In the past years, I have had my homepage hosted at the TU Delft Visualisation Group. I have worked there for about six years, so all that time I had free hosting, lots of space and lots of features.

I had also registered my domain (bvrolijk.net), six years ago, without hosting, but with domain and email forwarding, at redirection.net. So no disk space, just forwarding to the TU Delft.

Ever since I left the TU, I’ve been thinking about hosting my domain elsewhere, possibly even doing it myself. My homepage consists of only a small number of pages, but I like putting some photos online, I have a wiki, which I use quite a lot, and a weblog (yep, this is it). But since there are so many good, free services nowadays (at the moment, this weblog is hosted at wordpress.com, for free and with lots of space; and I uploaded lots of photos to picasaweb.google.com, also for free and also quite spacious), I was in doubt whether it would be worth it to buy a hosting package.

After a lot of searching and comparing, I eventually decided to buy the hosting package at ANHosting. 500 GB of webspace, 5000 GB of bandwidth, and all the features you could possible want: MySQL, PHP, Perl, Python, unlimited subdomains, unlimited email addresses and SSH access to your account on a (shared) Linux server. Furthermore, they support WordPress, Drupal, Mambo and many other packages with auto-install scripts through Fantastico.

In fact, my search for a hosting provider resulted in three very similar candidates, of which I (almost arbitrarily) chose ANHosting. The other two providers were DreamHost and Bluehost. Take a look at this site for a comparison. You will see there are not much differences. Whereas DreamHost and ANHosting offer 500 GB of space and 5 TB of bandwith, with Bluehost both the disk space and bandwidth are unlimited. On the other hand, the first two offer unlimited email accounts and MySQL databases, which are both limited at Bluehost. Well, for me, and for my personal website, I think 2500 email accounts is enough. And 500 GB is more disk space than I have in total at home! So, in practice, I would say it’s all the same. BTW, contrary to what it says in the comparison table, ANHosting do offer SSH access. You just have to ask them nicely…

Why then ANHosting? Basically because they’re the cheapest. DreamHost is cheaper, but only if you pay 10 years in advance (instead of 2). And if you google for “anhosting coupon”, you can even get a bit of extra discount.

And what about my experiences so far? Well, the email support is very fast, they often reply within minutes. I’ve installed MoinMoin for my wiki and it’s working fine. Besides that, I haven’t done anything special yet, so nothing special to report either. The only thing is that I’ve had SSH access being disabled all of a sudden a few times now. They say it’s because of a server update or something. But every time they’ve fixed it within 10 minutes after I email them about it. So, as long as it won’t happen every week…

As you can see, my weblog has been moved to WordPress.com. If you haven’t done so already, please update your link or bookmark to bvrolijk.net.

I have used the import function of WordPress to copy all of my old (Movable Type) weblog entries to this new system. I hope the conversion went all right, but if you see anything strange, please let me know.

Many thanks to Charl for hosting my weblog these past four-and-a-half years and for his help in the conversion.

Of course I’m not talking about people who have committed minor offences, small delicts, or even larger crimes, like thieves and murderers… No, I am talking about the real scum-of-the-earth, the utter lowest life-form possible.

Yes, I am talking about the SPAMMERS!

By now, I am used to these spamming bastards sending loads of unsolicited email. Luckily, we have spamfilters for that. Praise be to SpamAssassin!

I am also already a little bit used to blog spam. Idiots who post spam-comments on my weblog with nothing but stupid URLs. We have blacklists for that, and as that’s apparently not enough, we also use Captcha’s. That’ll teach ‘em!

But now these ugly no-good sons of bitches have found a new way to spread their spam. They’ve found my wiki. The idea of a wiki is that a lot of people can cooperate in creating and maintaining webpages. I had one page that was open to the world (shhht, don’t tell anyone!), because I wanted an easy way to communicate with a number of friends. But I’m afraid I will have to password-protect that page also.

I hope that these people will somehow, sometime, come to their senses and realise the effects of their business.

If not, with the lack of a death penalty, may they be deported to Iran, and buried up to their chests – and without internet access of course!

Much easier to remember!