I have Xamp installed on my local PC. That gives me a working Apache web server that lets me test out my PHP based web sites before I publish them. This has been working great until I needed to utilize mod_rewrite. I had created a subdirectory on my local web server for a new test site.  I created a .htaccess file with the necessary rewrite statements but it wasn’t working.  After some Googling and testing I finally got things working.  Here’s the steps:

1. Need to modify the httpd.conf file for Apache. Find the line "LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so" and uncomment it (remove the # sign at the start of the line)
2. Because my test site was in a sub-directory I had to change my .htaccess file just a bit from what I’ve normally had.  The "RewriteBase" line needed to be "RewriteBase /test" (where "test" is the name of my subdirectory).
3. The final, important step, was that I needed to add a few lines to the httpd.conf file where I had defined my sub directory.

<Directory "c:/dev/test">
Options All
AllowOverride All
</Directory>

Restart Apache and everything worked great!

If you’ve read my blog before you know that I have gone through quite a few different web hosting providers over the years. It seems that as my web sites expand in sophistication I run up against some limitation with my hosting company. A few months ago I thought I had found a great host with ReliableSite.net, but I was having some issues with sessions being dropped and one of my scheduled jobs not working. That caused me to once again search for alternatives.

Lucky for me, I’m getting much better at searching for a hosting company! It didn’t take me long to find one that looked good and I decided to give it a shot (the 30-day money back guarantee made the decision quite easy). This past weekend I got a new account setup with DailyRazor. Yes, I know, that’s a rather odd name for a hosting company; but the feature set is good and so is the price. The are currently running a special promotion where they will quadruple the limits for any package. I went with the .NET Edge package and with the 4x I get 40GB of disk, 100GB bandwidth, 20 Websites hosted, 20 SQL Server DBS, 2GB SQL Disk, etc. All for only $9.95/month! That’s pretty sweet, but as I’ve learned (time and time again) you don’t want to get suckered into a provider based on low price.





While I’ve only been using DailyRazor for a few days, there are some things that I really like over other hosting I’ve had.

1. They use the Plesk control panel. It’s my first time using it, but it’s easy to navigate and provides a lot of functionality. If I want I can create multiple user accounts and control what each user can administer. I can set limits for each web site also.
2. Unlimited subdomains, which can be either physically hosted or just map to a subdirectory on your main web site. It’s nice to have the option. Sometimes you just want a subdomain to be an easy way to get to a directory on your site; but other times you want it to be completely separate from your main site.
3. Support for both ASP.NET and PHP. ReliableSite.net has this too, but I really like it and figured I’d mention it again
4. Scheduled Task using the Windows Task Scheduler. Okay, this is very nice and works great. This is basically just like cron on Linux. On ReliableSite.net they provided a “web scheduler” which had some real limitations. With DailyRazor I can specify if I want the output of the job (i.e., stdout/stderr) to automatically be emailed to me after the job runs. I can have it run any type of executable and specify command line args for it.

I’m sure there are more things I’ll find that I like over the next few weeks. Hopefully I won’t run into anything major that I don’t like!