People regularly ask me where to host their websites. This is pretty much what I tell everybody.

RackSpace Is The Best

Unless You Don’t Want To Pay For Managed Hosting
Or You Want Ruby on Rails Support

An entry level server at RackSpace will cost you about $500/month. If you can afford a managed, dedicated server, and your are working with PHP host with RackSpace. I have several servers with RackSpace and have been working with them now for over 5 years. The service, support, and reliability are fantastic unless you intend to host Ruby on Rails applications. RackSpace does not “officially support” Rails. When you are talking to the sales department they say they will help with Rails issues even though it’s not officially supported. My experience is that you are totally on your own with Ruby on Rails at Rackspace.

RimuHosting Is The Best For Non-Managed Servers

The Best VPS, Semi-Dedicated and Dedicated Servers

So if you want to run Rails apps or you don’t need a managed dedicated server, host with RimuHosting. This blog is hosted at RimuHosting and for the past 2 years I have had both VPS accounts and Dedicated servers there. The uptime, performance and reliability has been extremely good although not quite flawless. There was one time when one of my semi-dedicated VPS accounts was unavailable for about an hour and it was not a scheduled maintenance period. Even with that one blip in the service, my overall experience has been excellent and I highly recommend RimuHosting if you want a VPS account or a non-managed dedicated server. The support is extremely fast and helpful – albeit via email only. I prefer email though, as long as it’s attended to promptly. In your customer control panel, you can see the status of your support ticket, how long it has been since you have submitted it, whether or not anyone is working on it, etc. It really is better than phone service in my opinion.

HostICan

The Best Shared Hosting Package I’ve Ever Seen

If you just want a low cost shared hosting account, I have never seen a package that is better than the BaseHost package with HostICan. It is $6.95/month and you get 2,000 GB – yes about 2 Terabytes of data storage. You can host 2 different domain names and get a free domain name for life when you sign up. The free domain name is at least worth the cost of one month of hosting each year. They offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee. If you want a WordPress blog, the WordPress software is already there and ready to go. So this is great account to have if you want to host your own blog. You can even get SSH access but that adds a little to your monthly cost. They no longer support Ruby on Rails. But, if your building Rails apps, get a VPS account at RimuHosting.

I’ve been asked a few times how to make a signature with a link in Mac Mail. I’m using Leopard and I agree that it’s not very obvious how to pull this off. The steps are fairly simple as long as you know what to do.

• Open a new mail message
• Create a link in your mail message
• Copy your link into your signature

Here is a quick screencast to show you how to pull this off. Not only does this work with links, but it also works with any other types of formatting in your mail message – bold, italics, fonts, etc.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have recently become quite fond of using jQuery as my javascript library in conjunction with my CodeIgniter PHP projects. In PHP, I often name my form fields in the format of…

model_name[attribute_name]
For Example...
contact[first_name]
contact[last_name]
etc.

I do this so that I can easily retrieve all the attributes for each model and then quickly store them to the database using CodeIgniter’s database helper functions. For example, taking advantage of the Active Record Insert Syntax, I might write PHP code like this…

[php]
…
$contact = $_POST['contact'];
$this->db->insert(“contacts”, $contact);
…
[/php]

When I started to use jQuery to do some client side javascript validation on my forms it was not immediately obvious to me that I needed to escape the square brackets in the jQuery calls.

[javascript]

[/javascript]

Due to javascript’s encoding, you need to use double slashes – not just a single slash – to escape the square brackets.