Cumulus Support

Ever since the demise of David's excellent localweatherview free webhosting I have been looking for an alternative host. I have tried a number of free hosts but all seem to have problems ie do not allow weather stations, do not allow the use of txt files, etc. My current webhost is a victim of it's own success, it is frequently unavailable for uploads because it limits the number accessing it to a max of 42500 sites at a time.

I have been looking for a good, cheap webhost - I only require it for my weather station. I have found one which offers webhosting basic pakage for £35 for two years. https://www.extendnet.co.uk/portal/hosting.php

Help My webhosting skills are very limited. Will this package allow me to use all of the Cumulus options ie Realtime, etc Are there any better/cheaper packages

All advice gratefully received

From their AUP: "The use of web cam applications which maintain a constant FTP connection uploading an image at regular intervals is forbidden. "

Cumulus realtime FTP does this (maintain a constant FTP connection), and while by default it doesn't upload images, I would think that they would apply this rule to it.

What we need is some clever person to write a PHP page to upload the realtime.txt file (from an automatically submitted HTML form, or just a script using a 'POST' ?), most ISPs will be happy with a HTML upload as it looks like 'normal' traffic to them (and does not bypass bandwidth counters as FTP and SSH connections often do). Toolbox could then be used to upload the file - though I think it is limited to once a minute?

I have moved my web site to the laptop connected to my weather station for now as my hosting service asked me to stop the continuous FTP as they do not allow system passwords to be stored in 'automated systems'.

never had any prob with mine, and the owner knows full well it's a weather service

http://www.carbonhosting.co.uk


note: he is just a reseller for heart internet, but have experienced no downtime, apart from the occasional (very) ftp problem, which more often than not turned out to be my fault

I have seen quite a few problems over the years where folk use free or very cheap hosting.

I pay £35 a year for mine which gives me loads of capacity for what I need (my site is not just weather) and has been excellent and their (UK well Scottish ) support is very knowledgeable. They are Ariotek, mine is Basic Shared, I see now they do a Starter Basic which might suit some folks, anyway its worth a look.

Stuart

Note that there is a section in the wiki with recommendations for suitable hosting - http://wiki.sandaysoft.com/a/Webspace

steve wrote:Note that there is a section in the wiki with recommendations for suitable hosting - http://wiki.sandaysoft.com/a/Webspace

Steve,

That list includes DreamHost. Given recent experiences of some Cumulus users is it appropriate they are still listed?

RayProudfoot wrote:That list includes DreamHost. Given recent experiences of some Cumulus users is it appropriate they are still listed?

I use Dreamhost. I've been using them for all of my hosting, including this forum, my Cumulus weather site, and the weather sites of a number of other Cumulus users, for nearly five years now. In total, the sites I host are currently using around 1.5 GB of bandwidth per day, and apart from the periods of down time, I've never had any problems with them.

We don't know why DH pulled the plug on David's hosting, or in what way his usage differed from mine, but DH seem like a perfectly reasonable choice for an individual looking for hosting that works with Cumulus.

Incidentally, Dreamhost have a referral scheme whereby an existing user can create a 'promo code' which gives $97 as a reward for referring a new customer. The promo code can be set up such that the $97 is given in whole or in part to the new customer instead of the existing customer. I've set up a code which gives the full $97 discount to the new customer.

So if anyone does want to set up their own account at Dreamhost, enter code CUMULUS during the sign-up process, and you'll get your first year's hosting for $22.40 instead of the usual $119.40.

Dreamhost accounts also come with a free domain (mine is sandaysoft.com). I'm not sure whether you still get this if you use a promo code, you would need to check.

Edit: DH have confirmed that the free domain would be included.

I stand corrected Steve.

I just use the webspace that comes as a part of my internet package from iinet.

I have searched their site to see if there are any rules, but can't find any, all it says is I get 1Gb of webspace and this is in my free zone so I don't have to pay for any uploads or downloads to or from it.

So far they've been great with only one outage that I can recall (which turned out to be a Telstra problem, but iinet managed the issue to resolution for me) and good help when I had a problem ftping to the site.

I just assumed all ISP's offer this sort of package.

Hi Phil,

I've tried my free webspace on my ISP but they don't allow PHP or txt files so it's a no go for me.

Yeah, I've heard others have had the same issue, but both have been fine on my ISP. So long as they don't change this then I can fully recommend iinet!

hills wrote:Yeah, I've heard others have had the same issue, but both have been fine on my ISP. So long as they don't change this then I can fully recommend iinet!

1gig and php? woah. Optus gives me 10meg with nothing else.......

robertc wrote:After I considered all these things I have chosen

Could you post a link to your Cumulus web site, please?