The "Freeola Customer Forum" forum, which includes Retro Game Reviews, has been archived and is now read-only. You cannot post here or create a new thread or review on this forum.
I've been toying with the idea of setting up my own site (4DGamers.com) for a while. I already run another site where the Web Host has the only access to the coding and contribute to another, so it was high time I dusted off my little coding knowledge alongside a new domain and a web host that would be flexible and cost effective.
Freeola was only one of my choices but as I'd been with them as an ISP before and had a long history with the company, plus knowing that their customer support is pretty helpful, I decided to use them for my Domain and Web Hosting.
Day 1
=====
At first I wasn't sure what tools to use. There was no way I could code enough to come up with a site from scratch and Freeola offered their Instant Pro site construction. It was, however, a rocky road to success as Instant Pro, while a great instant website builder, just wasn't flexible enough for my needs.
Day 2
=====
Some help on the Freeola forums pointed me towards a One-click install option for several Web Design tools.
Day 3
=====
Looking at the options, both Joomla and Wordpress were powerful enough for my needs, while offering further development once set up. Having worked on several Wordpress based sites before, I decided to go with that.
Honestly, the install was far easier than I could have ever imagined and I was up and running with Wordpress on my Freeola Site within 30 minutes, including the install itself.
I choose a theme from the huge amount on offer, designed a banner and popped a few older stories on the site to see what it would look like. By this time it was pretty late at night and my wife popped her head around the door and made grumbling noises.
Day 4
=====
Theme changes and logo changes were on the cards and a brand new banner had been designed to go with the current logo. I found the perfect theme that contained a slider showing the latest posts and that was flexible enough for me to add my own bits and pieces to the site.
At the same time, I checked out the Freeola Email options and created a couple of email addresses. However, I may have to wait until the site has some way to get money coming in before I use the email pro option that allows you to have incoming and outgoing email without a Freeola internet connection.
Day 5
=====
More articles added, moving menus and sidebars around and adding a few affiliate links. Still getting to grips with CCS and working out how to do more complicate changes behind the scenes. I've also now applied for the Freeola Website Promotion service.
Freeola was only one of my choices but as I'd been with them as an ISP before and had a long history with the company, plus knowing that their customer support is pretty helpful, I decided to use them for my Domain and Web Hosting.
Day 1
=====
At first I wasn't sure what tools to use. There was no way I could code enough to come up with a site from scratch and Freeola offered their Instant Pro site construction. It was, however, a rocky road to success as Instant Pro, while a great instant website builder, just wasn't flexible enough for my needs.
Day 2
=====
Some help on the Freeola forums pointed me towards a One-click install option for several Web Design tools.
Day 3
=====
Looking at the options, both Joomla and Wordpress were powerful enough for my needs, while offering further development once set up. Having worked on several Wordpress based sites before, I decided to go with that.
Honestly, the install was far easier than I could have ever imagined and I was up and running with Wordpress on my Freeola Site within 30 minutes, including the install itself.
I choose a theme from the huge amount on offer, designed a banner and popped a few older stories on the site to see what it would look like. By this time it was pretty late at night and my wife popped her head around the door and made grumbling noises.
Day 4
=====
Theme changes and logo changes were on the cards and a brand new banner had been designed to go with the current logo. I found the perfect theme that contained a slider showing the latest posts and that was flexible enough for me to add my own bits and pieces to the site.
At the same time, I checked out the Freeola Email options and created a couple of email addresses. However, I may have to wait until the site has some way to get money coming in before I use the email pro option that allows you to have incoming and outgoing email without a Freeola internet connection.
Day 5
=====
More articles added, moving menus and sidebars around and adding a few affiliate links. Still getting to grips with CCS and working out how to do more complicate changes behind the scenes. I've also now applied for the Freeola Website Promotion service.
Page:
Day 20
----------
New site logo now matches the Twitter logo. Getting a regular stream of visitors and more news content.
Still reading up on how to create footers for posts and get rid of them on extracts.
----------
New site logo now matches the Twitter logo. Getting a regular stream of visitors and more news content.
Still reading up on how to create footers for posts and get rid of them on extracts.
Yep, it was sorted pretty quickly.
Yup, bit of a random issue this morning, which now seems to be resolved. It did cause a few problems across the board, including some VIP hosted sites being either unavailable or slow to load.
Your site looks okay now though...
Your site looks okay now though...
Hmmm... wrote:
pb wrote:
[i]Now to find out where Freeola keep customers up-to-date on any issues or service details...
Here you go: Freeola Service Status
I've just checked a couple of VIP hosted sites and they are loading slowly atm. It might be worth putting a support ticket in if things don't clear in a little while.
EDIT: The status page has just been updated.
I saw some problems with emailpro earlier so guess this is all related...[/i]
Cheers Hmmm, what would we do without you? I've bookmarked the page.
pb wrote:
[i]Now to find out where Freeola keep customers up-to-date on any issues or service details...
Here you go: Freeola Service Status
I've just checked a couple of VIP hosted sites and they are loading slowly atm. It might be worth putting a support ticket in if things don't clear in a little while.
[s]Hmmm...[/s]EDIT: The status page has just been updated.
I saw some problems with emailpro earlier so guess this is all related...[/i]
Cheers Hmmm, what would we do without you? I've bookmarked the page.
pb wrote:
Now to find out where Freeola keep customers up-to-date on any issues or service details...
Here you go: Freeola Service Status
I've just checked a couple of VIP hosted sites and they are loading slowly atm. It might be worth putting a support ticket in if things don't clear in a little while.
EDIT: The status page has just been updated.
I saw some problems with emailpro earlier so guess this is all related...
Now to find out where Freeola keep customers up-to-date on any issues or service details...
Here you go: Freeola Service Status
I've just checked a couple of VIP hosted sites and they are loading slowly atm. It might be worth putting a support ticket in if things don't clear in a little while.
[s]Hmmm...[/s]EDIT: The status page has just been updated.
I saw some problems with emailpro earlier so guess this is all related...
Day 11-13
========
Tweeks. No, not the things Miley Cyrus does, but changes to the site.
I settled on the theme, so now that was all completed it was just a matter of changing colours to match the site logo, messing with picture dimensions and finding other plugins to enhance the site.
The biggest change is the addition of a review score plugin which can be switched on for any post, allowing for scores at the end with a nice little graphical interface.
The site is getting a lot of visitors, too, but there does seem to be an issue this morning with loading, so I'm hoping that doesn't put too many people off. Now to find out where Freeola keep customers up-to-date on any issues or service details...
========
Tweeks. No, not the things Miley Cyrus does, but changes to the site.
I settled on the theme, so now that was all completed it was just a matter of changing colours to match the site logo, messing with picture dimensions and finding other plugins to enhance the site.
The biggest change is the addition of a review score plugin which can be switched on for any post, allowing for scores at the end with a nice little graphical interface.
The site is getting a lot of visitors, too, but there does seem to be an issue this morning with loading, so I'm hoping that doesn't put too many people off. Now to find out where Freeola keep customers up-to-date on any issues or service details...
Hmmm... wrote:
chasfh wrote:
[i]...It all comes down to best practice really, it's ALWAYS preferable to have your own data stored safely by yourself.
Hi chasfh,
NB. I slightly edited my query just before you replied.
I agree about your 'best practice' comment.
So you can recovery an entire server - is that VIP hosting only as in the past sites on Standard hosting have had to be recovered by customers own backups after failures?
Are you backing up the Standard MySQL data or is this down to the customer?
Perhaps you could say for both hosting platforms what data is being backed up to clarify things?
I haven't got a problem with this as long as I can get my head around what data is being backed up so I know where I stand :¬)
...and pb (and others) who are updating their sites regularly also need this info.
Thanks.
Probably the best way to look at it is that we back up for our purposes, to safeguard against catastrophic hardware failure and the likes. VIP services are regularly backed up, including databases, whereas the free servers are much less frequent (we have a working "snapshot" of those for extreme issues, hence our advice in the past for customers to restore from their own backups if possible).
What we DON'T have is easily accessible running backups of "site x" that we can offer as a safeguard for the site owner. Extracting a single site's data and restoring this would require some considerable work on our part, mostly due to the way in which the backups are taken and stored. The additional cost of providing that kind of backup service would be prohibitive, requiring resources and storage way beyond what we already have.
Essentially, you should treat it as if we did not have a backup of your site, and plan accordingly, but also feel safe in the knowledge that should King Kong stamp on our servers we can still get everything back up an running.
chasfh wrote:
[i]...It all comes down to best practice really, it's ALWAYS preferable to have your own data stored safely by yourself.
Hi chasfh,
NB. I slightly edited my query just before you replied.
I agree about your 'best practice' comment.
So you can recovery an entire server - is that VIP hosting only as in the past sites on Standard hosting have had to be recovered by customers own backups after failures?
Are you backing up the Standard MySQL data or is this down to the customer?
Perhaps you could say for both hosting platforms what data is being backed up to clarify things?
I haven't got a problem with this as long as I can get my head around what data is being backed up so I know where I stand :¬)
...and pb (and others) who are updating their sites regularly also need this info.
Thanks.
[s]Hmmm...[/s][/i]Probably the best way to look at it is that we back up for our purposes, to safeguard against catastrophic hardware failure and the likes. VIP services are regularly backed up, including databases, whereas the free servers are much less frequent (we have a working "snapshot" of those for extreme issues, hence our advice in the past for customers to restore from their own backups if possible).
What we DON'T have is easily accessible running backups of "site x" that we can offer as a safeguard for the site owner. Extracting a single site's data and restoring this would require some considerable work on our part, mostly due to the way in which the backups are taken and stored. The additional cost of providing that kind of backup service would be prohibitive, requiring resources and storage way beyond what we already have.
Essentially, you should treat it as if we did not have a backup of your site, and plan accordingly, but also feel safe in the knowledge that should King Kong stamp on our servers we can still get everything back up an running.
chasfh wrote:
...It all comes down to best practice really, it's ALWAYS preferable to have your own data stored safely by yourself.
Hi chasfh,
NB. I slightly edited my query just before you replied.
I agree about your 'best practice' comment.
So you can recovery an entire server - is that VIP hosting only as in the past sites on Standard hosting have had to be recovered by customers own backups after failures?
Are you backing up the Standard MySQL data or is this down to the customer?
Perhaps you could say for both hosting platforms what data is being backed up to clarify things?
I haven't got a problem with this as long as I can get my head around what data is being backed up so I know where I stand :¬)
...and pb (and others) who are updating their sites regularly also need this info.
Thanks.
...It all comes down to best practice really, it's ALWAYS preferable to have your own data stored safely by yourself.
Hi chasfh,
NB. I slightly edited my query just before you replied.
I agree about your 'best practice' comment.
So you can recovery an entire server - is that VIP hosting only as in the past sites on Standard hosting have had to be recovered by customers own backups after failures?
Are you backing up the Standard MySQL data or is this down to the customer?
Perhaps you could say for both hosting platforms what data is being backed up to clarify things?
I haven't got a problem with this as long as I can get my head around what data is being backed up so I know where I stand :¬)
...and pb (and others) who are updating their sites regularly also need this info.
Thanks.
[s]Hmmm...[/s]
Hmmm... wrote:
Thanks for that. I'm a little confused though.
If you are saying you keep your own backups (both Standard & VIP?) so WordPress sites would be recovered if there was a failure, why are you recommending people also take their own?
Is it due to the frequency of your backups or just a belt and braces approach as people would be unlucky not to be able to recovery from Freeola's backups?
The important bit here is "for disaster recovery" I think. To clarify, we are able to recover an entire server, for example, quite easily. Picking a specific site from that to recover for a customer is not quite as straightforward, and as you also guessed, not necessarily quite as accurate.
For example, if you make some major changes to your site and these cause a severe error, it could be that we'd only have the option to roll back your site by a week, therefore losing data and progress. If you have backed the site up yourself five minutes before making your changes though...
It all comes down to best practice really, it's ALWAYS preferable to have your own data stored safely by yourself.
Thanks for that. I'm a little confused though.
If you are saying you keep your own backups (both Standard & VIP?) so WordPress sites would be recovered if there was a failure, why are you recommending people also take their own?
Is it due to the frequency of your backups or just a belt and braces approach as people would be unlucky not to be able to recovery from Freeola's backups?
[s]Hmmm...[/s]The important bit here is "for disaster recovery" I think. To clarify, we are able to recover an entire server, for example, quite easily. Picking a specific site from that to recover for a customer is not quite as straightforward, and as you also guessed, not necessarily quite as accurate.
For example, if you make some major changes to your site and these cause a severe error, it could be that we'd only have the option to roll back your site by a week, therefore losing data and progress. If you have backed the site up yourself five minutes before making your changes though...
It all comes down to best practice really, it's ALWAYS preferable to have your own data stored safely by yourself.
Page: