What web host does GoreGrish use?

[Blaine]

Thinking of using InMotion myself, Business Class "Max." I already found an adequate registrar.

No, I have no idea what I'm doing yet, other than knowing the basic steps and that I'll probably need to use a WYSIWYG website development program to start off with. Doesn't matter, it's just a personal website and I'll figure it out.

My main concern is that there be absolutely no advertisements whatsoever on my site, is that standard procedure if I'm paying the hosting fees myself?

 

[D.O.A.]

For domain names I always hit namecheap.com, find a discount code at retailmenot and you get dot coms for about 8 bucks. Plus your WHOIS info is protected so no one can look up your name and address & phone etc. All that shit is public with some almost all registrars.

We use jaguarpc for hosting. I've been there about 4 years I'd guess. Start off with $5 hosting (shared hosting), it's enough to get going and work things out. Once you start getting decent hits, or your scripts are doing too much at once, that shit will implode and you'll be forced to upgrade to real hosting, like sdx or vps (one server with only a few clients) hosting for $20 per month... this will do fine until you are getting fairly heavy traffic and causing load on the server again with requests for content. Then it's dedicated server time, aka a whole server to yourself. You pay for it, so no ads from the host, only free hosting forces ads on its users or makes them perform some type of sexual favour in return.
I see inmotion is still basing its budget plans around the limit of databases and impossible value for money, which is kinda old hat. If you need 200 mysql databases then $13 bucks a month worth of CPU aint gonna cut it. Most do unlimited now as your ass will be thrown out long before you hit the limit they're willing to allocate you in processing power and ram. I use just 3 databases, albeit 3 fucking huge ones in the gigabyte size range getting hit with hundreds of requests per second.

You probably dont want to be building your own site if you just got started, even if it is with dreamweaver or whatever other shit spits out html in capital letters. If it's just a personal website you should be looking at one of the freely available CMS scripts or something like wordpress, you can build slap that shit into whatever you like. I built the goregrish frontpage theme and this around wordpress functions, which is pretty flexible for what is supposed to be a pretty basic "text/image blogging" script. wordpress also has add ons much like the forum software here does.

If you wanna see some decent sites check out http://www.cssmania.com/ for ideas, most of them will use either wordpress, joomla, expression engine or some other off the shelf website management system and put a pretty theme around it. Because of the complexity of a "basic" website nowdays, anything built with these shitty editing programs usually comes out looking like a geocities website imho, so best to use one of the management systems available and one of the thousands of paid and free themes you can get for them.

 

[Blaine]

Thanks for the advice, I appreciate it. It's extremely difficult to get any halfway-decent feedback about these issues over the Internet. My cousin Seth is an IT professional and we get along very well, but he lives in Seattle, and I'm not going to pester him over the phone for pointers. GoreGrish is almost always up, is relatively fast and gets a fair little bit of traffic, so you must be doing something right. Remember how UR started filling up with shit because of the ads, porn spammers and PPM's incompetence at doing things unrelated to bricklaying? lol

Speaking of filling up with shit, after I read the fine print of InMotion's user policy, I filled my pants with a steaming-hot brown growler:

InMotion Hosting has zero tolerance for spam originating from our customers, or from our customers' customers, or for spam advertising web sites of our customers or our customers' customers. ...InMotion Hosting has the right to charge $500 per complaint to investigate.

That's just one instance. There are other portions of their policy that stipulate circumstances subject to $500 fees, as well as a $150/hr. fee for a computer engineer's salary if they need to fix something on their network allegedly caused by your domain, such as blacklisted IP addresses or ranges, or a faulty script.

I sent their support an email saying (paraphrasing): "Are you fucking serious? Not even big corporations or Internet security services are immune to being hacked these days. Are you going to charge me exorbitant fees if someone hijacks or tampers with my domain?"

They sent a reply essentially claiming, "No, no, it's not like that," but actually it is (excerpt from their reply):

"If your server is the initiator or target of a denial of service attack that adversely affects our/somebody else network, we will terminate your account without warning and you will be held responsible for any charges that may result from this action."

So if someone DDoS's me, I get my account terminated, lose my domain and InMotion may or may not charge me exorbitant fees? Riiiiiiight. Way to reassure your customer, dipshits. Killing my domain and account to stop the DDoS is certainly understandable, but charging fees to me personally because I'm the target of a DDoS attack? Yeah, fuck off. Get business insurance, you frauds.

So I'm definitely going to be looking into this JaguarPC thing, thanks for the link. Won't use GoDaddy since they supported SOPA at one point, retraction or no retraction (also, GoDaddy is shit).

 

[D.O.A.]

GoDaddy is fucking AIDS/CANCER of the internet, avoid them at all costs. They supported SOPA until most customers threatened to transfer domains to namecheap or another anti-sopa registrar. $$$$$ talks as usual. They've always had shitty hosting, support, shit prices and are probably still the biggest domain squatter on the internet. If you come across a domain they own and do nothing with, they extort top dollar out of you for backordering it with some invisible auction you cant see the bids in.

Bad news but 99.9% of hosting companies worth a fuck have obscure clauses that will cost you if you fuck up. Spam is the big one, jaguarPC will also play the $500 card if you get them blacklisted. The thing is, the whole IP range gets blocked and listed on spamhaus and the host is fucked/blocked, so they have a valid reason for wanting ur balls.

The only ways I can think of getting jammed that hard is if someone uploaded a shell script and took over your server and used it as a mail whore. Or you install outdated/exploitable scripts that hackers will get full access into your shit via. Or your root password is qwertyuiop. It's not something you need to worry about if you have good security to begin with, at the server level, and you have up-to-date "everything". Chinese always try to jack this server, a couple times per day I get warning emails. It's bots not people (I think), but I changed the port for ssh access and you only get three chances and you get IP blocked by the server firewall if you fuck it up.
Shit like that will fuck most script kiddies up.

I hear a neat trick for handling DDOS attacks, redirect your domain to the IP behind fbi.gov, pretty sure they don't like that kinda traffic much. Is it legal? who gives a fuck, it's out of your hands anyway. Guys like paperclip would threated to DOS your site, which is the other kind where it's just one guy pinging your website from his dell inspiron.
pissing into an ocean of piss etc.

Anyway when you sign up to shared hosting you'll be given cpanel access so you can add your domain name and create databases, so start getting used to this, if you go vps you'd get this as well. Install wordpress via cpanel software installer, upgrade wordpress when you're in it (it's a one click process in the wordpress admin) and you're ready to go. Also get a decent theme.
http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2010/08/19/100-free-high-quality-wordpress-themes-for-2010/

 

[Blaine]

The only ways I can think of getting jammed that hard is if someone uploaded a shell script and took over your server and used it as a mail whore.

I've considered that already. I don't know nearly as much about this stuff as you do (including the terminology), so I simply thought of it as, "What if they take over my shit and use it to send spam emails?"

Or you install outdated/exploitable scripts that hackers will get full access into your shit via. Or your root password is qwertyuiop. It's not something you need to worry about if you have good security to begin with, at the server level, and you have up-to-date "everything".

I considered that, too. It's a pretty big problem, because I have very little idea of how to manage a domain/server yet, so it would be easy to make a mistake. I can certainly follow your rote advice (or the advice of a guide, you get the picture), but there's a difference between being able to follow a series of steps and actually knowing what the fuck I'm doing.

I suppose in a perfect world I should attend some sort of class or read a bunch of literature/become active in webmaster discussion forums/read online FAQs/do tutorials/etc. I've been prepared to do just that as I go along, except that if I fuck something up due to inexperience, apparently my host can have the bank repossess my genitals.

I just want to throw some bullshit on the Internet like Maddox does on The Best Page In The Universe, or like people did back in 1999 with those ugly-ass spinning fire GIFs and everything in Times New Roman font. I want to have complete creative control. From what you're saying, though, doing that is riskier and more difficult now.

I can do some rudimentary graphic design, and want to create my own visual theme and layout. Here's an example of something gay I made a couple of years ago for practice, using various Photoshop techniques (I made this from scratch with no references, clip art or anything of the kind):

Guys like paperclip would threated to DOS your site, which is the other kind where it's just one guy pinging your website from his dell inspiron.

lol

Anyway when you sign up to shared hosting you'll be given cpanel access so you can add your domain name and create databases, so start getting used to this, if you go vps you'd get this as well. Install wordpress via cpanel software installer, upgrade wordpress when you're in it (it's a one click process in the wordpress admin) and you're ready to go. Also get a decent theme.
http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2010/08/19/100-free-high-quality-wordpress-themes-for-2010/

Yeah, I'm basically going to have to start with safe stuff like that until I know what the fuck I'm doing, I think.

 

[D.O.A.]

I've considered that already. I don't know nearly as much about this stuff as you do (including the terminology), so I simply thought of it as, "What if they take over my shit and use it to send spam emails?"

If you get shared hosting you only have to worry about your own password being secure enough, and whatever you upload also being secure when it runs. Something like 50 million websites use wordpress, so it's a pretty stable/secure thing to have a start with. And it's easy to use. And free.

From what you're saying, though, doing that is riskier and more difficult now.

Not really... if you are just gonna stick up a page as you described, that is easy, and the risk of anything happening is pretty much fuck all. You don't have to personally manage a server unless it's dedicated. Plus you'll have cpanel, so you can do pretty much everything you need from a control panel page like add your domain names, create databases, upload stuff etc.

Putting a theme together is easy enough, and a site like maddox is pretty damn simple as far as design goes... black background, huge ass text lol. Your images would be easy to incorporate in a theme along those lines, you can even modify existing themes to make it all work, changing colours, heights and widths is pretty painless.