Server Virtualization
April 28th, 2009
You may have heard about a new web hosting option coming to EPhost soon called Virtual Servers (or server virtualization). I wanted to take a moment and explain virtual technology, and explain the differences between it and another technology called Virtual Private Servers (VPS).
VMWare Virtual Servers
You can think of virtual servers as a server within a server. A virtual server is an independent isolated operating system that lives inside another server. Multiple virtual servers can reside on the same physical server. Usually they are referred to as the Host system (physical server) and the Guest OS (virtual server). Each virtual server operates entirely independent of one another and for the practical part independent of the Host System. What makes this situation so unique is that there is literally no difference between a virtual server and physical server– not to mention that the same physical server can host many virtual servers.
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Tags: virtual servers
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Counterintuitive Ideas
April 26th, 2009
The definition of counterintuitive is “contrary to what common sense would suggest”. It’s also the topic of this blog post about business and the economy. I first heard the term, in the context of the current economy, at my annual corporate meeting with my lawyer and C.P.A. I raised some concerns about the economy and advertising during this time and my lawyer, an older gentleman and the head of a massive law firm, suggested that advertising now, although counterintuitive, is the right course of action. It struck a chord with me and wanted to share these insights with you.
“contrary to what common sense would suggest”
Many people right now are pulling their punches so-to-speak by eliminating advertising, and stopping web development efforts. While it’s important to maintain perspective and keep your business afloat, it’s unwise to think that cutting out such expenses entirely is going to help in the long run. You have to keep the end-game in your mind — when you emerge (and you will) from this down-turned economy where do you want to be? Do you want your business to be frail and gaunt basically unable to fight, or do you want to be strong and fortified having taken advantage of the situation?
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Tags: Business, economy
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ColdFusion 8
April 25th, 2009
I got off to a late start getting ColdFusion 8 installed across our shared web servers, but now that it’s here- I have to say that I am really excited about some of the new features. Most especially there are a handful of new/upgraded tags, .NET integration, and built in MySQL compatibility.
CFGRID Demo Video
Some of the new tags can be found using this link. Personally, I am excited about the AJAX features of cfajaximport, cflayout, cfwindow and others. This opens-up a wide variety of new CRUD interfaces to be built for slick user GUI’s and no-refresh page interaction. It would have been nice if Flash Forms wasn’t so slow and that Flex wasn’t a whole new thing to learn. Some upgraded tags include “cfform type=HTML” which turns the whole thing into an AJAX interface and “cftextarea richtext=yes” which adds a VERY slick WYSIWYG text editor. The editor is probably one of the best I’ve seen– clean code, templates, image insertion and the ability to show your paragraph blocks. Cflayout now includes a tab navigator to create tabbed pages. Interestingly, it can also dynamically pull in another page from a remote source to fill the contents of the tab’s page.
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Tags: AJAX, ColdFusion, MySQL
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Welcome
April 24th, 2009
In these economic times it’s more important than ever to make myself and experience available to everyone who wants to listen. I’ve started this blog to discuss in a candid sort of way various topics including business, web design, ColdFusion, and web hosting. Whether directly or indirectly I hope that you’ll take this information and apply it to your own situation. I’ve always felt that two heads are better than one, so I invite your participation by registering and commenting on my posts.
One aspect behind our new website and this blog has been to make sure that you are aware that real-people do exist behind my company, and that we aren’t just some faceless enterprise that offers web hosting and web design. There is nothing worse to me than seeing someone get caught up in a web hosting or design situation only to find out that when times get tough, the company that was so attractive in the first place, falls short of offering any real help or advice. That’s just not how we operate.
When considering various mediums for sharing ideas with you we decided against, for now, using a forum system on the site. While a generally good idea for customers to share and exchange ideas– I’ve often seen where it becomes both a crutch and a diversion for a company. Instead of providing good customer service they become referrers of people to the forum. Instead on working on customer solutions that benefit everyone, they are fielding specifics from the handful that use the forum. Until we are able to devote the time it’s off list for now. Instead we’ll be focusing on the blog, writing helpful knowledge base articles, and producing video tutorials.
There are so many things that I have learned about the Internet and business over the last 12 years and I am excited to be able to share them with you. Please take a moment to register on the blog to get the latest posts and, most importantly, to be able to comment and share your experiences.
Best,
Joe Rebis
President
EPhost, Inc.
Tags: Joe Rebis
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