In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

I Heart PowWeb

Lauren

I do love my host. I’ve been with PowWeb ever since I moved off of Blogspot, and aside from the Great Movable Type Debacle, I haven’t had any troubles with PowWeb at all.

After using MT for two years the blog got too big to handle and it had to be redone. With the help of two awesome people I was able to make the switch to WordPress rather smoothly.

Until today. *

If you didn’t notice, this site was down for a couple of hours after my mySQL database went berserker and rendered the server unstable. I wrote PowWeb immediately and not only did they restore it, someone optimized my database for me. ** My site! It’s so quick!

All I Need To Know About Life I Learned From My Geek Friends

1. RTFM

2. Use Google. That’s what it’s there for.
2a. Learn how to run a good search on a good search engine.

3. Be especially polite to your geek friends, computer support staff, and engineers. They will come through for you, especially if you are patient and considerate with your requests considering the amount of stupid “problems” they are asked to solve every day. Nothing is more irritating than the rude person you are required to help.
3a. Be polite anyway.

4. Always defer to the experts. Do not try to act like you know what the fuck you are talking about — it’s irritating to those who can see through your affected ignorance.
4a. If you can, use proper jargon and terminology. This is a suggestion for dealing with geek elitists.

5. Show a willingness to learn.

My friend Z always pummeled these things into my head, but I had no idea what he was talking about until I had the three-week series of questions leveled at me by my (I love you) Mom when she couldn’t figure out how to attach a file to an email.

Thanks again to Rick at PowWeb.

___________
* I really hope I got a few people to sweat on this post considering I’ve convinced three bloggers to move to PowWeb this week.
** Arguably, this should be standard, but he did it without me even thinking to ask. Awesome.

16 thoughts on I Heart PowWeb

  1. PowWeb sounds nice, especially because they want to solve problems. Right now, my webhost is telling me that I have problems, but they refuse to lift a finger to help me solve those problems. This kind of treatment makes me want to lift one of my fingers in their direction.

    Does PowWeb have any “CPU time” quotas?

  2. The site does seem faster than I can remember it. I’ve actually been meaning to post on this somewhere where it wouldn’t go off topic. I develop web software for a living so I know this stuff back and forth. I deal with many hosts day to day, if you are looking for recommendations, I can give some.

  3. Ah, teaching moms computer skills is the best. The night my sister tried to teach my mom how to use AOL is still infamous around my house. My increasingly frustrated sister kept getting snappier and snappier with her answers to my mom’s questions, until my mom finally yelled at her for being so impatient, and said, “You know, Chrissy, you should never go into teaching.”

    To which Chrissy replied, “Well, you should never go into learning.”

  4. My brother and I have managed to teach my mother the basics of the Internet although it is still painful to watch her using it (our hands itch to grab the mouse to make it faster). My father is completely hopeless. My GF’s dad who is in his late 70s (she was born very late) however has taken to it like a fish in water. He can’t figure out Windows, Word, etc but the Internet is completely comfortable for him. Go figure.

    The break-through for my mom was I bought her a $50 gift certificate for Amazon.com and the rules required that no one helped her spend it. The money was a great incentive.

  5. There is a noticeable difference in page load time — holy shit did this site load slow. It’s much better now.

    I *heart* PowWeb, too.

  7. Would you recommend WordPress over Movable Type in general?

    By far, although there are other dynamic publishing tools that are nice as well. WP is clean, quick, and open source, which means new developments, etc. Plus the support boards are very, very active. I’m always surprised at the options and plugins others develop for the WP community.

    It does take some getting used to, especially from the administrative and design end, though some are developing dynamic themes that are very handy for newbies.

    And it’s free.

  9. No, domain names and hosting must be paid for, although there are some cheap plans available. Fuitadnet.com has $5/month hosting plans (I used them before I switched to Dreamhost).

    WP is better in general than MoveableType because there are no licensing restrictions. I also happen to think that PHP is a better language than Perl. I haven’t used MT since early 2004, so I don’t know what the current version is like, but when I used it, it was horribly crufty: you had to rebuild an entire site of static HTML files after any significant change. WP is so extensible and full of plugin goodness that it’s difficult to see why you’d want to use anything else.

    On another note, v2.0 of WordPress is coming out any day now.

  10. I’m getting ready to move to WP as well (I’m on the horrific — yet free — MSNSpaces right now. Blah!!). My concern, however, is that my knowledge of HTML coding is just enough to screw something up.

    Hosting is another issue — I’ve looked into BlueHost and Laughing Squid, but we don’t even have cable right now because $$$ is tight. I got a nice bonus check and plan on paying 2 years upfront, so that’ll help. I’ll check out PowWeb as well.

    Now if I can just find some nice, affordable, incredibly intelligent person to help me design the site (wink wink, nudge nudge).

    🙂

  11. And one other thing — this site is SCREAMING fast now. Before (even on the T1 at work) it was a bit slow.

    The folks at PowWeb did a heckuva job!

  12. Mark, like I said: Fuitadnet.com is good hosting on the cheap; the only reason I moved was because I was willing to pay a little more a month for Dreamhost’s added services.

    And using WordPress is a breeze; you don’t even need to make your own site design: there are assloads of downloadable templates available.

  13. Holy crap!

    PowWeb was the biggest piece of crap that I have ever had to deal with.

    I design and update the website with glsenphoenix.org and PowWeb was nothing but a pain in my ass. Our website was always down (which was strange because I have never seen yours down), tech support was sucky and RAWR.

    Anyway, I’m glad someone got some use out of them. lol.

  15. I design and update the website with glsenphoenix.org and PowWeb was nothing but a pain in my ass. Our website was always down (which was strange because I have never seen yours down), tech support was sucky and RAWR.

    I find you get what you pay for with hosting companies. When you figure it costs them about $15-50 dollars to answer a tech-support question (the cost per question decreases with volume) when you factor in all the costs, a host charging $5/month will generally be bad on support and accept the customer churn, knowing that at that price there will be more customers.

    The cheaper hosts also tend to limit the resources a site can use to pack hundreds or thousands of customers per machine. The hardware they use tends to be cheap too with no included backups. I can’t tell you how many of our customers who have licensed thousands of dollars in software to put it on $10/month servers only to come crying to us because they lost everything because of a bad hard drive. They weren’t making backups.

    If you are using a cheaper server, make sure to create and download a complete MySQL dump at least weekly and download a copy of all files via ftp at the same time. Assume that your host will eventually have a hardware failure (with cheaper hardware used in a server hard drives usually last 18-24 months at most) and it will be your responsibility to restore it.

  16. also happen to think that PHP is a better language than Perl.

    I program in both, PHP can be better in some circumstances but has a crummy security record. It also is more limited from a progamming point of view. With the right host Perl kills PHP but those knowlegable hosts are more rare.

Comments are currently closed.