The observant among you may have noticed that I’ve changed web host. Goodbye Dataflame, hello LivingDot. Dataflame finally pushed me over the edge by locking down the permissions on my cgi-bin for a week while I was on holiday (without telling me) then locking them down again for two days while they did testing, simply because I was running Movable Type for this blog (and my other blogs).
LivingDot has the virtue of being a preferred partner of Six Apart, the company that makes Movable Type, and while the performance on their servers isn’t as good as Dataflame’s, the server occasionally times out on some requests and they’re a little more expensive, they have several advantages
- They let you use SSL encryption on email in a way that’s compatible with Microsoft Entourage
- They let you support a huge number of domains (50 I think) on your server at no extra cost
- They actually know what Movable Type is and how to support it.
- Large numbers of MySQL databases to call your own
The only hassles I had with the move was a couple of files that somehow got left behind; and problems getting my old MySQL databases copied over (leaving some strange characters on entries that used £s, “s, …s and Greek script). Otherwise, all is good and happy again.
We had huge issues with dataflame, we used them when they first started a good few years ago – It was non stop hassel ! – and if you wanted to complain about the service, you got the person replying in an email “lol” – Glad you are with a better host now, all the best for the future.