NealGrosskopf.com l My New Home!

My New Home!

Aug 16

I'm happy to announce that I have a new home. Before you get excited (thinking that I sold my house, which I assure you I haven't) I'm actually referring to the new home of my website nealgrosskopf.com. After almost 4 years with the hosting company 1&1, I've finally switched. For the entire month of July my site was going down left and right. After contacting my old company 1&1 over 7 times with them doing nothing to fix my problem, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I also determined that it wasn't just my site going down by using a service that checks other sites in my shared hosting environment. With this I could tell if it was a server-wide issue or something specific to my script.

On July 15th I started tinkering with PHP via Portable XAMPP on my computer. After that I started converting my old site over from Classic ASP to PHP. Then on July 22nd I signed up with the hosting company FatCow.com and bought the domain name HtmlB.org (a combination of HTML and Borg...from Star Trek). It was also a very short domain name and a domain hack so I figured I could do something with it someday.

I finished converting the site this Friday the 14th, after about 3 weeks of stressful nights at home programming non-stop. Then, on Saturday I started changing all my 1&1 DNS settings. For whatever reason, 1&1 sticking with their usual lousy customer service, decided to take two days to update my DNS settings which I finally got notice tonight (Sunday, August 16th) at 6:23pm that the DNS switchover was finished!

1&1 Fail

Like I mentioned 1&1 was failing me majorly. I even completely ceased writing articles and promoting my site, which usually results in only getting less than 200 visits a day, yet the site still went down. If you still don't believe me take a look at a graph from Google's Webmaster Tools showing how Google's crawl of the site came to a screeching halt in the beginning of June/July:

Google Crawl

AreMySitesUp.com

Next I started using a service called AreMySitesUp.com which will basically check your website once every hour to see if its up. What I found is that my site was going down every hour and often times for 10-15 minutes at a time. If the service found that your site was down, it would then do a couple follow-up pings to see when it comes back up again. By finding out that my site was going down (even more than I was aware of), I started converting it to PHP at an even faster rate.

FatCow

So far my I have a high opinion of FatCow as a host. A week after I signed up with them, they actually bothered to call me to see how things were going. I was pretty impressed with this. I also feel that their online control panel is quite robust with features allowing me to customize my site however I want.

PHP

I also feel pretty comfortable with PHP+MySQL now. There will still probably be some issues popping up on my site from time to time, but I'm tracking all the errors that occur and trying to address them as they come up.

If you run into any problems let me know.

Posted By: Neal Grosskopf @ 8/16/2009 8:50:34 PM

Tags: nealgrosskopf.com ( Add Tag )

Replies: 8 | Views: 2503

Chris Retlich

Mon. August 17 2009, 8:48:12 AM

Congratulations on the full-site ASP to PHP conversion. Now you get to take advantage of the fun PHP features, like the GD library for image resizing/manipulation, among others. Looks like you've set up some kind of redirect for .asp files to .php files, and a non-www to www redirect also. this appears broken though, but not anywhere as bad as it was before where you only got an "invalid hostname" error message.

Neal Grosskopf

Mon. August 17 2009, 11:59:53 AM

Thanks Chris! I'm already using GD for a few areas on my site. I even resized 100+ wallpaper images locally using GD which saved a lot of time. Hopefully things will be a bit more stable now that I'm using a more professional database back-end.

Chris Retlich

Mon. August 17 2009, 1:36:41 PM

Yeah, was just going to bring that up - must be nice to be using a "real" database now moreso than access .mdb files scattered about. Were there any big hurdles or anything that was especially troublesome to learn or convert to PHP?

Neal Grosskopf

Mon. August 17 2009, 8:58:09 PM

One thing I ran into a lot was variables and their values (specifically querystring values). In ASP I would always do if(request('submit') <> "") then ..... but in PHP I can't do this because if the QS isn't set, then it returns an error (I'm using strict validation)

To fix this I'm using isset() all over the place now. So in ASP I was taking QS values for granted.

I also got screwed up a lot when a PHP error occurred and returned the HTML as a blank white empty screen. It took me a long time to figure out that I could run the PHP locally in XAMPP (w/o a DB) and then it would tell me the exact line number and error, which usually would be a missing ';' or '{'.

I also found it rather annoying how the order of the built in functions were usually slightly different than ASP. Like the parameters for str_replace or str_len etc, are in a different order. This usually messed me up if I wasn't paying enough attention.

Finally variable scope messed me up on several occasions. In ASP if a variable was set outside a function, the function could still access it and it's value (even if it wasn't dim'd.) In PHP I have to set the variable as 'GLOBAL' to do this.

Overall I'm quite happy with my new PHP codebase as I feel it is a lot cleaner now. Some of the code hasn't been updated since 2006 (in my dorm room) so it was a good project.

Chris Retlich

Tue. August 18 2009, 11:45:10 AM

I\'ve always liked the isset() method - seems cleaner than comparing to an empty string. The error reporting settings can be troublesome - you want to see errors while building/debugging/testing, but usually not on production. You can also add \"@\" before a statement to act like \"on error resume next\" for that specific statement instead of having execution halt or have an error appear. Scope is nice when you are aware of it and use it properly, but if converting your old codebase that used one style of scope to another, I can see how that can cause trouble. I imagine the PHP way is more \"proper\" as you should be explicitly sending the information that affects the behavior of the function via parameters, but it can be a nuisance sometimes too.

Neal Grosskopf

Tue. August 18 2009, 6:03:30 PM

I turned off magic quotes. So here's a test to see how it's working.

Chris Retlich

Tue. August 18 2009, 11:20:19 PM

Some tests:

slash: \

slash slash: \\

apostrophe: '

slash apostrophe: \'

double-quote: "

slash double-quote: \"

Chris Retlich

Tue. August 18 2009, 11:22:24 PM

Looking good!

(the preview/confirmation screen still showed all the wacky escaping, but the final post looks correct)

Neal Grosskopf Dot Com A NG Designs Site

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My New Home!

Aug 16

1&1 Fail

AreMySitesUp.com

FatCow

PHP

Replies:

Mon. August 17 2009, 8:48:12 AM

Mon. August 17 2009, 11:59:53 AM

Mon. August 17 2009, 1:36:41 PM

Mon. August 17 2009, 8:58:09 PM

Tue. August 18 2009, 11:45:10 AM

Tue. August 18 2009, 6:03:30 PM

Tue. August 18 2009, 11:20:19 PM

Tue. August 18 2009, 11:22:24 PM

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