IsMyWebsite Free Hosting Development Blog

Forgot Password Works

ismywebsite — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 19:54:21 +0000

In the past, an overly colourful but functionally unfinished form would display. As of yesterday, you can use the feature to find your account by username or email, and reset your password if necessary.

If The Site Doesn’t Load

ismywebsite — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 08:50:45 +0000

Right now, I’m receiving reports that some of you find the site to be offline. I have confirmed there are in fact some DNS issues. These are not universal, but only affecting some people. While I work to fix these, there is a workaround if you’re using Windows and are the administrator on your computer:

1) Start > Programs > Accessories, Right Click Notepad, then click ‘Run As Administrator’.

2) Open the file ‘C:/Windows/System32/Drivers/etc/hosts’. You can use Ctrl + Alt + S to save a backup of this file in case you do something wrong.

3) Add the following 4 lines to the bottom of the file and save it:

174.121.11.252   ismywebsite.com
174.121.11.252   www.ismywebsite.com
174.121.11.252   ismywebsite.net
174.121.11.252   www.ismywebsite.net

This will cause your computer to skip the DNS lookup and directly attempt to access our site at the correct IP. If you are unable to do the above, then thanks for your patience as I work to fix this.

1And1 Domains Locked

ismywebsite — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 06:10:10 +0000

Due to a lockdown on our 1and1 account, changes to client domains registered via 1and1 are not possible. This includes WHOIS changes, nameserver changes, domain transfers, and domain renewals.

Based on current communications, it appears that the unlock procedure is to accept being billed a currently unknown amount for undesired renewal of domains no longer in use.Communication continues to be underway.

Three Free Invites

ismywebsite — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 22:20:53 +0000

Due to the incomplete credit system, and that I appreciate everyone’s feedback and hope having a few more users will give some more feedback, I’ve decided to give everyone three free invites. I may give out more in the future, but I’m not sure yet. Extra invites can still be purchased at the regular price of 10 credits, if you have more than 3 friends who you want to invite.

Here’s how to activate your free invite codes:

1) First, go to ‘Overview’ in your account.

2) Then, scroll down to the bottom and click ‘Invite Center’.

3) Next, click the button ‘Activate Free Invite > >’

4) Your invite will be generated. Copy the code to your friend who you want to invite.

5) Your friend enters the invite on the homepage to start the registration process.

Thanks for all the great feedback everyone. Please keep it coming.

If anything doesn’t work, please report it. Thanks.

Update To Hosting Control Panel

ismywebsite — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 22:30:59 +0000

This is a relatively simple update. I have removed the troubleshooter that never got finished, and only caused confusion. Instead, I’ve added a new tool, which will attempt to recreate the cPanel. It also fixes incorrect passwords if your cPanel ends up with the wrong password somehow. So basically, if your cPanel isn’t working, it fixes the most common errors. You can find this new tool under the ‘Reset’ tab. As usual, I hope you’ll help test this new feature and report any problems.

Note For Clients Of Node 4

ismywebsite — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 19:30:25 +0000

We have received a few notifications that some of our clients are not able to connect to their website. If you are experiencing issues with your website to where you cannot connect to it and/or our website (weblyte.com) please reply to this e-mail so that we may inspect your website and make sure that your IP address is not blocked.

As you may know we are a very proactive company that would rather work on an issue before it actually becomes a problem for you, but sometimes this is not always possible as we cannot foresee everything. However, we do make every attempt possible to make sure your hosting is stable.

Node 1 Quota Reset

ismywebsite — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 21:36:42 +0000

Due to a client taking up 16Gb with backup files, new accounts accepted on Node 1 could not be properly configured with the correct package. This was causing mixed results. In order to fix this, we had to reset the package settings for all accounts on the Planning stage. If you had requested extra storage (not part of your package), you’ll need to request that again.

Brief Node 4 Downtime

ismywebsite — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 23:52:38 +0000

The following alert was received from WebLyte regarding Node 4.

As you may know, we do our best to keep clients informed of whenever something happens that may affect their service. Today we experienced about 8 min. of downtime which was a result of data center maintenance performed by third party vendors. We have been reassured that this will not occur again as we were promptly contacted by our data center after this occurred.

Nick Finishes The Job

ismywebsite — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 17:20:04 +0000

Ahh what a lovely thing to hear:

Deltik has moved onto a shared webhost and a VPS, provided by Almighty Servers.
Our previous webhost, IsMyWebsite, has pretty much committed suicide. We’re outta there.

So a suicide eh? That would imply I intentionally did something to damage/kill the service. Ahh I remember now what I did. You’re right. Unfortunately, if I didn’t go along with it I was considered unreasonable and inflexible.

Since version 5 is ‘almost done’ as it was for the last 5 weeks before I finally pulled the plug on it, why don’t you just launch it then? I’ll let you use one of our domains (say ismywebsite.info) and just see how it goes. Since I’m sure a launch was imminent.

You can expect Deltik to be much more stable and have less downtime. (No guarantees; it’s possible that I can accidentally botch up something because I’m not used to the new provider..)
Also, Deltik should load faster now. The new hosting provider outperforms our old one.

Well Mr. Liu, I wish you luck with the reliability. I’ve set up monitoring on it and only time will tell. As for loading faster, it might be worth your while to do a side by side comparison. For the record though, it still appears you’re comparing a VPS to a free hosting plan. Not only that, but for someone so opposed to the invite system, due to it restricting our services from being usable by anyone, it sounds like you have an exclusive deal with the host.

As for “it’s possible that I can accidentally botch up something because I’m not used to the new provider”, it’s not only possible but highly probable if this is your first time with a VPS especially.

Oh and get this – I heard about this from our (apparently unreliable and slow) provider WebLyte. Why? Well because of a script driving up the CPU load on your account nonetheless:

They had a script driving up the server load consistently for about 5 minutes to 2.00+

So if there’s a death here, it’s certainly not suicide.

However, there’s still a heartbeat. There are still people who believe in this site and this service, and that’s the only reason it isn’t dead. I may not see that path out of where we are, but I can tell you without a doubt that a small group of committed people can do anything. In fact, that’s about how anything gets started or happens in this world.

Nick is a very smart capable person, who did care a great deal. Unfortunately, he chose at one point to view me as an adversary, someone to be undermined and given false progress reports, and later to be opposed in a strong fashion. Since a strongly divided team is not really one at all, at that point, I had but two choices – give Nick and all the other developers the hosting entirely (which Nick didn’t even want) or take back control and do what I could to salvage things. I didn’t see any decent working relationship between me and Nick at that point. Thus, there was no other option.

But most likely Nick’s criticism will be of my blog posts here, reflecting my concerns, fears, and worries about what could happen, which not surprisingly came true in the end. You can argue if through posting, I somehow affected his team’s morale and took their courage and made them take longer to finish things. You could argue that my attempts to discuss with them what needed to be done, and try to even determine what was going on, did in fact slow them down. The fact still stands, aside from changing the password once out of frustration, they had full access the entire time and any questions about my code I answered in full.

In fact, however, if I know anything about Nick and the type of person he is, he loves a challenge, and the more people who tell him it can’t be done, the harder he works at it. It’s truly unfortunate he believed that 8 months of coding could be done in 1 month, even by a team as skilled as his, and under his devoted leadership. There was a point I realized the only thing holding him to keep working was this burning desire to prove me wrong. It wasn’t until I finally told him that I really appreciated the hard work and I wanted to support that version 5 and potentially use it, that he appeared suddenly to become very busy with school and homework and all these other commitments started getting mentioned. I kind of predicted that would happen as well. That’s when I pulled the plug.

And so Nick, the previous project I mentioned in my last blog post – everyone thinks I’m crazy to even attempt such a thing. People say it’s impossible. Nobody’s ever done it. Why – because it’s just too hard. Sessions and cookies are too complicated to figure out, let alone build a working virtual browser. Maybe you could do it – nah you’re too busy. It’s too great a challenge. There’s no possibility of success. You’ll fail. You’re not good enough. It’s probably impossible. It wont work. How would you even do it anyways? Yeah, like I said, pretty much impossible. There’s no way you could do it. You shouldn’t even try.

Good luck.

Biggest Project Yet (For Domain Management)

ismywebsite — Mon, 30 May 2011 18:06:13 +0000

So it’s getting to be quite frustrating for domain owners (who bought domains through the system) to manage them. So much so that I’ve got a request lately to transfer a domain to another account. This defeats the entire feasibility of the domain system if they are somehow subpar domains, not able to be controlled, or their reliability depends on my limited time.

Thus, it’s really important to get a huge project finished, that would be used for a lot of systems. Essentially, it’s a proxy. It is able to crawl and explore the web in the same way my browser does. With a catch – it all has to be PHP-based. If I ask it to visit a site, it needs to keep track of it’s cookies that it’s picked up. If I ask it to click links, submit forms, etc… they need to be submitted such that it’s undetectable that this is a PHP client and not a standard browser.

My previous attempts have fallen short of working, due to my limited understanding of the whole cookie protocol, as well as very tight security on the websites I’m trying to access. If one thing is wrong, the whole request fails, making it very difficult to figure out what went wrong. Yet any browser I use has no trouble doing the exact same task (no problem at all).

The end goal is that you would be able to set up new nameservers for a domain that you own, and it would log into the applicable registrar (1and1, GoDaddy, WildWestDomains, MyDomain, etc…) and use their control panel to change the nameservers. The relevant output would then be returned. So effectively, an API could be built. In the future, this would expand. It would be possible to change the WHOIS details. It may even be possible to renew domains automatically. (Registration would still require approval to prevent system exploits.)

What else? This would allow for automatic daily calculation of AdSense earnings. AdSense does not have an API. Currently, I have to manually download a CSV, open it in a text editor, then copy and paste it into a tool I built to parse it. With this system, the tool could run each night (or a few times a day) and automatically grab that data. It also allows us to hook up with many other advertising networks, majorly expanding the selection. Finally, I was even considering Minecraft servers. However, all these do not have APIs and so they need a proxy / browser simulator to really be usable.

The main reason I’m posting this is to see if anyone knows of software that can do it already, or may know a developer who can build something like it. This is something I really would like to get going on.