Libdems like to make out they are something different to the rest of the parties.

I found it interesting that when the BBC (rather nicely) provided profiles of the likely candidates for Party leader all but Charles Kennedy had been to Oxford or Cambridge.

Shows how much these two institutions to have a strong influence in UK politics. Also of note is that a fair few of them had senior jobs in the private sector before turning to the darkside politics. That a bad thing.

In August I signed up with Dreamhost.

Until now I have used Freedom2surf’s web hosting service. I originally signed up with them as they seemed a good company (and still do, though now owned by pipex) and were cheap, £25 a year. When I first started using them they transferred my domain to them (it was all a bit new to me so I just presumed this was a required step) and their domain name costs were not cheap (£10). A few years later I wanted email as well (another £25), and the cost started going up. The service was stable, but I was started to need more. They offered just one database, not much when you are playing around with different software, such as Joomla, running Wordpress and trying to experiment with your own silly web apps which require a DB, plus the quote for the database was tiny (10mb). Plus their web stats were crappy, and the log files were fiddly (kept for a few days on a secure website, no ftp and wget didn’t seem able to get them which made automating difficult, plus each file would download with the same filename by default).

During the summer I ended up at the GoDaddy website. I had heard bad things about them, but they did seem to offer an awful lot for a very cheap price. But I wouldn’t get that warm cosy feeling having my website hosted by them, so I waited. Dreamhost were recommended but not the cheapest. However after seeing just how much you do get (shell account, cron, etc), and that it would still be cheaper that my current setup, I went for it.

So far impressed, a lot of nice things and a lot of stuff (databases, email addresses, easy to get logs, easy to upgrade Wordpress, etc). There does seem to be an awful lot of login requests when using their backend, each service and area seems to have it’s own username and password system, but this isn’t a huge problem. Plus I seemed to join them at a bad time, and there has been some downtime of late.

nostuff.org has been down for the last couple of weeks, and this is just down to me. I tried to transfer the actually domain across, though the move was rejected (I may not have set the new DNS servers up right before putting in the transfer request). I then basically did nothing for a few weeks. I finally got around to it yesterday, the transfer this time went fine and now everything seems good again.

So, hopefully this is still on some of your RSS feeds and you haven’t all deserted me! Welcome back.