I prefer to buy domains at Godaddy.com, because it’s the most famous domain registrar all over the world. I found that it can register .cn domain now.

.cn domain is the root domain in China. Register a .cn domain, the first year price is only CNY 1.00, and the renew price is CNY 55.00.

According to latest currency exchange rate:

1.00 CNY = 0.146124 USD

55.00 CNY = 8.03682 USD

But the price of .cn at Godaddy is $29.99. Nearly $30. Oh my god.

If you need assistant to register a .cn domain, just contact me. Or you can direct to www.zitian.cn .

SiteUptime provide free monitor for websites, it checks per 30 mins. And send only one email to us when site down. And another email for available. Register Here.

Everyone can check my monitor report here.

Dear Adam,
This is an automated message from SiteUptime.
Alert Type: Site Not Available
Result: Failed
Time: November 23, 2008 21:05:58

Dear Adam,
This is an automated message from SiteUptime.
Alert Type: Site Not Available
Result: Failed
Time: November 22, 2008 16:34:05

Dear Adam,
This is an automated message from SiteUptime.
Alert Type: Site Not Available
Result: Failed
Time: November 21, 2008 18:03:09

Dear Adam,
This is an automated message from SiteUptime.
Alert Type: Site Not Available
Result: Failed
Time: November 16, 2008 12:58:08

Dear Adam,
This is an automated message from SiteUptime.
Alert Type: Site Not Available
Result: Failed
Time: November 5, 2008 18:45:48

Dear Adam,
This is an automated message from SiteUptime.
Alert Type: Site Not Available
Result: Failed
Time: November 5, 2008 12:45:33

Dear Adam,
This is an automated message from SiteUptime.
Alert Type: Site Not Available
Result: Failed
Time: November 3, 2008 08:43:16

Dear Adam,
This is an automated message from SiteUptime.
Alert Type: Site Not Available
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Time: November 3, 2008 02:13:00

Dear Adam,
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Time: November 2, 2008 17:42:33

Dear Adam,
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Alert Type: Site Not Available
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Time: October 29, 2008 02:37:47

Dear Adam,
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Alert Type: Site Not Available
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Time: October 29, 2008 01:07:42

Dear Adam,
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Alert Type: Site Not Available
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Time: October 28, 2008 01:36:34

Dear Adam,
This is an automated message from SiteUptime.
Alert Type: Site Not Available
Result: Failed
Time: October 28, 2008 00:36:31

BACKGROUND:

There is a parameter for php called ‘allow_url_fopen’ that is currently
enabled in both our PHP4 and PHP5 environments.  If the proper
precautions are not taken in PHP a large number of code injection
vulnerabilities frequently reported in PHP-based web applications are possible.  We
understand that our customers install a great number of PHP-driven
applications, many of them from the open-source community.  Unfortunately
a great number of them can potentially fall prey to these
vulnerabilities.  As a company the best that we can do in a shared environment is to
provide sane global defaults that protect the majority of our customer
base. This pro-active change is in the best interest of our entire
customer base using our (gs) Grid-Service.

CHANGE:

Starting on 01/18/08, and continuing for several more days, we will
begin disabling ‘allow_url_fopen’ across all of our clusters on the (gs)
platform.  This will be a permanent change.

PREPARATION/WORKAROUND:

In preparation for the pending change you can determine now whether
your site will function with our new defaults.  We have created a
KnowledgeBase article at http://kb.mediatemple.net/article.php?id=793 that
details how you can disable ‘allow_url_fopen’ now to check for any
incompatibilities.  The process is very straightforward; include the following
line in your php.ini file at /home/####/etc/php.ini (replace #### with
your site number)

allow_url_fopen = Off

This will give you a PHP environment identical to the one we will be
changing to on January 18th.  We strongly encourage you to thoroughly
test your sites to ensure compatibility.  If the change has no impact you
will not have to worry.  You can freely remove the line above or keep
it.

Should you come across errors directly related to this change you can
simply modify the flag to ‘On’ which will be honored post-change as
well:

allow_url_fopen = On

With this particular change your setting in php.ini will always be
honored regardless of the global values.  With that in mind we would highly
suggest further researching and examining aspects of your site that
depend on this functionality to see if a safer method can be used
instead.  If this software was obtained from a 3rd party we would suggest
contacting their developer.

Once again we will be making this rolling change to our servers
starting on 01/18/08.  If you need clarification of this change, or require
assistance with updating your php.ini, please feel free to open a Support
Request in your AccountCenter or by calling us toll-free at
(877)578-4000 at any time. 

Thank you for your cooperation and understanding.

Regards,

(mt) Media Temple, Inc
Hosting Operations
8520 National Blvd.
Building A
Culver City, CA 90232

<24/7 toll-free>: 877-578-4000
<24/7 international>: +1-310-841-5500
www.mediatemple.net

Here are the content.

Dear Site Owner,

(mt) Media Temple would like to notify you and the Contacts on your
Account of a very important data center maintenance which may affect one
of your hosting related services.

DATE/TIME WINDOW:
—————————-
Friday, November 30th 2007 9:30 PM – Saturday, December 1st 3:00AM PST

To see when this maintenance window will occur in a different timezone
please visit:

http://mediatemple.net/go/date/0710112330

AFFECTED RESOURCES:
—————————-
(gs) Grid-Service
(ss) Shared Services
(dp)(dpv)(nitro) some Dedicated Physical Services

MAINTENANCE ACTION:
—————————-

On Friday, November 30th, our data center Electrical Engineers will
facilitate proactive replacement of certain electrical systems in one of
our Facility Power Segments at our EL-DC3 data center. In addition, an
upgrade will be taking place to core components of the (gs), including
the storage subsystem. This vendor-recommended upgrade required
additional time and thus has been grouped with the data center activity in
order to reduce customer impact.

This larger than normal maintenance period is a proactive measure to
prevent power failure incidents as experienced by various other data
centers mentioned in recent news. We would like to remind all customers
that scheduled infrastructure maintenance and security related updates
are a necessary and vital aspect of web hosting that ensures the long
term uptime and reliability of your services.

Should you have any questions regarding the maintenance please open a
support request inside the (mt) AccountCenter at the following URL:

https://ac.mediatemple.net/

This announcement is also viewable in our weblog:

http://weblog.mediatemple.net/weblog/category/system-incidents/electrical-systems-maintenance-notice-nov-30th/

Thank you in advance for your understanding.

Regards,

(mt) Media Temple, Inc
Hosting Operations
8520 National Blvd.
Building A
Culver City, CA 90232

<24/7 toll-free>: 877-578-4000
<24/7 international>: +1-310-841-5500
www.mediatemple.net

I’m very unhappy because visitors can not visit my site in several hours. But I know the maintenance is very important. So I published an announce about the maintenance. I told my visitors about the maintenance time.

But at 4:30am, PST, I could not visit my site even. Then I checked the system status of Media Temple. They said:

Unfortunately the upgrade to (gs) Grid.Cluster.2 is taking longer than anticipated. Our systems engineers expect all services to be restored by 4:00AM PST.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

They told me the maintenance will delay to 4:00AM PST. But I told my visitors that they can visit my site after 3:00am PST. I made them disappointing!

The nightmare haven’t been over.  I couldn’t visit my site until 10:10am. PST. And they worte a post here.

I have two questions,

First, if you tell me the time, why not carry out？

Second, I found this maintenance affected (gs) Grid-Service, (ss) Shared Services, (dp)(dpv)(nitro) some Dedicated Physical Services. But why the (gs) Grid-Service delay for so long?

Everyone can check the maintenance process here:

http://weblog.mediatemple.net/weblog/category/system-incidents/electrical-systems-maintenance-notice-nov-30th/ 

Just pay attention to the post timestamp

China has the largest population all over the world. If you are employed by an hosting company, please read the following. I’ll tell you my request about the hosting.

First, linux + Apache + php + MySQL. Maybe someone need .net and asp, too. Because the programmer  of .net is too much in China. Maybe they need an asp/.net hosting, too. Personally, I prefer to php. In linux + Apache + php + MySQL, it should support the mod-rewrite, and the vesion of php/MySQL should not be outmoded. And we can create multi-users of FTP/MySQL, too.

Second, Chinese Goverment has an Great FireWall to prevent the critical political views. Not only this, such as some picture about social is forbidden, too. If they banned the ip address, we can contact you to change the ip address quickly.

Third, the Ping time should be shorter and shorter. Here are the screen shot, w757.com is my site at MediaTemple, dupola.com is my friend’s site at Dreamhost. Hmm, Dreamhost is faster than MediaTemple now.

Click Here to view the full size

Last, you should have an online support. If a language is not your mother tongue, you couldn’t speak it very fluently. But chating in the dialogue window is more easy. Someone may said, we have email support, yes, but you cannot reply the mail soon, isn’t it?

The following is the letter which I received today, I think they are great. Because they know how to use the target marking. Lol.

I noticed on your blog that you have been suffering from the recent outage at MediaTemple.  I wanted to present to you an alternative.
HostMySite has been in the hosting business for offer ten years and offers managed dedicated, collocation, virtual private server, and shared website solutions.
Below I have highlights where we are strongest in the hosting industry:
1)      24x7x365 day Phone Support ? On average someone will pick up the phone within 3 rings and 90% of the time the first person you talk to you will be the person that solves your problem.
2)      Reliability, stability, and maintainability ? We own and operate our own data centers in Newark Delaware providing 100% uptime of network and external connectivity. In addition we keep a high stock of parts in inventory in the event of hardware failure and offer a 2 hour hardware replacement guarantee on our dedicated servers.  Our infrastructure department is staffed 24/7 to make sure our infrastructure does not go down.
To learn more about capabilities please see the following:
http://hostmysite.com/hosting/
http://hostmysite.com/vps/
http://hostmysite.com/dedicated/
http://hostmysite.com/datacenter/
In addition if you sign up as a reseller we offer 30% off our shared and
VPS plans as well as a referral plan for our dedicated servers.
http://hostmysite.com/reseller/
I look forward to hearing from you,

Adam marked: I have hidden the name and contact method here. If you are interested in it, please visit their site.:)

I called them twice. The first time, the system reminded me that I will wait for about 40 minutes, because I was in the queue 22. Wow, it’s amazing. I hung up the skype.

About a quarter later, I called them again, only wait for 1 minutes, a guy answered me. He said they had found the problem and will solute it in one hour. I repeated: Only one hour? He answered, yes.

Then one day passed. The problem was still existing.

They had posted the problems on their blog.

From then to now, the hosting was not stable.

I have chosen the MediaTemple, because it’s very fast, even I’m in China. Many friends choose the Dreamhost, the first year is very cheap. But when I am choosing the hosting, the speed of Dreamhost is lower than MediaTemple’s. So I bought it. But I am so disappointing now. You can test the speed, the speed of MediaTemple is lower than Dreamhost’s now.

I found an interesting thing. All the problems happened in the Grid-Service. It’s the cheapest hosting in MediaTemple. But it’s more expensive than other hosting, such as Bluehost’s, Dreamhost’s, 1and1′s, Godaddy’s, etc.

I pray that MediaTemple don’t have latency any more. blessing…..

As per the last incident update on (mt) Media Temple’s incident tracker
system, 24 hours have passed and we have seen no further latency
issues on (gs) Cluster.2

(mt) Media Temple is issuing 1 month’s credit to customers affected by
this issue (INC# 285). We would like to take this opportunity to once
again apologize for the unexpected access problems. We understand that
our customers run web dependent businesses on our systems and that
slow or inaccessible websites or email are simply unacceptable. We would
also like to convey once more that this incident has spawned numerous
internal reviews, new monitoring points and new adjustments to our
cluster growth formulas. The primary aim for (mt) Media Temple is for this
to never happen again.

We thank you for patience and your continued business.

Regards,

Demian P. Sellfors
CEO
(mt) Media Temple, Inc.

You may review the full history of the incident log at the special
incident URL:

http://weblog.mediatemple.net/weblog/category/system-incidents/web-and-email-latency-on-gs02-grid-service-cluster-2/