Cumulus Support

dc1500 wrote:Hi Ray, that provider looks pretty good compared to what I've seen so far. Did you go for the starter at £24?
Dave

Hi Dave, yes I did. If you have a standard Cumulus1 setup your requirements are tiny. Support is great. They sorted out a PHP problem in a few minutes.

archae86 wrote:My remaining problem is that some non weather related files I've moved onto the new server don't show up to a browser the way they did on Steve's. I suspect this is some site configuration option, possibly related to the lack of an index.* file in the directories of interest.

I learned that different server conventions are out there. On Steve's server, a user entering a URL pointing to an extra directory to which you had FTP'd files would see a sort of file directory in their browser. At A2 hosting, they get a message essentially saying "Sorry, Dave, I can't let you see that". I edited up an index.html file specific to the directory in question, including a local reference link to the file I wanted to make available. So my immediate problem is solved, and as it has nothing to do with Cumulus, I'll not write more on the matter here.

With a day of A2 hosting serving my web site, I'll say that the trends page reliably displays more quickly and consistently than served by Steve. This might just be the matter of getting data from the next state, rather than the other side of the Atlantic (ping times came down from 200 msec to 45 msec), or maybe the server really does serve more uniformly and faster. But as most people who view my site are over here, it should be a bit of an improvement for them, or at least for the very few who ever look past the first page.

archae86 wrote:My remaining problem is that some non weather related files I've moved onto the new server don't show up to a browser the way they did on Steve's. I suspect this is some site configuration option, possibly related to the lack of an index.* file in the directories of interest.
I learned that different server conventions are out there. On Steve's server, a user entering a URL pointing to an extra directory to which you had FTP'd files would see a sort of file directory in their browser. At A2 hosting, they get a message essentially saying "Sorry, Dave, I can't let you see that". I edited up an index.html file specific to the directory in question, including a local reference link to the file I wanted to make available.

I think you mean indexing? That can be turned on or off for any directory on your site with the click of a button in cpanel.

Speed wise - you're probably hosted on an SSD? I don't know if Steve's was or not? I couldn't go back now, it makes things much easier when moving files or big folders around on the host as well as speeding up a website due to the increase in read/write speeds.

Mapantz wrote:

archae86 wrote:I think you mean indexing? That can be turned on or off for any directory on your site with the click of a button in cpanel.

Right you are. File Manager|select the directory of interest|right-click|manage indices. I get a radio button choice of four possibilities, for which "standard indexing" makes it much more like Steve.

I'll use that selectively. I never saw cpanel until yesterday, and initially found nothing of use. You've added to my list.
Thanks

archae86 wrote:
I'll use that selectively. I never saw cpanel until yesterday, and initially found nothing of use. You've added to my list.
Thanks

Great stuff!

Cpanel is great, lots of hidden goodies. Do you have Cloudflare in there too? That can be very handy to set up for your site!

Don't forget,f you're using SQL, be sure to add your IP to the remote SQL to the list, so you can easily send your data from third party apps/Cumulus MX.

RayProudfoot wrote:

dc1500 wrote:Hi Ray, that provider looks pretty good compared to what I've seen so far. Did you go for the starter at £24?
Dave

Hi Dave, yes I did. If you have a standard Cumulus1 setup your requirements are tiny. Support is great. They sorted out a PHP problem in a few minutes.

Thanks Ray. I'm okay because my brother's server hosts mine but I have accumulated 3 or 4 "Cumulus" friends over the years and they are not all up to speed with this sort of thing so I help them out with it. Only two are directly affected by this but I will recommend hostpresto to them. Thanks for finding that one, the bigger ones I looked at seem to have a very muddy pricing policy.
Dave

dc1500 wrote:

RayProudfoot wrote:Thanks Ray. I'm okay because my brother's server hosts mine but I have accumulated 3 or 4 "Cumulus" friends over the years and they are not all up to speed with this sort of thing so I help them out with it. Only two are directly affected by this but I will recommend hostpresto to them. Thanks for finding that one, the bigger ones I looked at seem to have a very muddy pricing policy.
Dave

What put me off A2 Hosting was all the extra they pushed on their website. Do I really need to pay for their backups when HostPresto do it as part of the service? Hmmm. And if you look at TrustPilot virtually everyone is giving them 5 stars and I'll do the same.

RayProudfoot wrote: What put me off A2 Hosting was all the extra they pushed on their website. Do I really need to pay for their backups when HostPresto do it as part of the service? Hmmm.

I don't pay for backup service, you still get them free by default as part of cpanel. The extra charge is for automatic backups - useful if you're running a big forum or something similar. I usually perform a manual backup once a month just in case something happens, but I do have quite a few sql databases as well. It is worth doing one, because on an old host, Websound, they had a catastrophic RAID failure and everyone's files/sites were lost and they only had old backups, so after the two days it took for them to fix the issues, the backup they installed for me was missing a lot of data, but thankfully I had new backup which took a matter of minutes to restore.

Mapantz, They didn’t make that clear when I visited their site the other week. I just found it incredibly off-putting to see a relatively attractive headline price suddenly escalate with all the addons that we’re selected by default.

I don't pay for backup service, you still get them free by default as part of cpanel. The extra charge is for automatic backups - useful if you're running a big forum or something similar. I usually perform a manual backup once a month just in case something happens, but I do have quite a few sql databases as well. It is worth doing one, because on an old host, Websound, they had a catastrophic RAID failure and everyone's files/sites were lost and they only had old backups, so after the two days it took for them to fix the issues, the backup they installed for me was missing a lot of data, but thankfully I had new backup which took a matter of minutes to restore.[/quote]

Brilliant website. Probably the best Cumulus based one I've seen.

With Steve's permission, a new copy of the current Cumulus Wiki has been established (with content cloned as-of 26-Oct-2018) at

https://cumuluswiki.wxforum.net/

The MediaWiki software was upgraded to 1.31.1 version from 1.26.1. If you had an ID on the current Wiki, it should exist with your same credentials on the new Wiki.

Thanks to Steve for letting me host a durable home for the Cumulus Wiki.

Best regards,
Ken
(admin for wxforum.net)

Well done Ken. Too much valuable info there for it to be lost.

Thumbs up for Hostpresto. Transfered a site across easily. Thanks for the heads up Ray.

Glad you’re sorted. If anyone else wants to join HostPresto can you PM me first as they’ll give me a couple of months free hosting for signing others up.

Another thumbs up for Hostpresto. I have Transfered my site across easily. Thanks for the heads up Ray.