A project of mine launched today: www.aenac.com.   It was in collaboration with Adelheid at CZA Design.  She does the design, I do the  coding.

A Page from AENA

We had quite a difficult time with the client’s hosting service.  The original hosting company ran PHP4 by default, which was okay because you can let it run PHP5 by using .htaccess file.  Also their idea of preventing directory listing was to put a blank index.htm file into every directory…  that’s just wrongheaded.  The biggest problem was that MySQLi was not supported, so I gave the client an option of editing my code, but they found a new hosting company.  With the new one, something was screwy with the FTP connection, which kept dropping connection on me.  After providing them log files, screenshots, etc, the support gave me the following ultimatum:

It might be the issue with the network connection which you have used. Hence, I suggest that you to try to use different network connection and try to connect the FTP in different computer.

Also, please make sure to disable the firewall connection and disable the antivirus and try to upload the files again from your end. Please let me know if the issue persists.

Hmm, if I have no problem connecting to 5 other hosting services, why would this be my problem?  Why would I ever want to disable my firewall and antivirus?  Thankfully they had a decent file manager through their control panel, so the problem was averted, but using FTP is so much easier.

I always recommend my hosting company Hostmysite.com even though I get no kickbacks from them (unlike people who recommend DreamHost…) and it’s not the cheapest service around.   Their support is awesome –  a real person picks up the phone when you call support!  No navigating through the maze of phone system.  It’s a cliche but so true — you get what you pay for.

Anyway, enough of my gripe.  In the end it worked out; glad to have it live.

Update August 2010 — Ever since hostmysite.com was purchased by hosting.com, the quality has deteriorated drastically.  I no longer recommend it and is considering moving my hosting elsewhere.