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Watching the CBS morning show yesterday (not by choice), I had the misfortune to find out about a new menace to society. If the general state of America, or my life for that matter, wasn’t enough to make it difficult to sleep the knowledge CBS news dropped yesterday was enough to ensure months of insomnia. Was it a realistic look at the American economy, and where it is headed? No. An update on our rapidly disappearing civil liberties? Worse. War coverage, with in depth analysis of the damage to ourselves and others? Sorry, if it were only that simple. This new nightmare has the power to destroy individuals, tear families apart and further widen the hole in the American social fabric. Can you handle the truth?! I’m about to drop it, hardcore style, so stop reading here if you want to spare yourself the horror.

Chapstick Addiction.

You read that right. That innocent tube sitting in your pocket that isn’t saying you are happy to see me is a dynamo of destruction. Heroin’s cute little sister. A gateway drug we dispense freely to our children. A salve that will steal any hope of salvation!

It got me thinking. I was recently in Manhattan, it was cold and windy. I had lost my chapstick and was too lazy or absent minded to get some. After three days of this, what was one of the first things I did when I returned home? I didn’t finish my novel. I didn’t make crazy love. I didn’t even check my email, which I was unable to access while gone! No, brothers and sisters, I went and grabbed that goddamn tube of chapstick and went overboard applying it. The first step to recovery is recognizing you have a problem.

Thankfully there are many resources on the web. Two relevant stories are here and here. The original, Lip Balm Anonymous, has many collected on one page. Links on the home page include:

-Chap Stick Conspiracy

-Sex Sells

-Lip Balm Drug Connection

-The Nightmare Never Ends

-Addict Denial Page

The page also mentions that the site was rated #327 in the book 505 Unbelievably Stupid Web Pages, but thankfully the author notes LBA is considering taking legal action against the author and publisher of the book. The book that is linked to and has a banner ad. I bet Carmex secretly funded the publication!

I know first hand the nightmare of addiction. I’ve been Straight Edge for over fifteen years, long since it fell out of fashion. As an old, clean Straight Edger, let me tell you–you don’t want to go down this path. It was over two years before I started to feel comfortable in my own skin. Now I find out I was really using, and my drug of choice was chapstick. I’ve been lying to myself all these years.

I was at a party a couple of years ago, and a teacher was hilariously referring to his students as “the Helmet Generation”. He recounted how these kids do nothing without a helmet, eat their shitty lunchables for lunch, play sports where there is no winner to protect esteem and generally are just coddled and soft. This Helmitification, if you will, is spreading across our entire society, and this “chapstick addiction” is as perfect an example as I’m likely to come across.

What are the costs of this addiction? The downside I’ve read is that it costs consumers about one hundred dollars a year. Your habit is stealing a movie and cheap dinner right out from under you! I live in Detroit. It gets very cold here for part of the year. My lips dry out, crack and bleed. That is why I use chapstick. Maybe I am buying into a conspiracy, but it really feels like I’m just putting something on my lips that makes them feel better. It really is an insult to people whose lives have been damaged by the ravages of addiction to lump chapstick usage in with crystal meth.

We are living in a dark time in America. Darker days are on the horizon. If anything, this news story will serve as a marker for a more innocent time. When most of the world is starving we worry about addiction to lip balm. Welcome to the home of the free and the brave. Can I get you a gallon of soda and a triple cheese burger?

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A good web host, like a good man or woman, is hard to find. If you have decided to pay for your own hosting, finding a good one requires tenacity, good luck and going through bad ones before you reach the promised land. It is easy to get lured in by the promise of low prices, only to find once you get your first surge of traffic that you are facing a much larger bill then you have imagined. Finding an honest review on line, in the five hundred million reviews out there, is difficult at best. Most reviewers have a financial incentive to write a positive review. Most negative reviews are written by someone pissed off over something, and a lot of times you can’t trust it because the problems may have been their causing. By luck, if you find reviews you trust, you can read mainly positive reviews of a reputable host only to read one or two negative reviews that make sense. I drove myself crazy for a month looking for a host. By sheer luck, I found Fused Network. This review will be in two parts. Part one is the story of how I got to Fused Network, part two a review of the service.

Originally I had signed up with 1and1. It wasn’t a bad decision. I found them easy to use. It wasn’t too difficult to get my sites up and running. Support was adequate, I could phone when I had a problem, sit on hold for twenty minutes and then get to talk to “Larry” from India. 90% of the time the help was good. The 10% was a real problem.

Occasionally I would get articles picked up by Slashdot. I would put in a call to 1and1 as a courtesy to let them know I was expecting heavy traffic. In April, I had one article that really took off. Multiple sites besides Slashdot carried it. I had a two hour warning before the initial burst, so I put in a phone call to warn 1and1. I was reassured that it would be handled. Five hours later my site was down. I could get no real answers from 1and1, the answers I did get conflicted. The bottom line was that the most successful thing I had written was offline for over 48 hours. I still had huge traffic from Coral Cache and the like, and when I went back up traffic was good for a few more days. I received an ominous email from 1and1 warning me I could pay to move to dedicated hosting or face severe charges for the next traffic surge. I took a job and just gave up on my sites. I couldn’t justify the additional expense, so I surrendered the readership I had slowly built. I figured the old adage was true, you get what you pay for, and I had paid for cheap hosting.

I decided in October to get back in the game. My contract with 1and1 was drawing to a close. I figured I’d switch web hosts and go for it again. Since my domains were registered through 1and1 I started to research how to cancel and retain ownership of the domains. It was then that the full price of my cheap hosting became apparent to me. I read over and over again about the nightmares people had canceling 1and1. People claimed to be charged, to have collection agencies after them for charges after they canceled and importantly, having their domains tied up. The sheer quantity of these complaints plus the uniformity of them gave them credence. I decided my best course of action was to keep a small package, not cancel, and move the important domains elsewhere. This worked. The downgrade and eventual domain transfers went smoothly, to 1and1’s credit. Unfortunately I’m being charged for something I had canceled, I still have to work that out.

I entered a two week hell of looking for a new host. The problem is that there are a lot of bad hosts out there with glowing reviews and a decent amount of good hosts with lukewarm reviews. I narrowed it down to Media Temple, ASmallOrange, Laughing Squid or Eleven2. A few emails with Eleven2 sealed the deal for me. I liked them so much that I prepaid for two years, getting a good deal.

I was excited and ready to go. I was nervous about transferring the sites, but reassured by Rodney, the owner, that their support was second to none and they would hold my hand through the process. The 24/7 support through AIM appealed to me, I figured it was a great way to get my hand held. I fired up a client, shot an instant message. Heard nothing. Hours went by, nothing. I filed a support ticket, it went unanswered. The next day, I sent a message saying I wanted to cancel my service. I got a nice response from Rodney that reassured me. I thought maybe I had overreacted and retracted my cancellation. I fired up the Instant Messenger later, and again got no response. Not once in 72 hours was I able to speak with anyone over IM. I don’t know if it was a bad weekend or not, or if it was an anomaly, but it was a complete customer service failure in my eyes and enough to make me cancel. The cancellation was pleasant enough, and I had no trouble receiving my funds, so I can give eleven2 credit there.

When the eleven2 problems started, I did deeper research into them. I read a few posts here and there on forums where people complained about them being inaccessible, which helped me in my decision to cancel. I started seeing posts about Fused Network. There weren’t many, but the ones I saw struck me in the overwhelming praise of their service. I started noticing David, from Fused, in these threads. He seemed genuine, the posters were very grateful to him. Based on this, I decided to sign up. It was a great decision.

That brings us to Part Two, I will post it tomorrow.

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Welcome to part 2 of Finding A Good Webhost. To sum up the story thus far:

Boy meets host, host lets boy down. Boy leaves host for prettier new host, only to find her completely unavailable. Boy then finds the webhost of his dreams and lives happily ever after.

As I mentioned earlier, I had read good things about Fused Network. The positive things I read were striking in their gushing praise. Nervously I signed up for the service. Pricing was attractive. Not the cheapest, but I wasn’t looking for the cheapest. I signed up for the Level 4 shared Web Hosting Package, giving me 5 Gigs of storage, 1 gig Transfer, 1000 email accounts, 500 subdomains, 30 MySQL DB’s, 50 FTP accounts and Free Setup. These numbers were more than sufficient for me, and I liked that Fused did not play the “Unlimited Diskspace/Bandwith” marketing game. The numbers are real numbers with no surprises.

Sign up was easy, and soon after phone verification I received an email with all of my relevant account information. David at Fused Network handled transferring my sites and nameservers to Fused. He advised me on how to transfer the domains and gave me a timetable of what to expect. By this point, I was so thrilled with the service that I purchased the domains from Fused. I had zero downtime through the transfer. Fused Network handled everything, and it went very well.

Fused Network uses cPanel, with a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) powered backed running the latest versions of the LAMP stack. I love that their systems are “primarily 100% open source powered” since I have a strong interest in Open Source. Free nightly backups are included. As far as the technical aspects go, this link will go a lot farther than my parroting it. Fused’s offerings are solid.

Where Fused Network really shines is in support. I have a customer service background, and pride myself on being someone that would do whatever it took to get a job done for a customer. David and Fused Network seem to have the same philosophy. Any support ticket I have filed has been answered almost immediately. The site claims their average response time is three minutes, and I can vouch for that. Communication is excellent. Any time Fused has a problem, I am informed and kept up to date. Early in December they ran into a forty-eight hour instability problem that didn’t affect me, the emails came constantly throughout it. Once it was solved, a credit was offered to anyone that had suffered even one cent in lost revenue. A status blog was set up in the event of any future problems. The professionalism exhibited during what must have been a difficult time was inspiring. It reaffirmed my choice was the correct one. If you have had bad or adequate web hosting, you honestly will not believe how you are treated at Fused Network. The email and ticket support systems work so well I haven’t had to use the 24×7 phone support.

My experience with Fused Network has been extremely positive. I’ve been dying to get the word out. I have no problem recommending something I am happy with, and love to advocate great things. Fused Network is special. It is rare to get this level of service this day and age. If you are looking for a web host, look no further.

In Part 1 of this review, I said you can’t really trust positive reviews because a lot of times the author has an affiliate program set up, where they get money based on someone signing up. In full disclosure, I have an affiliate program with Fused Network. There is one big difference, though. Fused gives you the opportunity to donate any earnings you have to the charity of your choice. Any revenue I earn based on this review will be donated to charity. This is based on Fused Network’s outstanding example. I’d like to share an email I received this month. It highlights what I like so much about Fused Network and David. This letter is a perfect example of what is so great about working with them, and sets a great example to follow.

The email:

The Biggest Holiday Giveaway ever by Fused Network

It’s the season of giving and with the snow plastering the ground, the weather outside being frightful and hibernating in our offices being so delightful (although let’s avoid starting a warm fire with the carpet).. it’s time to have the biggest holiday giveaway ever!

Now, I know what you may be thinking.
“But David, I’ve already got everything I want by hosting with Fused Network. You’ve satisfied all my corporal needs!”

Perfect then, we’ll give it to someone else!

The Biggest Holiday Giveaway ever:
During the month of December, Fused Network will be donating 100% of our revenue to the charities of your choice. All new accounts that are signed up will have the opportunity to select a charity of their choice. We’ve been absolutely blessed every day of this year so far so it’s our chance to give back.

It isn’t often that we get to change the world. Sure, we offer great web hosting and from the testimonials we’ve received there’s an impact we make in others lives but it’s simply not enough. As a show of our gratitude, we’re giving you the chance to give back to those charities that have made a difference in your lives, the lives of others & are genuinely making the world a better place.

So how does it work?
Well, it’s fairly simple in concept. Any new accounts signed up between now & December 31st will have the opportunity to fill in a ‘Charity’ field. Enter the charity of your choice in the field and we’ll take care of the rest. Daily, we’ll be calculating the totals on our blog & even interviewing different users about the charities they’ve selected.

Of course, we like to put our money where our mouths are so all of the revenue that isn’t from new signups is being donated directly to the Salvation Army. If a user forgets to select a charity, that’s where it will go as well. We see them in Downtown Toronto feeding the homeless daily and I’ve watched them time & time again make sacrifices for others: Now that’s what I like to see

More information regarding the ‘Biggest Holiday Giveaway’ ever will be available on the giveaway page here:
http://www.fusednetwork.com/give.php

Be sure to tell your friends, family, co-workers & even your enemies.
It’s a season of giving. Let’s give wholeheartedly.

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact me!
Have a jolly, jolly Christmas.. 

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