arkitrave :: log

I have finally found a host I’m going to stay with. I was with catalog.com for just longer than the 30-day cancellation period, and less than two months. I am now at TextDrive, paying a litte more, and getting a lot more for my money. catalog.com is good for simple, small sites that don’t need a lot of control or features, but it was not a good move for my site.

Since Apache makes it so easy, I’ve been serving html files as php for a long time, for several reasons:

• no specific technology needs to be hardcoded into the site url structure. Links will never break, even if I change to an alternative dynamic technology. I’m sure you’ve visited a newspaper site that’s gone from .php to .asp and you have to start all over with their search tool to find your article.
• the technology I’m using to generate my pages isn’t obvious to the visitor, as the url will always be an html extension. This isn’t really a security help, but it makes me feel better anyway. “html” says “website” to people, while “php” is confusing to non-tech folks.
• I can decide to script any page on the site without having to change its extension from .html to .php

Whether these are great reasons or not, it’s a functionality I’ve gotten used to, and since catalog.com allowed me to edit my .htaccess file, I figured I wouldn’t have any problem. And I didn’t, for over a month, until they switched servers and stopped allowing the rewriting. Of course, my site was broken for several days, trying to save files to disk with the IE warning “Some files may harm your computer”. Since this isn’t good for business, I have said goodbye to the nice catalog.com people.

TextDrive, fyi, defaults to parsing .html files as .php, so I guess I’m not the only one who does this. I am now a happy hosting customer again, and will begin my fight to get a refund from catalog.com, since I’m outside of the 30-day money-back guarantee period.

Wish me luck.