Yes, at last, with 100% thanks to Newnet, I finally have internet. I won’t repeat my praises too much about how excellent their tech support is, and how much of a pleasure it was to deal with them and get the problems sorted. I highly recommend them to anyone at all.
Jul 24 2008
Now, even though I still don’t have Internet due to BT crossing my lines, I am already singing Newnet’s praises. Their customer service is simply supreme. The difference is quite simple… call centre in England, with English speakers, but the important part is this, so I will emphasise this a lot:
The technical support know what they are talking about.
I have never had such a pleasurable experience being told I can’t get internet just yet. It was simply bliss. The good thing is, they explained the problem clearly, in simple-to-understand language, and without just repeating what BT Wholesale just told them, or just reading from a script!
So, here’s to Newnet, possibly the best ISP in the UK.
Jul 7 2008
I just heard from Be Unlimited that I should be getting my broadband enabled on 10th July! Woo! Once I have that, I can start the migration back from the Newnet servers to my own again.
Jul 4 2008
So after a little hacking at lunch today, I discovered just why half my websites don’t work. It’s a very simple reason…
PHP4 vs. PHP5.
Yes, Newnet are still stuck in the year 2000, and are using the “favourite old shoes” version 4 of PHP. Please, Newnet, PLEASE upgrade to PHP5. Not for me, but for the sake of your hosting service. Not to mention the fact development for PHP4 actually stopped seven months ago! Not only that but security updates will be stopping in August apparently! Surely that’s two really big reasons to upgrade.
And that goes to every other webhost stuck on PHP4. At least provide two hosting options – one PHP4 for those developers stuck in the year 2000, and a PHP5 option for those developers who are modern and up-to-date.
This article is a good debate.
Jul 4 2008
After several days of stress, tiredness, anger, fustration and all sorts, we’ve moved into the new house and everything is done (for the mean time anyway…).
Firstly, the servers. I took them to a friend’s house to stay there temporarily until I could get my new internet line set up. Unfortunately after a day or two of waiting for DNS updates to propogate through the world, it looked like it just wouldn’t work. I didn’t have time to fiddle around making it work, I just needed the sites up as I have a couple of important clients. I’ve had to shell out at my own cost, temporary hosting at Newnet. So far so good except for the fact I cannot get any PHP error logs, which is fustrating as the Frosthold site does not work properly at the moment. I managed to get this blog back up and running after finding that my Feedburner Stats plug-in doesn’t work on the Newnet servers, so that’s disabled for now (coding fail perhaps?). I’m still waiting for their online support service to give me some sort of response (24 hours later, and not even a “we have acknowledged your ticket”… Unfortunately due to the temporary migration to newnet, Tom’s blog and Hannah’s blog won’t be working as I stupidly set them to use the same DB prefix (wp_), and I can only afford one MySQL database. Sorry chap and chapette…
The actual house move went fairly smoothly, albeit loads of heavy lifting and Hannah and I cursing at each other when boxes were dropped on each other (and no, thats not some kind of kinky game..). The new house is absolutely gorgeous, and we’re having a few people over tonight to celebrate our engagement as well as the house warming. Now I know that the blog is working, I’ll take a few pictures to show everyone what it’s like.
