Five Percent: Conserve a Little Energy

At 8PM local time the world turned out the lights for an hour, Earth Hour. If you missed the chance, it’s not too late. I have a sneaky trick for you. (more…)

Earth Hour is upon us. Turn out your lights for an hour starting at 8PM (your local time) this Saturday the 29^th. You won’t be alone. See my previous post for details and a link.

I got an Economics degree almost 25 years ago. I think I might like a refund, as it has not lived up to its promise. (more…)

In order to develop A Site With No Name (yet) I needed a web hosting service that was more, er, reliable than my former unreliable hosting service.

They were ok at the start. But several times I tried to log in and found a problem, submitted a support ticket and they got back to me saying something like “yes, this is a known problem that we’re working on”, after which the problem was resolved. But then I began to realize, as I looked at log and traffic data that these outages were quite frequent. After coming home from a vacation after Christmas, I learned that the site had been down for many days, and that I was expected to know that I needed to do some minor reconfiguration in order to make it work again. Harrumph! With relish, I will cancel my account tomorrow. Onward and upward.

Given that I work for a company whose websites have not had an outage in 16 months, perhaps my standards are higher than I should expect for $7.95/month. Well, now that I have tripled my “capital investment” I am paying for some first-class web hosting service. (Note: I started writing this last night, but was rudely awakened this morning by the monitoring service that we use at my company. Guess what: first time in 16 months, several of our websites were performing slowly. Seriously, what was I thinking even in writing that down???!)

Anyway, fivepercent is now being hosted by RimuHosting, whose name is an indication that they are actually really great nerds, just the kind of folks you want managing your servers. So maybe it will be up most of the time, now :-)