Site News Archive
In this archive you'll find all of the Site News published on the Home page of this website since its launch. Everything archived here relates either to all of the Lyndenlea websites, or just to this site in particular. For Site News specific to another Lyndenlea website please see the Site News Archive on that site. Note that the archive is arranged in chronological order, so the most recent news in a particular year can be found at the end of the page.
Site News 2011
Tuesday, 3rd May 2011
- A word of advice to anyone seeking a new website hosting company: AVOID WEB MANIA LIKE THE PLAGUE. Their support is either non-existent or worse than useless, their security is so bad it allows their servers to be hacked, and since last Friday, 30th April at least half of their web servers have been offline. Yes, that's FOUR DAYS, during which time I've received just two emails from them, neither of which was in direct response to the one I sent. Consequently I've now moved to a new hosting company – Tsohost – which actually keeps its customers informed when things go wrong.
- So now that little rant's over, may I offer my sincere apologies to anyone who's tried to access any of my websites over the weekend, and ask you to please bear with me – and ideally drop me an email – if you find anything's not working as you expect it to. I'm pretty sure I've uploaded everything now but you never know, I may have missed an essential file somewhere...!
Saturday, 7th May 2011
- A brief update on my recent web hosting hassle. Web Mania's servers came back online on Thursday, 5th May with no fanfare or email to their customers, just a short note on their website's status page – not very customer-focused if you ask me. On the plus side I've now been able to grab the past year's website access log files and will upload them in due course; until I do you'll find lots of zeros on The Websites – Statistics page! (Yes, I admit I've previously neglected to back-up said log files, an oversight that has now been rectified.) I'm also taking this opportunity to review my entire logging policy, not least because I recently signed up to a monitoring service that pings my websites every five minutes and alerts me if they're offline for too long, and those pings are being dutifully logged and completely skewing my visitor numbers... I'll keep you posted.
Monday, 6th June 2011
- Further to my news item last month about avoiding the UK hosting company Web Mania, it seems they've recently changed their name to YorHost (evidently a poor pun on their York location), quite possibly to hide a large number of disgruntled customers from any future business. Customers who were NOT informed about the change to the company name, I might add – this is clearly not the way to run a business. Therefore I will not hesitate to suggest that you might also avoid YorHost if you're currently looking for a new UK-based web hosting company, and recommend instead that you look at Tsohost who are currently doing an excellent job of hosting my own websites.
- On a lighter note, I've finally got around to uploading all my old log files, thereby eliminating a history of zeros on The Websites – Statistics page. My next job – reviewing my logging policy (that makes it sound like I'm chopping down trees, which I'm not – I quite like trees) and giving access to my latest log files in their new location – is still on my list, but until then it'll be all zeros again after May 2011. Of course, if I decide to ditch the logging altogether (which seems likely considering I never really look at them), that's how it'll stay. Apologies for the badly-ordered drop-down list for changing the year on view, by the way: I'll fix it in due course.
Wednesday, 24th August 2011
- For the latest in a long (i.e. stretching back YEARS) line of tweaks to the Site News feature, I've changed the formatting of the dates to also include the day of the week. This is simply so I can refer to "last Friday" (for instance) without having to specify what date last Friday was.
