Birdhouse Hosting News and Updates

Note: In the event of a system outage, this News page may not be available. Our status system, however, lives on a completely independent server and will always be available. Please bookmark status.birdhousehosting.com.

PHP Upgraded

We’ve upgraded PHP to the latest version, and have now compiled PHP against libexpat. This fixes an issue some users were having using external WordPress posting clients, as well as some XML parsing tools built into sites. Please let us know if you experience any oddities.

WordPress Uploads

We’re temporarily experiencing an issue affecting users’ ability to upload files into WordPress. We hope to have a full fix for this soon. We’ll post back here with more information soon.

Update: This issue has been corrected.

git installed

On customer request, git (client, not server) has now been installed on Birdhouse for users who have been granted command line access. Enjoy!

Carbon Balanced

Birdhouse is committed to environmentally friendly hosting – our datacenter is not just carbon-neutral, but climate-positive, and committed to offsetting the total carbon-footprint of their server facilities by at least 110 percent.

Birdhouse Adds Django Support

For experienced web developers, Birdhouse now supports web application deployment with the Python-based Django framework. While we don’t provide Django setup through cPanel, we will take care of the initial setup process for you, and create a super-fast mod_wsgi-based Django hosting environment on your behalf, ready to rock.

For more information, please see our Django FAQ.

Disk Usage Patterns

It’s not uncommon for web hosts to provide unholy amounts of disk space to users. 50GBs! 100GBs! Unlimited storage!

The truth is, the vast majority of web sites on the internet are very, very small, and never have a need for anywhere near large numbers like that. In fact, web hosts offering tons of storage would never be able to supply it to their users if their users actually decided to take them up on it. Classic overselling, on a scale that far eclipses what the airlines do.

Here’s a little data to help clarify:

Birdhouse currently hosts 90 master accounts, for a total of around 200 domains. The current average size of all data stored for all web and mail accounts is 340MBs – and the majority of that is mail, not web files. But the average is itself misleading  – a small handful of sites storing a lot of audio or video grossly skew that average. To get a more accurate view of what most sites actually use, we need to calculate the median instead, and that number gives us 102MBs.

In other words, the vast majority of web sites will only ever utilize 1/500th of the 50GBs promised by the biggest overselling web hosts.

At Birdhouse, our disk quotas may look smaller than those of other web hosts, but we try not to oversell, and we provide more than enough storage room for all but the largest audio/video storage sites (and even those are now moving to storing large amounts of video on YouTube or Vimeo).

The more you know…

SpamAssassin rulesets updated

In our ongoing effort to detect and delete email spam, we’ve updated/modified our technique for obtaining daily updates to SpamAssassin rulesets (sa-update). Please let us know if you notice an improvement in the ratio of spam that slips through the cracks.

Mail Form FAQ Added

Sending mail from a web form is incredibly easy with our server-wide form-mail clone. Nothing to install – just include a few required fields in your form and you’re off to the races. We’ve just added a new FAQ to cover the details.

Ruby on Rails Support

Birdhouse Hosting is proud to announce support for Ruby on Rails! All users will now find a new Ruby on Rails icon in their cPanel, and we’ve written a new Rails FAQ explaining how to get a RoR application scaffold off the ground. We’re looking forward to seeing what you create.

New Hosting Plans, Rates, Bandwidth Offerings

Birdhouse is pleased to announce our new Plan A account, optimized for student budgets and hosting needs. The Plan A account is available to students everywhere (with proof of enrollment, if we don’t already know you), and is valid until one year after graduation.

We’ve also reduced rates slightly for our other hosting plans, increased bandwidth and storage allocations across the board, and increased the number of plan features available to all users.