Tag: Internet

Quick Hosting Reviews

Over the last few years I’ve used quite a few different hosting providers, so I thought I would give a few quick reviews of them all, so I can share my experience with them.

Silentflame Web Hosting

During the time I was with Silentflame during 2007-2008, I was very happy. Although the service was a bit slow for me, I suspect that this was purely because I was on the other side of the world. The novel thing about this service is the fact that it gives away all it’s profits to charity. It’s a great idea, and one that I think we should see in more businesses (perhaps a tithe would be better though). No native IPv6 on their services yet, unfortunately.

DirectSpace Networks

I only had a VPS with DirectSpace for about a month or two, before I switched to a different provider. I was fairly happy with these guys, never had any issues that weren’t resolved promptly. The biggest criticism I had with my service was that the CPU allocation was too low. I had severe speed issues from the lack of time my processes had to run. No native IPv6 either.

ServerPronto

I had a dedicated server with ServerPronto for around six months this year, and although I no longer have it, this server performed very well for me over the time I was with them. They do have a somewhat convoluted exit process (it involves filling out a paper form and sending it to them snail mail along with a copy of some ID) but this is no problem to navigate, and unlike what others are saying on the Internet, does not result in your identity being stolen and your credit card being abused. The main selling point of ServerPronto is the price, they are extremely cheap dedicated servers. That said, quality does not appear to be an issue. No unexpected restarts, hardware never failed, and the network is very fast. No native IPv6 here either.

The only reason I got rid of this server was that it was costing more than an equivalent VPS and I wasn’t really using it. I’ve since turned the money over to other VPS services, increasing the number of services I can test.

Nullshells Networks

I’ve used Nullshells Networks’ web hosting for a few years now, and I am extremely happy with the service. All the services I had with them (web and email hosting) have always worked flawlessly, and if I’ve had any queries, the owner of the business has been more than happy to help out. I have only two nitpicks; one is the lack of IPv6, and the other is the fact they use a self-signed SSL certificate. While the lack of signing of an SSL certificate is no technical problem, and while I’m savvy enough to check the certificate and add an exception, it is a bit unprofessional. I’m still using Nullshells for my web and email hosting.

For my full review of Nullshells from around a year ago, click here.

Mammoth VPS

Overall I’ve been very pleased with Mammoth VPS, which is an Australian-owned company with servers located in Sydney’s CBD. While they are more expensive than other offerings, this is simply because the bandwidth in Australia is much more expensive than it is in Europe or the USA, so this is no fault of Mammoth. I have had a few issues with unexpected reboots, but apart from messing with my uptime statistics, this is no real problem. It’s always nice to support local businesses, too. No native IPv6 yet, but almost nowhere does.

BuildYourVPS

I’ve only had a BuildYourVPS (actually TOCICI) VPS for a couple of days now, but I wouldn’t recommend them, based on what I’ve experienced so far. When I first signed up, it took 4 rebuilds of the VPS before I could even log in via SSH. I’m assured this is not a regular thing, but I’d take care. After it was set up, the VPS did work very well. No CPU cloggage issues like on most other VPS providers. The network was extremely fast (as you’d expect from having the servers located in a US west-coast Internet exchange). One thing I did notice is that the server is behind a NAT. Fine, I guess, except that it makes some network configuration tasks a bit more confusing, and that the gateway IP they use is actually a special-use IP reserved for testing. Ouch! Zero marks for that one. On the up side, they do support native IPv6, albeit on request.

Edit 8/10/2010: After playing around a bit more with BuildYourVPS services, I’m happy to report that the issue with server builds has been fixed. All my other complaints were simply OpenVZ issues. Pending a few more weeks with the server, I’d be happy to give them a thumbs-up.

Facebook Pages ARE NOT Websites

There’s something I need to get off my chest. You may have guessed what it is by now.

I’m getting really sick of news outlets calling Facebook pages ‘websites’. It’s really demoralising to the people who actually own websites and put effort into maintaining them. I mean, it even costs money! I bet you don’t get the people who create pages spending money on them.

So, Southern Cross News, WIN News, and even ABC News (this one, I admit, surprised me), please just stop confusing pages and websites. If you really want to get pedantic, a Facebook page is indeed a webpage, but it’s not a website. Facebook as a whole is a website.

It also alarms me that the easier it gets to create content on the web, the stupider the content gets (I’m talking about this and this). Which makes me wonder: were the book publishers and the newspaper publishers right? Has the quality of published work suffered because of the Internet? The fact that they might just be right… well, that scares me.

Eight Things I Hate About Living In Hobart




You might also want to read my follow up to this post, Eight Things I Hate About Living In Hobart – Six Years On

Following on from my post about things I love about living in Hobart, here are eight things I hate:

  1. The public transport system. It sucks badly. If you want to go anywhere by bus after 6pm or on a weekend, forget it.
  2. People complaining about the public transport system. People love complaining about Metro (I’m one of them). It smells. It’s always late. It goes nowhere near where you want to go. All this complaining is really bad; what we need to do is all get on the busses and give them the money they need to fix it. At the moment I can (and regularly do) catch a bus and be the only person on it.
  3. Bogans. Individually Bogans are fine. I know quite a few, and they’re lovely people (mostly). It’s just when they get into groups; you start to get the feeling deep inside you that it’s no longer safe and you should leave. It’s not a good thing that The Powers That Be decided to build entire suburbs of public housing, which have now become ghettos.
  4. There’s not very much to do. Assuming you don’t drink alcohol (which I don’t), there’s very few things of great excitement in Hobart (if you have ideas, leave comments please!).
  5. Rubbish TV stations. People on the mainland get Channel 7, Channel 9 and Channel 10, as well as digital radio. We get Southern Cross, WIN TV, and TDT, which are bad impersonations of the mainland stations. I know Tasmania is a small market, but wouldn’t it be cheaper then to copy the stations over exactly as they are on the mainland and just change the evening news bulletin?
  6. Badly surfaced roads. I know this is a complaint pretty much everywhere in the world, but in Hobart’s suburbs it’s getting pretty ridiculous. Neither of the two electorates that Hobart covers (Denison and Franklin) are marginal seats (in fact pretty solidly Labor) so there’s not a lot of money spent pork-barrelling here.
  7. Slow Internet. We’re at the end of the world and there’s only a few Internet cables coming into the state. Add to that the high prices charged by ISPs in Australia generally, and it’s a pretty bad situation. The National Broadband Network (NBN) promises to fix the speeds, but at what cost?
  8. The jokes about two-headed Tasmanians when you travel to the mainland. It’s getting old guys, seriously.

Review: HTC Touch Pro2

I’ve been in need of a new mobile (cell) phone for a while. My old phone, an HTC Touch GSM (the original) was becoming a bit broken. I was loving it to bits.

The USB connector was broken, WiFi only worked half the time, I was starting to get jealous of the iPhone; a number of reasons contributed to the need for a new phone.

I did however love HTC. The phones seemed rock-solid and well designed, especially compared to some of the other manufacturers on the market. Other HTC owners I have met over the years agree; I am yet to hear an HTC owner complain about anything but the price.

I considered a few phones. The Apple iPhone was high on the list, as were a number of Nokia phones, most notably the N79. I will admit at this point to being a brand junkie; there was no way was buying a cheap iPhone clone.

What drew me in to buying the HTC Touch Pro2 was the full QWERTY keyboard and large 3.6″ WVGA screen. I know from owning a decent desktop computer that the most important parts from a productivity point of view are the monitor and the keyboard. They are the parts your body has to interact with, and they should be comfortable.

I bought my phone new in the retail box for $887 AUD from a shop in town. I have seen them as low as $650 on eBay, though I didn’t go this route because I wanted a solid warranty. It is a mobile phone with a hinge, after all.

Now onto the device itself.

It’s far and away the largest and heaviest mobile phone I’ve ever had, or ever seen, or even heard of (apart from the old analogue brick phones). It’s 17mm thick, 116mm long, and 59mm wide. Looking at it another way though, it’s the smallest laptop computer I’ve ever seen. It has a 480×800 pixel screen, as well as a 5-row QWERTY keyboard. Although it is on the small side (naturally) the keyboard is very nice to type with, using both thumbs with the hands wrapped around the back of the device. The screen is also nice, not suffering from glare problems as much as other phones I’ve used (older Nokia phones were particularly bad). If you look closely you can see the individual pixels, but you have to look very closely. It is a very high quality screen.

The screen is a touchscreen, and this is one area where they might have done better. The level of touch required to activate a ‘click’ is in my opinion excessive. It’s far more than on my old phone, or the Apple iPhone. It’s still usable however.

Battery life, as expected for a smart phone with all the bells and whistles, is miserable. I have to charge mine every day, otherwise the battery does run flat. However, being human, I have to sleep sometime, and it’s convenient to charge it every night.

In the box comes a screen protector (very useful, it’s a large otherwise unprotected screen waiting to be scratched), a spare stylus, a USB cable, a wall adapter for charging without a computer, a pair of earphones, and a very nice leather case. The headphones that come with the device serve a dual purpose. The first is as a headset for using the phone, and for listening to music. The second is an antenna for the device’s FM radio. I have to say here that the shape of the headphones is abysmal. They do not fit in my ear at all, and the cable is far too short. If it wasn’t for the fact that they are required for FM radio, I would have just chucked them away.

Inside the device is a Qualcomm MSM7200A chipset running at 528MHz. It’s fast. There’s 512MB of storage onboard, of which around half is available to the user to store settings, documents, and optional applications. Program memory (RAM) is 288MB. More would have been nice, but I’m yet to run out of it.

HTC has gone to great lengths to ensure every piece of software you could desire is on the device, and they’ve managed well, with a few exceptions.

The operating system is Windows Mobile 6.1, upgradeable to Windows Mobile 6.5 some time in the future depending on which carrier you are with. It’s nice, though I notice no huge usability or performance increases compared to Windows Mobile 6.0.

HTC also put their custom TouchFlo 3D software on the device as an alternative user interface. If you’re not used to the Windows Mobile interface, you’ll probably find it nice. I just turned it off and used Windows Mobile as Microsoft designed it. The alternative interface does have a few cool features, mostly related to quickly turning communications on and off as well as turning emails into phone calls near instantly. I get the feeling it’s designed for the jetset business executive. As you may have noticed, I’m not one of them.

The device is also jammed with other software. A YouTube player is there, as is a choice of two browsers (Internet Explorer and Opera Mobile), Google Maps (with support for the GPS built into the device), and Microsoft Office Mobile. As well as a lot more. I loved the fact that Google Maps and YouTube were installed by default, saving me some download time. One application that is missing is Facebook, although given two browsers and a huge screen, it’s not so much of a problem. Opera Mobile even supports tabs, though having more than 2 or 3 tabs open at one time does slow down the device quite a lot, especially when multitasking with other applications as well. I would have liked a few more games installed by default, although I guess I can’t complain – this is a business phone.

Overall, I love this phone, and I’m very glad I bought it. Assuming you have the the money to spare, I would definitely recommend it.

Good:

  • Huge 3.6″ screen.
  • QWERTY keyboard.
  • WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, HSPA, it’s all there.

Bad:

  • Opera slows down when multitasking.
  • Battery life is short.
  • Included headphones are awful, and using your own requires an adaptor.

Overall: 4.5 stars.

On Phone Plans & Wireless Data

Recently I’ve been looking into my mobile phone account, since I’m sure I’m not getting the best deal. Currently I’m with Telstra on a prepaid plan. There’s nothing wrong with it, except that it’s generally expensive.

I’m only a light caller (we’re talking a couple of sub-minute calls a week, tops), and only a couple of SMS’ a day. On the other hand, I use a significant amount of data. Every month I use at least 100MiB, and sometimes I go up to a gigabyte. For various personal reasons, I’m expecting to use even more than this over the Australian summer.

So I went through the options, with the goal of paying less (a good thing) or getting more for my money (also a good thing). I currently pay somewhere between $30 and $50 AUD a month.

Telstra – I like Telstra a lot. Signal can be found pretty much everywhere in Australia, and a 3G signal can be found in all the major towns and cities. Call quality is very good also. However, they are very expensive. The Telstra plans I looked at (in particular the Mobile Member Plan) confirmed this, being even worse value for me than my prepaid plan. Data usage (most important for me) is charged at $59 for 1GB, then 25c/MB after that (more info). This is HUGELY expensive. Even with a low-cost $20 plan though, I do get a new phone (but no data).

It’s worth mentioning that I’ve also had a Telstra Prepaid Wireless Broadband dongle in the past. I liked it a lot and found it very functional, but the prices were very high. This is still the case, and the prices are about the same as they were 6 months to a year ago. I’d prefer not to have to have a seperate plan for data, but it is an option.

TPG – TPG have one of the cheapest post-paid plans on the market. It’s $9.99, includes $150 of cap value, with call charges being very reasonable rates. However, at this cheap price, data suffers. Data usage is $5/MB, which is much more expensive than Optus, Virgin, or even Telstra!

TPG’s more expensive plans ($49.99 and $79.99) do include data (500MB and 2GB respectively) as well as free calls to other TPG users in off-peak hours. However, at this price, other providers are cheaper anyway. In addition, none of TPG’s plans include a new phone (although for that price, you can’t blame them).

3 – After a friend’s experience with their accounts department, I’ll never go to them in my life. I haven’t even looked what the prices are, let alone care.

Virgin – Virgin Movile was one of the providers I looked at very closely. For $25 on their Rollover Caps Plus plan, I get more calls and texts than I’ll ever use in a month, as well as 300MB data, which is more than I use in an average month. Also included is a new phone, free voicemail, and free calls and texts to other Virgin Mobile customers (though this is nobody I know, making it a dud offer). It goes straight on the shortlist. If I do use over the 300MB in a month, I can buy a data pack which gives me 1GB (up to a total of 1300MB) for an extra $15 a month. There’s also the Velocity points I earn, but they amount to two parts of nothing.

Also worth consideration is the Beancounter prepaid plan. This has the benefit of really cheap calls and texts to everybody (10c SMS’ to anybody in Australia is very tempting), but falls down in the data department; I have to buy a seperate data pack ($10 for 300MB) seperately.

Optus – The ‘yes’ Cap plans have similar value to Virgin’s post-paid offerings, but without the possible bonus of free calls to other customers of the same telco. With regards to data, Optus is slightly more expensive than Virgin at $19.95 for 1GB. Virgin uses the Optus network (in fact, Virgin is owned fully by Optus, not by the Virgin Group as you would expect) so reception and signal quality should be very similar, at about 96% of the continent’s population at the present date.

Vodafone – Last but not least is Vodafone. They have two series of plans. The first is the SIM Only Contract Caps, starting at $20. This has quite reasonable value at $150, but my research indicates it comes with no data. A data pack can be added, $9.95 for 200MB. This would cover my needs most months, but leave me high and dry in a few.

Their other line of plans is the Contract Caps, starting at $29. These include a new mobile, and for the more expensive plans, some data as well (quite a lot of it, in fact). However, for the cheaper plans it’s the same $9.95 for 200MB as the SIM Only plans.

Another thing to be mentioned about Vodafone is that their network in Tasmania, from experience, sucks. It’s getting better all the time, and in other states is probably quite fine, but is still lagging behind the other networks in Tasmania.

Conclusion

So which one to choose? It’s a hard choice to make. Most of my friends are with Telstra, and would either kill me or not message me anymore if I moved away to another provider. On the other hand, being with Telstra is definitely the most expensive option for me (except for possibly TPG). I won’t go Optus, since I may as well go Virgin. I also won’t go Vodafone, since I like my phone to work around the places I live. 3 is ruled out for being incompetent. That leaves staying with Telstra or moving to TPG or Virgin.

I have no idea what I’ll do yet. I’ll let you know when I decide.