Birdhouse Hosting is proud to welcome a chilling, but expertly produced new web site by photojournalist Mimi Chakarova, priceofsex.org:

Chakarova has spent more than six years reporting on sex trafficking in Eastern Europe and parts of the Middle East. The site features a series of interviews with young women sold into prostitution against their will, multimedia video pieces, reporting notes, previous work that launched on PBS’ Frontline/World, NGO resources and ways to get involved. Chakarova says:

Please spread the word and leave comments on the site. Your input is invaluable. And as always, I am grateful for your support and interest in my work.

It’s been ages since I’ve promoted Birdhouse Hosting customer sites here on the blog — but that doesn’t mean we’ve stopped taking on new users! Here’s a quick list of some of the best new sites to join Birdhouse in the past six months (full list here).

backyardmedia.org
As a writer and multimedia journalist, Wroth brings subjects to life with fresh and media-appropriate use of photography, audio, video and the written word. She earned a Masters from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism in May 2008. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, she focuses on food and agriculture, health, and urban renewal.

Hilobrow
“Middlebrow is not the solution.” A Josh Glenn project site.

ktgkids.com
Kid-friendly version of the classic Archive of Misheard Lyrics.

jaimegross.com
Jaime Gross is a freelance journalist based in San Francisco, California. She writes about culture, design, art, architecture and travel—and the places where they overlap—for the New York Times; T, the New York Times Style Magazine; Travel + Leisure; Dwell; and Town and Country, among others.

swisswatching.com
Jackie and Seth are spending a couple years in Switzerland, living just outside of Lausanne in Renens VD.

haomama.us
“Raising Children in Mandarin and English. This site is part of my never-ending quest to find and share resources that make learning Chinese a fun and organic part of our children’s lives.”

Poor Babies
Life is Tough for the Rich and Powerful. Another Dan Gillmor project.

mediactive.com
From journalist/technologist Dan Gillmor comes Mediactive: A Users’ Guide to Media in a Networked Age. “My goal is to help people become active and informed users of media, as consumers and as creators. We are in a media-saturated age, more so all the time, and we need to find ways to use media to our — and our society’s — best advantage.”

tomabate.com
Tom Abate is a former small-press publisher turned newspaper reporter who lives in Castro Valley.

Did some math and took some notes on real-world disk usage patterns by Birdhouse Hosting customers. Short version: The vast majority of users will never utilize even a tiny fraction of the massive amounts of space being offered by some of the largest/most-oversell-crazy web hosts out there.

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes karaandrade.com

Kara Andrade is a veteran of multimedia journalism, both for print and online. She builds communities both online and off-line and has reported and organized events in virtual worlds such as Second Life.

Great-looking site!

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes albanytoday.org, an experiment in low-cost community journalism by J-School student Linjun Fan:

Linjun Fan covers Albany related news stories and writes a series of feature stories about Albany’s diverse residents.

This is the first site we’ve migrated from a free wordpress.com blog (Fan wanted to start running ads, and to have the ability to tweak her own themes, both of which are disallowed by wordpress.com). Impressed by the quality of the export/import system (which included all media), and by wordpress.com’s domain redirection service.

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes moabfolkfestival.com, promoting, what else? The Moab (UT) Folk Festival, being held November 6–9, 2008 in, where else? Moab, Utah.

Plans for a proper CMS for the site are in the works.

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes the What If? Foundation, a wonderful charity feeding more than 6,000 malnourished and impoverished children in Haiti weekly. I’ve been working in the margins over the past few months to port their site out of a horrible and inflexible .ASP back-end and into WordPress, as well as consulting on the design and implementation.

Our Mission is to feed and educate impoverished children in Haiti, providing hope and opportunity for a brighter future. Founded in 2000, the What If? Foundation funds food and education programs for children in Haiti. We’re making a tangible difference in the lives of some of the world’s hungriest children. We welcome you to join us.

It’s been one of the more challenging collaborations of my freelance career, but everyone is happy with the results, and I’m proud to have donated some time to the effort. The work the foundation is doing is marvelous. This is the kind of site Birdhouse loves to work with – forward-thinking and effective.

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes brianpollack.com:

Brian Pollack is a west coast filmmaker. His work has taken him from Sitka, Alaska to al Anbar, Iraq. He has directed, associate produced and worked as cameraman on productions for National Geographic, Triage Entertainment, and CBS 5 Investigates in San Francisco. His print work has appeared in the Oakland Tribune, San Jose Mercury News, and North Gate News Online.

Birdhouse Hosting is pleased to welcome kaplanforoakland.org, a site promoting candidate Rebecca Kaplan for Oakland City Council.

Rebecca’s diverse experience as a civil rights attorney, an outreach consultant protecting Oakland residents from predatory loans and foreclosures, and as an elected Director for the AC Transit Board, makes her the right choice for Oakland City Council. She has the policy-making skills necessary to bring positive change.

Yet another WordPress site (not designed by me – I just ported her static Dreamweaver templates to work within WordPress so the candidate could manage her own content more easily).

Birdhouse Hosting is pleased to welcome the Canyon County Zephyr, out of Moab, Utah – All the News That Causes Fits.

“… the Canyon Country Zephyr, based in Moab, Utah. Editor and publisher Jim Stiles has loaded this irreverent newspaper with enough good reporting to put metro papers to shame… the Zephyr tells it like it is. In Moab, the erstwhile outdoor recreational capitol of the interior West, the siren like allure of booming tourism has become, for many, a monster out of control.”

A redesign of the site is in the works.

Several years ago, when Birdhouse Hosting was young, I was researching the market to find a reliable datacenter that was entirely powered by renewable energy sources. I did find a few, but none working at the scale I was looking for (some didn’t have 24×7 monitoring and support; others did, but didn’t provide cPanel licenses). I ended up going with ServInt, and have been extremely happy with their reliability and support.

Today got some exciting news: ServInt has just announced that their whole VPS operation has gone not just carbon-neutral, but climate positive:

ServInt’s commitment to climate-positive hosting applies to its entire line of Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting services. Each of ServInt’s VPS services is backed by a commitment to offset the total carbon-footprint of the VPS by at least 110 percent. ServInt accomplishes its carbon-offsetting goals through large-scale reforestation campaigns operated by American Forests (www.americanforests.org).

To ensure a truly climate-positive approach, ServInt calculates its reforestation commitment not only on the energy consumption of the host servers, but on its entire VPS infrastructure. That includes compensating for all core routing and switching equipment, for cooling and redundant power operations, and for an extensive back-LAN that provides customers with free backups and centralized update repositories.

Birdhouse Hosting is proud to announce support for Ruby on Rails! All users will now find a new Ruby on Rails icon in their cPanel interface, and we’ve written a new Rails FAQ explaining how to get a RoR application scaffold off the ground.

We can’t support actual Ruby programming questions – users will have to turn to the Ruby on Rails community for that – but we will help you get an initial RoR installation going. We’re looking forward to seeing what you create.

To celebrate our recent upgrades to CentOS, Apache 2, and PHP 5, the launch of a new specialized student hosting plan, and reduced hosting rates and increased bandwidth offerings for all users, Birdhouse Hosting is proud to launch a brand new Birdhouse Hosting web site.

The entire site is built on WordPress, and features a newly integrated News section. The fancy navigation menu animation unfortunately doesn’t work in Internet Explorer, but degrades well and is still functional for brain-dead browsers.

Our new Plan A account, optimized for student budgets and hosting needs, is available to students everywhere (with proof of enrollment, if we don’t already know you), and is valid until one year after graduation.

We’ve also reduced rates a bit for our other hosting plans, increased bandwidth and storage allocations across the board, and increased the number of plan features available to all users.

Feedback welcome.

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes marilynberlinsnell.com, a portfolio site for journalist and editor Marilyn Berlin Snell.

I’m a San Francisco-based journalist and editor. Partial to Vladimir Nabokov, who said that “curiosity is insubordination in its purest form,” I’ve utilized my predilection for nosiness, most recently, on political and investigative stories related to the environment, profiles of unlikely environmentalists, and special projects tied to climate change and green living.

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes arabist.net:

The Arabist is dedicated to covering the politics and culture of the Arab world. It is published and maintained in Cairo, with contributions from journalists and researchers working in the region.

On the same hosting account are two additional popular blogs covering Arab culture and politics: Hatsheput, on women, society and academia; and 3arabawy, by Cairo-based journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy.

The Arabist came to Birdhouse looking for both WordPress expertise and bandwidth optimization assistance – we’ve been hard at work providing both.

Update: Five days after moving the sites over, many Egyptian ISPs are still pointing at the old host, which means the old “72 hours for global DNS updates” rule of thumb just ain’t true. The journalists are now trying to cover recent Egyptian riots, and many Egyptians aren’t able to see the updates. I’m getting hammered with requests to “do something,” but all I can do is to try and contact the Egyptian ISPs and ask them to please flush their DNS caches. No luck yet. Ah, the joys of running a hosting biz.

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes Harvard Right to Serve, a site promoting a student-developed program at Harvard University to put an end to the U.S. military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

“Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is perhaps the most discriminatory law in our country today. Since President Clinton signed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” into law in 1993 over 12,000 GLBT men and woman have been kicked out of the Armed forces because of their sexual orientation. The Harvard Right To Serve campaign is a student-led effort that seeks to end this injustice. From May 24-31, 30 students from Harvard University will embark a four city journey across America that will highlight the injustice of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” In each city one openly GLBT Harvard student will attempt to sign up for military service. When their desire to serve is rejected participants on the Harvard Right to Serve tour will sit-in at the recruitment station to highlight the injustice of denying a citizen the right to serve based solely on their sexual orientation.

PHP 4 is approaching EOL, and Birdhouse Hosting, like many hosts, has been in “pause” mode on the prospect of a PHP 5 upgrade for a while, cautious of the possibility of breaking customer scripts. We’ve also been running on Apache 1.3.x since forever. But after much research, finally decided it was safe to just go for it. Spent the afternoon and early evening compiling Apache 2.2.8 and PHP 5.2.5, all required modules, tweaking handlers, and taking care of a few post-upgrade burps. Everything seems to be running smoothly, with not a single customer complaint (let us know if you find anything not working!)

Stay tuned for a revamped hosting site and a new pricing structure in the coming months.

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes westberkeleyfoundation.com

The West Berkeley Foundation has given over $1.3 million in grants since 1993 to non-profit organizations that serve Berkeley’s most underserved children, elders and families. It is only possible because of the caring action of individuals and companies that believe philanthropy begins in our own backyard.

Loose notes from SXSW 2008 session “Scalability Boot Camp” with:

Blaine Cook Architect, Twitter Inc
Jakob Heuser Architect, Gaia Interactive
Alan Kasindorf MySQL DBA, SixApart
Sandy Jen Co-founder, Meebo
Kerry Miller Writer, passiveaggressivenotes.com

Good tips from diverse perspectives. Everyone on the panel admitted to having made huge scaling mistakes in the past, and to having learned critical lessons from real-world usage patterns.

(more…)

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes cornycrow.com, home of Corny the Crow and his ventriloquist friend Steve Cheney:

For 20 years Steve and his partner, “Corny Crow,” have presented their unique show for children and adults throughout Canada, from the east to west coast in the U.S. for fairs, festivals, schools and libraries. Either performing his hilarious show on stage or presenting his humor with a message to schools, Steve’s warmth and humor comes through in all his performances.