[UFO Chicago] re: budget web-hosting

[Eric Pement]

Replying to John Kilbourne, who on 22 Mar 2002 wrote:

> A buddy at work, the guy who writes most of our SQL, is looking for 
> an inexpensive web hosting company for his work with international 
> students. He and his wife take these people out, share meals, etc., 
> without actually living with them. He wants to spend not much, on the 
> order of 10 dollars (out of his pocket), for maybe 50 MB of space, 
> without ad banners and noise, for a site that will "at least be up 
> part of the time"

   http://www.affordablehost.com has Linux hosting packages for 25 MB 
of space at $20/year, 50 MB of space at $45/year, and so on. You also 
get PHP, CGI, SSI, FTP, mySQL and other features with these packages.

   I'm currently hosting a page at http://www.netfirms.com, which 
offers many excellent features at $5/month (web server in Toronto).  
I'm happy with it and don't nearly use the 50 MB of space I have. I 
get PHP, CGI, SSI, FTP, Flash, support for multimedia files, and more 
things that I don't have time to handle. Netfirms offers FREE 
webspace if you'll tolerate the banner and pop-up ads, so that's how 
I started, but after a month we paid the $60/year and upgraded.

   The web page I work for is http://www.pickwickpublications.com

   Technical digression: The catalog is derived from a database with 
multi-line records (each "field" on one line, each record has 11 
fields, records are separated by a full blank line). The author is on 
field #4, and the title is on field #2. I recently wrote a script 
convert the database to HTML (using awk), and then used both sed and 
sort to sort the HTML output by author or by title -- the trick is, 1 
or more titles begin with quotes ("Like this") and several titles 
begin with A, An, or The. The sort has to ignore the leading quote 
mark (if any) and the leading article (if any) so that the title 'The 
Aims of Jesus' will come before 'Ambushed by Grace'.

   It was fun writing it. If anyone has questions about paragraph 
sorting, contact me.
--
Eric Pement - pemente@northpark.edu