It's been a while..
 

Since I posted on these forums, I've mostly learned everything you can about PHP 5 and the current PHP 5.3.

I've been working on a lot of C# though more than PHP.

I've also been implementing Lua in an apache module as a server-side language, not necessarily to replace PHP, but for my friends and other people and mostly adding things that PHP does not add in the native core.

As far as life goes, I'm currently involved in the Android Marketplace and Android Programming w/ Eclipse. Still learning that so.

Being an old member of this community, having learned a lot from it, I came back to see how it's going ( and that the same vBulletin style is being used lol ), I don't see any new articles, so I guess mostly like everyone else has been very busy with life.

I've been pretty busy with my new job. Which I like, because I am allowed to use whatever language it is needed for the projects to be done. I've done some with PHP others with Perl, even others with DOS Batch :P. I haven't been very active because I am still working to learn most of the projects, systems, and services that we run at my new job.
But I have talk php in my feeds and try to respond to new questions.

Glad to see you back around here Orc (although your signature cracks me up :P)

Well while you were gone I completely gave up PHP myself and went into politics. I was actually elected President for a while there, but it turns out I have too much of something called 'morals' and 'ethics' so they replaced me with Obama. Other than that, I have increased my collection of doomsday devices from 2 to 5, won Hells Kitchen, twice, and rebuilt most of my car.

Aside from working towards my computer engineering degree, I've been trying to get my business to take off. Its been a bit of a rough ride so far, but I think things are going to get better soon.

Good to see you back, and your sig is still as creepy as the day you changed it. Edit: But as an avid D&D player, I would like to see what a half-orc actually looks like.

Yeah I've been hired by a hosting company. Making a lot of cash. :3

There's some pretty good money in hosting. We just brought our own online for Q4, and we've already completely subsidized the cost of our servers, bandwidth, and monitoring service. The only aspect of it I'm not entirely hooray about is having to use WHM to do a lot of the things I normally prefer to do from the command line, but it balances out; clients get cPanel, and I don't have to be hands on every time they need a new email address.

Hey, maybe you can do some industrial espionage for me Orc. ;)

Looks like we're all doing hosting related stuff right now. I've been on contract with a webhost (Carat Networks) and gaining major experience in a script called Ubersmith. I hope to move into that niche and start going after hosts in the Chicago area (there are tons of them).

delayedinsanity, may i ask how much Went into putting everything up.
I'm planning on opening up a hosting company but i am not sure how much
cash i need to invest :)

i think it's possible to make a low budget host provider and work your way up but
yeah well ;)


-CF

It's definitely possible; I didn't have to invest that much because we don't offer the service publicly, it's an in-house solution for our clients and the clients of three other business associates.

Hardware is only running us $350/mth per box for an AMD Opteron with 2 cpus/16 cores/16gb ram (one running the webserver and mail server, the other runs our database); you could easily start out on a much smaller machine though, a single quad-core with 2gb of ram could handle a few hundred accounts with proper configuration. Our bandwidth is about $70 a month for the first terabyte, easily upgraded if we need to handle more, backups are $0.10gb, IPs are a buck a month per, our monitoring service is only $40 a month, and our accounting is $49 a month for up to 500 customers (through chargify.com, excellent service).

We're running RedHat Enterprise Linux, which I personally have no love for (I've supported Debian since well before the IPO), but to run WHM/cPanel the only two choices we had were RHEL or CentOS. Plesk runs on Debian, but the licensing fees for cPanel hit the spot on our budget - we had no intention of setting this service up until next year, but we had to rush into it when we got approached by three separate people to make it a reality.

Drop the second box, lower the stats on the single box (if you go with the right service, it should be easy to burst upgrade if it becomes necessary), only get as much bandwidth as you need to start and run your own backups and you can cut that cost *considerably*. I prefer handling our accounting through a service, but this is something you can also do yourself, or purchase a system such as WHMCS which can cost a few bucks less a month. I would highly recommend a monitoring service - no matter the setup you choose, VPS, Dedicated, Cloud, or Colo, everybody is going to promise you 99.99 to 100% uptime. Unless you're a deity, there's always the potential for something to go wrong though and you want to know immediately when its other folks sites on the line (especially if those folks have lawyers). Facebook just recently incurred outages. If they can, anybody can. Get service monitoring. :)

I was googling myself (quite fun, once in a while) and found talkPHP again =) Hasn't changed much has it? Hehe.

Good to see everybody is doing fine and still busy with development! So am I btw, working for quite a serious web-development company here in the Netherlands, doing some pretty big projects :)

I'm quiting though, PHP doesn't give me the thrill like it used to when gaining new knowledge was easy. I'm pretty proud to say that I'm starting a new career as weapon maintenance guy in the navy! :)

That sounds like a fun job. If I was ever to leave computers gunsmithing would be something near what I would do.