Saturday, 23 February 2008

The Dedicated FunFoll

We are thrilled to announce that the Beta version of www.funfoll.com has been successfully moved to a dedicated server, located in Germany. We have acquired the dedicated server about 3 days ago, and we moved the website yesterday. Now www.funfoll.com works much faster than ever before. The website is very responsive and the surfing experience is very pleasant.

If things go well, we intend to buy another dedicated server in March, to cover the North and South American continents, as we desire www.funfoll.com to work as fast as possible regardless of the country in which it is viewed.

Here's something for the loyal readers, the very first www.funfoll.com funny link from this blog.

P.S.: Oh, and yes, the language of the website is currently stuck on Romanian, we got a bug there ::- D. It's going to be fixed on Monday, don't worry.

Devil Cat

Sunday, 17 February 2008

Beta Version Online

We are happy to announce that the Beta version of www.funfoll.com has finally hit the stores. This happened two days ago, on Friday, February the 15th. The Alpha and Beta versions were released according to plan, and right now, we are busy working at the final version of the website. We hope that we will be able to launch it as planned. The upcoming week will see us move to dedicated hosting, since this is vital to a well functioning website.

The official launch date of www.funfoll.com has remained set to the 29th of February, but as I have said before, this all depends on how our development team can cope with the remaining problems to be fixed and the new functionality to be added.

Our sweet www.funfoll.com also has Google's AdSense running on it. We have just set it up the same day we launched the Beta. We hope we can move it to a dedicated server as soon as possible, as we really need to start popularizing the website, and this can't be done on the current shitty co-located server.

This is my reward for you for reading this post. It's also the last time I'll post a non-FunFoll link here.

Crazy Catz

Thursday, 14 February 2008

Finally, A Working Server

Pfew. We finally managed to get www.funfoll.com working on the IX Web Hosting server. They enabled the PDO MySQL driver for us after more than two weeks of waiting. This is a very good thing because we got rid of the iFrame which messed things up for us. We also can stay a bit more on this server before moving to dedicated hosting. This is also because the move to dedicated hosting is going to take a bit of time. So we won't move to dedicated this week. We will do it next week.

The Beta version of the website is on schedule for launch tomorrow, however, we did start to have some doubts about how and when to launch the final version. Our intention was to launch the website on the 29th of February. However, this seems to be harder and harder at the moment. Many unplanned things hampered us in the past weeks and this is having a negative impact on what we thought to be a very relaxed time-line for the release date.

Our company will also travel to CeBit this year, and this further stresses our development team, as we would wish to present some of our software there. Anyway, we will try our best to finish www.funfoll.com in due time for its planned release. However, we will NOT PUBLISH SOMETHING UNFINISHED. I would rather postpone the release of the website rather than publishing a crap job. We will try to create something of near-perfect quality, and when we are happy with what we have, we will also launch it.

And here's the more-than-usual reward for reading one of my posts ::- D. This is an excellent game which will also be featured on www.funfoll.com. Let's hope www.funfoll.com will rule all ::- D.

Great Game with Great Idea

Tuesday, 5 February 2008

Alpha Version Online!

A few days ago we launched the Alpha Version of www.funfoll.com. This is a big event for us. Unfortunately, I was a bit too busy to post about it here. But alas, better late than never. The website can, of course, be accessed at it's official address, www.funfoll.com but this is not really the host of the website. At this address, there is but a simple file which opens the website in an iFrame. The website is hosted on a server here at our company, Wildcard Technologies. Why are we in this situation?

It's simple. Our host, IX Web Hosting, is the worst host I have ever come across. If you're reading this, remember to stay away from them. They're a crappy co-located host with no respect whatsoever for their clients, which is to be expected, of course, for the price of 12$/month which we pay for hosting our stuff there. Even so, they could have helped us with our problems, but didn't. We had a simple issue, we needed a PDO MySQL driver installed. Actually, not even installed, just enabled. Today marks the 10th day since our initial request for this driver. No answer to this day. I have spent 3 chats with members from their support department and I got the same stupid answers: wait, please wait, we're working on it, etc.. Lies. The reason I am so angry on IX Web Hosting is that they are a bunch of liars. I would have preferred a straight "we won't enable it + reason" answer, rather than waiting an eternity for a non-answer. This is the most unfair thing to do to a client: keep him/her waiting in a line for weeks. IX Web Hosting sucks and I suggest you to stay away from them, go to Blue Host or Lunar Pages or whatever. I know that we're going for dedicated hosting with this website because co-located hosting is bad no matter how you look at it. IX Web Hosting did answer tickets usually around 2 to 8 hours and they have a non stop chat service. They have a good package and reasonable support, unless you need more complex stuff, case in which they will lie to you, they will deceive you, they will make you scream in anger and frustrate you. Stay away!

Ok... so for now, we got www.funfoll.com at a temporary location. But we'll launch the Beta version of the website on the 15th of February, and that will feature dedicated hosting and a great deal of bandwidth and performance. Let's all hope that things will go well.

Let's laugh a bit together before www.funfoll.com is launched!

Great examples of stupidity