In last week’s Gearhead column I discussed problems with a Virtual Private Server service from my hosting provider Easy CGI. I finally decided to call on the 30-day guarantee and get my money back, but in response Easy CGI offered me three months for free. This sounds like no risk for me and, if things don’t work out, then it is really putting its reputation on the line. So I agreed, and now we’ll see if the company can make me happy.
What I find interesting is that Easy CGI, which has always provided me with exemplary customer service for my shared hosting account, should find providing a similar level of service for VPS so tricky. Perhaps this is the way of all service providers — they rush to expand their offerings and run up against the realities of implementation: Speed is theoretically proportional to revenue, but in reality inversely proportional to quality.
My original reason for moving to a VPS had been to get the latest version of PHP so I could run Simple Groupware, which looked like an interesting solution to my wife’s company’s need for a groupware solution (e.g. shared contact list, documents, projects and calendars).
Anyway, I discovered I had been misled by an Easy CGI tech back when I fist asked about PHP on the shared servers. At the time, the problem was I couldn’t upgrade my version of PHP to something better than 4.3.1 while Simple Groupware required 4.3.2. What the tech failed to mention (or didn’t know) was I could have had my shared hosting account moved to another server that supported PHP 4.4.4. If only they had told me this when I first asked about PHP versions we might all have a few more brain cells left.
So my account was finally moved to a new server and now that I had the right configuration I started the Simple Groupware installation. But I goofed and wasted an hour after using the Easy CGI Web-based FTP to set subdirectory and file permissions. It turns out that setting a subdirectory to “read/write” isn’t the same as “modify.” Yeah, I know I should have guessed that, but working with a Windows system through a Web interface is, well, unnatural.
I commented on the whole obsession with using Web interfaces in Gibbsblog a few days ago and suggested what we need are “mashapps” — client-side applications that efficiently front-end Web services so that usability and functionality are maximized. A Gibbsblog reader named Bill Jones wrote back, “there is an obviously misconceived notion that the browser is a ‘safe’ place to run these [browser-based] applications” and described my mashapps accurately as “SOA sandboxes.”
Anyway, even though I had the right version of PHP and the right file permissions, I still couldn’t get the software to talk to a MySQL database and I ran out of patience. If anyone out there has experience with this kind of configuration then please get in touch — either the whole thing is harder than I know or I’m doing something dumb.
As an alternative, I started testing the Zimbra Collaboration Suite. ZCS is a very interesting groupware system that runs on Linux and OS X and provides a killer AJAX front end. Better still, Zimbra offers a VMware virtual appliance based on the amazing rPath Appliance Platform. Guess what we’ll be discussing next week. . . .
