Cruiskeen Consulting LLC

Through 3/31/2010, we are having a hosting sale.  Buy any Standard or Premium hosting plan, and get 10% off your order (including as many months as you buy initially). 

Just enter the coupon code Cheaphost when you place your order.

We're now also supporting a one-click install of Wordpress for our hosting clients.  It's very simple, and lets you get a Wordpress installation up in minutes.  This is very much like our Drupal one-click install, and is also easily upgradeable (you'll get an email whenever a new Wordpress version is available) and you can then do a one-click upgrade.

We are strong supporters of Open Source software in general, and Drupal in particular. We build our web sites (including this one) in Drupal, and are a member of the Drupal Association.  Any purchases made from this page will also help to support the Drupal Association by paying the Drupal Association a 5% portion of your monthly hosting fee.

Our servers are set up to support Drupal.  We have a simple Drupal setup on our servers, which lets you install Drupal with a single click on the web.  This installer is kept up-to-date with new Drupal security releases, generally within a few days of a new release.  Our servers are tuned to support Drupal as well -

Drupal Hosting

Most of our hosting services are intended to support the Drupal content management system. We provide managed Drupal hosting where we supply  Drupal and a set of supported Drupal modules. This can include CiviCRM, and a number of other additional packages. Typically our Drupal managed hosting rates start at $65 per month.  We're not a generic hosting service, but have a strong background in UNIX/Linux system administration.   We can work with you on a specialized hosting environment for your needs, including VPS hosting and dedicated managed servers.

We're almost done moving to the new Eau Claire data center, and what a trip it's been. 

We moved our DNS servers yesterday (and I'm still looking for signs that I broke something subtle along the way) and almost all of the web sites are now moved.  We still have a few  email-only accounts to move over, and then we'll be ready to shut down the servers in Michigan, and re-install some of them in Eau Claire. 

A few months ago we launched a new web site for the American Composers Alliance in New York CIty.  ACA is a nonprofit that publishes scores for modern classical composers.

I'm happy to announce that we have just negotiated a space for a new data center in Wisconsin.  This will mean that we will be bringing all aspects of the business into Wisconsin, including our hosting and backup infrastructure. Our new Eau Claire, WI data center is very well connected to the Internet, and will provide us with high-speed low-latency connections.  The new data center has redundant power and is very physically secure.

New security-related Drupal releases came out yesterday.  We've already upgraded all of the Drupal 6 web sites that are under maintenance contract to Drupal 6.15.  We will be doing the existing Drupal 5 web sites later today up to 5.21.  So far the upgrade has gone very smoothly, and also fixes a number of bugs in Drupal 6. 

As always, please contact us at the helpdesk email address if you have any issues with your sites.

WEB HOSTING AGREEMENT

The purpose of this Agreement (hereafter referred to as the “Agreement”) is to precede a longer-term contract arrangement under which Company will provide Web Hosting services on behalf of Client.

Agreements

In consideration of the mutual covenants set forth in this Agreement, Customer and Client hereby agree as follows:

New versions of Drupal 5 and 6 were released yesterday.  These primarily fix a number of security issues which were recently discovered, and also introduce a number of bug fixes, particularly on Drupal 6. 

We are implementing a new automated system for hosting and domain sales. As part of this new system, we will be changing the company we use for domain registration sales.  We had previously partnered with Godaddy/Wild West Domains, and will in the future be using Enom as a reseller. Because of this, our current customers with registered domains will receive an amail from Godaddy around September 1, informing them on how to continue managing their domains.  Your login credentials for your domain account will remain the same as always, but you will be directed to a new web site to manage your domains and certificates.

We are implementing a new domain sales site at https://billing.cruiskeenconsulting.com, which will be more tightly integrated with our new hosting system and will allow you to purchase hosting on-line, along with domains and certificates starting on 9/1/2009.

We're currently working on expanding our hosting services.  In the long run this will mean much better services for our customers.  We are automating many parts of our hosting arrangement, so that by August you will be able to purchase all hosting services on-line with a credit card, upgrade your services, etc.

We're currently experiencing some network connectivity issues in our colocation facility in Michigan.  For about 30 minutes today most of the web sites we host were essentially non-responsive.  The connectivity is improving, but site response is still likely to be sluggish.  We're working with the data center staff to resolve the network issue. 

Update -

The problem has been a large denial of service attack against our data center.  The problem has been resolved, and response time on the servers is now normal. 

Well, that was interesting -

Our colocation facility in Michigan fell off the internet for a while today - this caused an outage of about 15 minutes for some of our hosted web sites (including this site).  We're still waiting for news from the colo facility, buit it appears that things have now recovered. Some of our sites and mailing lists werre unavailable from about 3:10 PM Central until about 3:25 PM Central.

There's a new report on CMS systems from the folks at Idealware.  Ignore the fact that we're one of the sponsors ard are listed in the report -it's a really good unbiased view of the different CMS systems and how they would fit into a nonprofit's world.

Imagine being able to back up your local systems automatically, and having it go off-site with no intervention on your part:

• No Tapes
• No remembering to back up
• backups happen from your laptop even while you're traveling
• Backups automatically go to an off-site server
• Your backups also can be saved locally on your own computers so that you can also have fast restores
• Back Up your Mac, Windows, and Linux systems. Desktops, Laptops, and Servers.
• All Data is encrypted before it goes over the network. Nobody can read your data but you.