your multiple websites per account is stupidly complex.
• Transferring a domain  from one package to another requires you remove it first, you can’t just alter the DNS and point it at your already set up system, it would actually be a lot easier to buy a package with someone else if you want to upgrade.
• Whatever way they have it set up, plesk won’t switch me over to ASP .net 2, have to re-register websites manually.

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I’ve been using blacknight for a week or so at this stage.

My first encounter with them was in my search to for a host that would provide .Net 3.5 support. As always hosting companies are reluctant to do anythign that might add to their downtime and .net 3.5 can be quite difficult to install. To cut a long and uninteresting story short, they fitted the bill in terms of the technical requirements for the project. They also met the client’s requirement for it to be hosted with an Irish provider.

At 5 euro a month with a 5 euro set up fee they are by far the cheapest hosting package I’ve ever had, they must have about half a million clients all packed onto each server. In terms of performance, I’m not noticing much of a difference (our application is a small one); in terms of functionality I’m really noticing a difference.

I am quite used to plesk, on my dedicated server I use it to manage DNS, firewall, database and a few other things. I like plesk, its simple, it works, I feel that lack of frustration is worth paying for. However the recesion has hit, and we’re all looking at the bottom line a little more closely these days. So I’m currently sitting staring at Blacknight’s version of plesk which is buggy but its usable. Perhaps plesk licenses cost too much when each user of the system is only paying 5 euro a month for the privilege of hosting 30 domains on the minimus shared hosting option but you can’t help but think that they could be the holy grail of hosting if only they got some license agreement with a company that’s far more specialised into this area.

My second gripe with the blacknight is access to the mssql server. I’m not sure what the issues are with mssql but either it hasn’t been written with shared hosting in mind or blacknight are paranoid but having to use mylittleadmin rather than Microsoft Sql Server Management Studio feels like trying to operate with one hand tied behind my back. Where is my graphical sql builder? Where is my export data? etc etc. All of which is available if you go with Host Ireland (who oddly enough seem to have their servers in Britain) but then again you don’t want to go a month with them telling you they will have .net 3.5 “you just have to wait until tomorrow, definately tomorrow!”.

Now before you begin saying, but Stephen, if you want a better hosting package, then pay for it, particularly given that you are spending valuable time on this! Keep your dedicated server and ditch blacknight or get a virtual private server. I am finding something about the blacknight, I’m getting used to the way they do things. Their system could be better, it could make more sense in general but the more I use it the more sense it makes to me. I’m finding ways of getting things done quickly, I mean everything I want to do is in that control panel… somewhere, all I have to do is find it.

If you are considering getting hosting with blacknight it may be worth doing some calculations in your head. If you are going to start migrating all your clients onto it, then go for it, you’ll get used to how they do things and massive amounts of money will be saved. If you want a simple blog site, and don’t mind spending a day setting it up, go for it. If your time is expensive and you want something quick, simple and you will only want it once, look elsewhere.

Its been a while since I wrote a blog entry, sorry if it hasn’t been the most coherant, I’ll get better

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