Monday, November 29, 2010

I Wanna New Host & Tech Update on My FB Feed Filter

For a long time now, I've been a GoDaddy/Wild West reseller. It was easy to set up clients, create accounts for them and manage it. They also had a phone number you could call for support, and they were friendly, knowlegeable and had American accents. This is important because I've encountered big problems with outsourced tech support due to a miscommunication issue. However, the GoDaddy/Wild West servers are crap. 256MB on a 512mhz processor??? WTF? Gimme a break! And working with db driven web apps like Joomla and Wordpress are impossible - the data connections are incredibly slow and at times would time out. Frustrating for myself, and my clients when their site would go down, particularly while editing.

As I have been doing web design and development since 1996 (yikes I'm old!) I have been through the whole hosting provider/domain name registrar switcheroo. Hear about these mortgages being resold to other banks? It's kinda like that - the host is too small, goes under or gets bought by a bigger fish that sometimes does not know how to migrate its customers and keep them happy. I figured, reselling GoDaddy (who was supposed to be the domain name registrar for Google) surely this one won't go down... umm yeah.

So with a new web client, I've started investigating new hosts. One thing that I try to be is ecologically smart (ie "green"). Another is cost-effective. And another is feature-rich. I found that in a host: fatcow.com. Granted, I haven't looked into their reseller program yet, but this new site is FAST! And their tech support has been great - Live Chat 24/7 and phone support! Unlimited bandwidth, disk space and MySQL dbs, what more could a gal ask for!

I would have liked to go local, but unfortunately I haven't found anything that compares with price and features.

And re: the FB app I was working on - sorry folks, the dream of the "My Feed Filter" is not going to work. Argh. Much to my chagrin, FB does not give access to the properties of the updates in the stream. Only thing you can do is pull the entire feed/stream, can't sort it based on if it is an application, photos, etc. I suppose I could create a "copied" page, and use a ton of JavaScript innerHTML fun to redesign the feed, but because I don't have the time it would take to creating it, I'll stick to more "simple" FB apps for now...