sneakyBlog

The DriverPacks.net project - which targets the lack of default hardware (driver) support in Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003 and soon Vista - is going open source! It already contains virtually all drivers available for these OSes and will soon be adding BartPE, WinPE, RIS, Sysprep and OPK support with YOUR help! Let’s prove open source IS better!

read more | digg story

Wow… This site gives you a way to get virtually ALL drivers for EVERYTHING internal. I have already built a DVD install disk and installed it on some of the newer machines, and it does great. Saves me a TON of time. I just hope the site doesn’t go under for bandwidth.

read more | digg story

I got digged for my DriverPacks project. And it seems I’m even the ‘top story’ of the week, and the second-best top story of the month
Thank you all!

Technorati Tags: DriverPack, DriverPacks, digg, digged

Here it is… 24 hours of experience with Dreamhost… and they suck already!

As I explained in my previous post, I had used the ‘888′ promo code to get 88% off of my bill (76$ instead of 382$). Yesterday, wen I bought the account, I paid the 76$ immediately through Paypal. Now, almost 24 hours later, my account still isn’t activated… So I checked my billing section of the control panel. Yes. ‘Amount due: 306$‘. I’ve just submitted a support request and they better reply soon…

UPDATE
At 20:49 GMT+1 today I got this e-mail:

Hi Wim,

My apologies for the delay in setting up your account! It had been
flagged by our automatic fraud checking system for manual review, and so
didn’t get automatically approved over the weekend!

I’ve manually approved the account now and you should be receiving your
approval emails soon.. if you have any questions at all, please let us
know, and I’m very sorry your first experience with us was less than
perfect.

Please let me know if you need anything else at all..

Thanks!

Josh

So Dreamhost seems to have a pretty good service, so far (it’s yet to see if that’s also the case when you’re a customer there for one year or more…)! Let’s give them the advantage of the doubt…

The previous 24 hours there have been some serious troubles with the uptime of the server where this site (along with DriverPacks.net and others) is being hosted. In fact, the last few weeks, and not just yesterday. The admin told me there was one abusive user and as soon he had tracked him, he’d get kicked. Do you hear it coming? Yes, that ‘abusive’ user was me. But basically I wasn’t doing anything abusive… only I didn’t know that at some times during the day, there were 50+ concurrent downloads of large files (the DriverPacks)… That’s indeed alot of load. As you can see, everything is up and running again now.
We’ve agreed I’d buy another ‘bandwidth-hosting‘ account (the second) somewhere else, to offload the server that also serves the webpages. I had been looking for something like that already the last two weeks, since I was already sensing that the server had become alot slower… My choice was DreamHost.com, not because of great uptime, speed or service, but simply because of the enormous amount of bandwidth offered for an incredibly low price (no, they did NOT pay me to say this ). 7.95$/month for 1TB/month when you buy a bi-annual contract is not bad, not at all. Some quick math, and that’s 190.80$. Well… not! If you use the promo code ‘BEST‘, you’ll get it for 93 and something… Now THAT’s cheap!
I was about to pay and then I noticed another hit in my search results… Now my mouth was litterally touching the floor…
It seemed that you could get the L3 account, which includes 1.6TB of traffic, for a staggering 76.08$. That’s €64.30 when you pay through PayPal (at the current exchange rate).
Yet it’s not a hosting provider I’d recommend for high reliability, quality support and such: huge discounts are often symbols of products for the mass, which are seldomly solid products! Another example for its lack of credibility: when using Firefox and signing up, the referer ID input field is hidden!!!
name=webid_referred type=hidden value="bweeb" (These are the values of one of the input elements.)
Shame on you, Dreamhost!
Technorati Tags: hosting