About

Trever Fischer is a junior at The University of Akron with a strong enthusiasm towards coding, writing, photography, and above all: oranges. This is his site. Specifically, this is his "About" box. In addition to recently having finished his first year of college, he is also a full-time hacker who tinkers with Amarok, Plasma, various KDE bits, and PHP.

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#335
4
August
08

A Small Orange

Recently, I heard about this little hosting company called A Small Orange. It had to do with oranges so naturally, I was intrigued.

Turns out, A Small Orange is an incredibly cheap web host. Far too small for wm161.net, but an incredible value anyways. For only $5 a month, you can have 400Mb of space, and tons of bandwidth. Thats a medium-sized website right there, with unlimited databases, e-mail, and even shell access.

If you’ve only got a small website, its only $25 a year for 75Mb of space and all the same features. For someone who has a tiny starter blog, and maybe a few pictures, thats perfect.

For me though, it doesn’t quite work. I signed up for their medium plan at $10 a month and spent a few days with it. They have a 30-day guarantee, so I gave it a spin and thoroughly checked it out. I still like MediaTemple more though.

First, I love MediaTemple’s directory layout. All your websites are stored in ~/domains/, which keeps things neatly organized. Any folder in ~/domains/ gets served up at that domain, so you don’t have to mess around with a control panel like cPanel or something. It lets me do all my dirty work in the shell, the way real men do it. At A Small Orange, you can set up your subdomains and addon domains to point to any directory you want, but your main website must point to ~/public_html/. The support staff at ASO are very friendly and fast, so I suppose if you ask them nicely they could change it for you.

Second, MediaTemple’s website shows that they know what they’re doing. Some people would look at me and scoff that you can’t always judge a web host by their own website, but this time you can. MediaTemple’s website shows that they have a strong passion for their work. A Small Orange tries to look eye-catching, and their minimalistic approach shows they are exactly what they are. Nothing too flashy, but very cheap and good. However, they use packages like ModernBill and cPanel to try and make things easier on everyone. Those two bits of software do the job, but they look absolutely hideous. If this was the 1990s still, they’d be on top of things. But I suppose the new wave of modern designed websites have spoiled me. And I digress.

While A Small Orange just isn’t right for hosting wm161.net, I still think it works for getting around that tiny little annoying nitpick in the MediaTemple contract: no hotlinking. I’m downgrading my medium plan to the tiny $25/year plan to host various images, and to otherwise mess around with some cheap hosting.

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