Back On Track

We have mostly recovered from our latest web hosting nightmare. I have a few glitches yet to work out on OKMensa, but other than that things seem fine. Our sites are taking up permanent residence at our new host. I sympathize with our old host, Dot 5 Hosting — everything that could possibly go wrong, did. But, it is still going on, and they are becoming less and less responsive to my requests to fix what remains broken so that I can verify we have recovered everything.

A web host that lasts at least a year, is that too much to ask?

I have retroactively posted the last two entries of our 90 days. Rather anti-climactic, eh? I prefer to believe the server just could not handle the exponential growth of our business. Please allow me my delusions.

In other news, Ad Goat launched this weekend to much fanfare and little sleep. Thanks to Perl Studio for providing the Perl/PHP solution that powers PayPal Instant Payment Notification on Ad Goat. When paying for an ad, a user can pay via PayPal and the software will instantly update the ad as approved. It is an example of a useful web service. When a user creates an ad, they see a link to PayPal. If they pay via that link, PayPal will post to a URL on our site the details of the transaction. The script on our side then posts that information back to PayPal, which will then respond to the script, telling it if the transaction was verified. If it was verified, our script updates the ad, marking it as approved. The user now has an ad, and we have our payment, all without any human intervention.