Asylum-ET™

Asylum ET has turned over a new leaf. It has been a while since we have made any posts so I am going to make one to let everyone know what has been going on recently. We have finally tied up all loose ends with our previous host which is a good thing but getting everything configured just right with our new isp has been a little crazy. We have almost got everything back in order.

We have been working away at a brand new framework for the website and so far tests show great performance increases but we have to get everything finalized before we migrate to it. Our intent is that it will be practically invisible to our users when we perform the migration.

On another note I am shocked to find out that in order to pay your bill over the phone with comcast cost you 4 bucks. That is just absolutely ridiculous! So not only does it cost you to use the internet but there is a fee for paying your bill. That should be illegal. Anyway everyone have fun, we’ll get back to you with more as we proceed.

So it has been a bit now since our last post. Sorry for that. No we have not died but one could surely have wondered. Things have been very hectic with the hosting issues and all. We have in fact moved from our old host. Now we host ourselves through our other website “NutsNBytes”.

Although Asylum ET is still in a shared hosting environment we have a few serious advantages here. The main advantage being that we control the host. With the ability to control the host we have set guidelines for our server that we will not change. Previously Asylum-ET was hosted in a shared environment with sum 250+ other websites running along side it. Our traffic has hit such a peak that the host could not meet our requirements and took us off-line as we mentioned in our previous post. This is directly following payment for services for an extended period of time.

Not acceptable to us at all! So now with our own server we set the strict policy that no single server will have more than 10 websites running on it. Anything over that is viewed by us as overselling what we do not have so we have surely learned by faults of our previous host in that aspect.

Now the refund process with this previous host so far has not proved to be overly fluid. We started our refund claim on Wed, Apr 11th 2007 at 01:22. It is now the 18th and we have received notice stating our account has been refunded. So all is good right? Well maybe not. In reviewing our account there has been no refund posted yet. We contacted the bank in regards to this and they made it very clear that they run there records update every morning so if the refund posted the 17th it would have shown this morning. The account does not reflect the refund so we will give this till tomorrow before contacting the host to find out what the issue may be.

On another note in the move the website requires many changes and updates. This would not have been to great an issue but very time consuming just the same. So as we were getting into the process of the shift you could not guess what happened. I sat at my desk oblivious to the fact that there was a hurricane brewing just outside. I sat and worked intently and before I knew anything was amuck there was no power. Now trapped in complete darkness I felt around my area for about 15 minutes trying to find a lighter or anything to give me some light so I may find the exit. Well the power came back just long enough to make my way outside.

Now I am outside and if you looked directly above my house it was the most beautiful day you could imagine. Sun so bright, nice blue skies and then surrounding us on every side was almost complete darkness and absolute chaos. The trees where touching the ground from the severity of the winds. The wind at times sounded almost mechanical as if it were a huge train. This is not the type of thing we see here. Ever! It is very obvious we (earths inhabitants) are really screwing things up but that will be another post. I must make comment though about a few things that bothered me about this whole thing though.

• Total disgust at the unprepared ness of everyone including myself in this situation.
• Absolute gratitude to those who worked round the clock to restore power.
• Disgust with comments aired from callers complaining about the state and power company workers eating breakfast when they should be working. I wonder if that person eats before going to work or maybe he has found a way to eliminate the eating process?

I want to give a personal shout out to all of the folks who have come to our aid and have been working double shifts or better. Seriously we have folks that came down from Canada to help out. Thank you all. And thank God that there were no serious injuries or deaths.

Wow this has been a crazy week for Asylum-ET. Our website was being used to much and our host shut us down. In the process they managed to severely damage the functionality of Asylum-ET.com. Important file structure and links where altered as well as deletion of files.
We are very sorry if this has inconvenienced anyone. It has surely been a huge inconvenience to us.

The actions of our host have pushed us to seek other hosting opportunities. We are looking at a few options at the moment and have the option of using a dedicated server if necessary so we will give things a few days here and see what the outcome is but so far our host has cost us around a thousand dollars in man hours. That is not acceptable. If we use to much we should be notified by the contact number in our account as our other host would do.

Just last night I walked away from my windows terminal as I would any other night. I locked the desktop out and shut off the monitor. About 5 hours later I awoke and something told me to check in on things. I came back to the office and find that the workstation is at the login screen after being rebooted. Not the lock out screen.

This did not concern me to much at first. Power outage or anything like that could have caused this type of behavior so no big deal right? Wrong! After logging back in I notice that the account profile is not showing but the windows default profile is. I check a few other things and find that all personal settings are gone. Now I am getting a bit concerned with what has happened.

After another moment a message balloon from the notify area pops up and says that windows installed a needed update and had to restart the computer. Now I know why the computer was in the state it was when I found it but why? I have personally disabled the automatic updates and selected to ask me which to install but to download all. The reason for this is due to a bug in the windows genuine authenticity check. I have a valid and previously verified genuine copy of windows xp pro installed that came with the computer. The GWAC has cuased nothing but problems for other computers we use so this one was never going to see it.

Well now since updates where disabled like they were why is it now that the computer updated anyway without asking. I have not found what the last installed updates where just yet but in viewing the system logs I found the reason the default profile loaded was due to the registry being locked from the last unexpected shutdown. The fact that I had numerous projects open and being edited while the computer rebooted ticks me off a bit due to some loss in data but that was very minute and one should always save anyways but still what is the deal. I say no you can’t install updates and MS feels they need to ignore that because they know what is best. I don’t want to point fingers here but come on now.

Just the same I can not wait. About 2 more weeks and we should have a stable linux server up and running and windows can just be a faint memory of a dark past. I may suggest that if you are using win xp and have auto updates enabled in any way disable it totally and I will look into this but if possible deny access to it in the firewall as well. If you want updates go and do it yourself manualy and then set everything back to protect you again.

After reading a friends blog and an article he wrote titled the no www movement I got to looking into this a bit further and found out many interesting things. After then asking myself why it is that we even use www in the first place. I could’nt come up with a single good explanation and many reasons why we should’nt use it. One being asylum-et.com is so much shorter and easier to type. I have decided that asylum-et.com is a class b site meaning that traffic flowing to www.asylum-et.com will be silently redirected to asylum-et.com. Joseph Crawford has a very good little code snip in the article for your htaccess file to redirect all traffic flowing to www to be redirected permanently to the same domain name without the www prefix. I have a bit that I added posted on the nutsnbytes forum that is a modification to wordpress so that when the htaccess file is overwritten joseph’s code is added rather than overwriting it to the default.

Browsing around the web today I came across the best April fools joke I have seen in a long time. Check this out. Google has got a brand new beta called Google TiSP Everyone must give this one a look and definitely follow the links from the page. You will have a good little chuckle.
Up front for those who believe just about anything, This IS NOT real. It is purely for entertainment purposes.

Well here we are 04/01/07. What was supposed to be inverted day. So far it seems we are the only participants and win by default but that is just not acceptable on so many levels. According to statistics we have had hundreds of thousands of visitors so there is no way that this was not known about.
Instead this is more a sign to me that webmasters everywhere are lazy and do not care much about things like accessibility. This may not be correct but of all the people I know of that had known about this event did not do it because it would be to difficult or some other excuse. Well inverting Asylum ET was not all that easy either but we did it. Maybe next year we will see more participants.
It is really not fair that we have won by default so this is surely not a victory but for not even a single site to take us up on this challenge it is just plain pathetic. Or maybe everyone thought this was some type of joke due to the date it fell on. Oh well better luck next time.