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.

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes the Chauncey Bailey Project, investigating the death of, and continuing the work of, journalist Chauncey Bailey, who was recently murdered in the course of his reporting:

Bailey, the editor of the weekly Oakland Post, was murdered on Aug. 2 while reporting on a story regarding the suspicious activities of the Your Black Muslim Bakery. In an unusual collaboration, more than two dozen reporters, photographers and editors from print, broadcast and electronic media, and journalism students are launching the Chauncey Bailey Project - an investigative unit that will continue and expand on the reporting Bailey was pursuing when he was gunned down. Devaughndre Broussard, 19, a handyman for Your Black Muslim Bakery, has confessed to the crime, according to police, but many questions about the possible motive for the killing have yet to be answered.

Great way to wrap up a holiday: Agreed to take on a new Birdhouse client - a mid-size company who’s had a horrible email experience with their previous “top tier” provider. They had a dozen or so addresses; could we take them on? No problem. The old host had been storing a couple weeks worth of their mail, but there was no way to get it through to the mail exchanger for delivery. The old host agreed to relay it all to Birdhouse for processing.

That’s when things turned ugly.

Turns out the previous host didn’t have the basic common sense to discard mail to unknown addresses on the domain (it hasn’t been feasible to accept mail for unknown names, like balloon345@domain.com) for years. But they were not only accepting it all; they relayed it ALL to Birdhouse.

300,000 messages worth, 95% of which was theoretically discardable.

Unfortunately, discarding crap mail isn’t trivial when parsing a queue that large. Needless to say, things came to a grinding halt. Complicating matters was the fact that Birdhouse actually utilizes two mail queues: One for MailScanner, which pre-processes spam, and another for Exim, which is the actual mail transfer agent. The MailScanner queue was so large we couldn’t even get things out into the Exim queue. Exim documentation assumes a single queue, and MailScanner doesn’t offer the same range of queue management options that Exim does.

Which meant I got to script a solution, examining each messages on the pre-que to determine whether it was destined for a valid or invalid address, and dropping it if invalid.

The script is running now, but will take a while. All spectacularly unpleasant. Once again, wanting to skewer a spammer or two and painfully aware of how much of my time is consumed by fighting bad guys.

Progress updates on the Birdhouse System Status page.

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes two great new media blogs:

pubfrontier.com: A raucous public discussion of the publishing revolution with an all-star list of contributors. “The goal of our site is to conduct provocative public discussion of the revolution that is happening in publishing and how it effects readers, society, economics, and fundamental values such as privacy.”

aliceinradioland.org: The blog portfolio of Pauline Bartolone — multimedia storyteller, radio producer and investigative reporter.

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes 101films.net, an informational site for an upcoming documentary film being made by a pair of J-School students.

This is the story of coming home from the war told through they eyes of veterans and their families - conveying the memories, flashbacks, and paranoia that continue to plague them long after the battle is over.

PHP4 is seven years old now (amazing!), and PHP5 has been out for nearly three years. But while v4 has gotten pretty long in the tooth, the massive entrenchment of web apps targeted at PHP4 has prevented anything like rapid uptake for version 5. As many as 80% of PHP hosts were still running 4.x as of June 2007. Web hosts who undertake an upgrade risk breaking thousands of customer applications - not OK. But something’s got to break the cycle, which is preventing developers from taking full advantage of all the chocolaty, O-O goodness in v5.

GoPHP5.org is assembling a list of major open source PHP apps committed to dropping all support for v4 by February 2008 as a way to goad hosts into undertaking the difficult transition. The Drupal, Symfony, and phpMyAdmin teams have already signed on, while the WordPress hackers are eager, but wary of the fallout.

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes Hilltop Harvest — our first farm site!

Hilltop Harvest is a 4th generation farm owned by the Pless family and located in the fertile farmlands of southwestern Minnesota near Redwood Falls. During the summer, hundreds of people come to our farm, enjoy the fresh air and sunshine, and of course, our mouth-watering strawberries and raspberries.

Hrm… I wonder if they’d trade a few crates of jam for a year of hosting? :-)

Birdhouse Hosting congratulates long-time user (and frequent commenter on this blog) Jim Strickland, who just had his first novel, Looking Glass published by Flying Pen Press.

Dr. Catherine Farro, or “Shroud,” as she is known online, is a 40-year-old paraplegic. She works in a virtual reality tank on the security team for a large discount store chain. Friday, payday, she is attacked in the virtual world, where violent hackers run rampant. …

Way to go Jim! Huge congrats.

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes When White is Black (A History of Race in One American Family), a book site for new Author John A. Martin, Jr.:

When White is Black relates the real life experiences of a mixed race family, who, despite significant Caucasian ancestry, lived as Negroes, due to the uniquely North American One-drop rule.

The site was developed by Martin’s daughter, who was a student in an XHTML+CSS class I just finished teaching, utilizing the shiny new skills she had learned. Nice job Lex!

Birdhouse Hosting user Scott Squire has a gorgeous new portfolio site capturing some of his representative photography and “moving pictures” (not quite video, but not just photography either). Loved his photo slideshow Jump School, on U.S. Army paratroopers in training. Squire also remains one of the most interesting wedding photographers I’ve seen. The site for his coming book Edges of Bounty: Adventures in the Edible Valley is also hosted by Birdhouse.

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes backpackjournalist.org, run by a pair of J-School graduates now traveling the world as a team, reporting on-the-fly:

Backpackjournalist.org is a collaborative international professional reporting project by journalists, Anna Sussman and Jonathan Jones, intended to generate stories of global interest from countries in the African Great Lakes region and the Great Rift Valley, the Indian subcontinent, and South East Asia.

Birdhouse is also hosting annasussman.com, a portfolio site for one half of the backpackjournalist team.

Anna Sussman writes, reports and produces print and radio news features. She has reported on a wide variety of issues from the US, Africa and Asia, with a focus on human rights.