Just a short note to say that I truly love the web hosts 1and1. That’s who my server is hosted with, and who is responsible for hosting all of the sites I have.

They have great dedicated server packages that are super fast, with loads of bandwidth. I actually run visualchat.co.uk on on of their dedicated servers, which has ample bandwidth for all the audio and video of the webcam chat sessions.

In short,

• the servers are fast,
• they got great control panels,
• the support is actually really good, both written, and on the phone,
• the bandwidth is phenomenal,
• you get free ftp backup with each dedicated server,
• they never go down.

They really are great – I strongly recommend them… However, I’m not writing because of that – I’m writing to let you know that they have exceeded my expectations again:

In September 2007 I took up a new server package, a beefed up dedicated server, that came with 3 months free contract, then 18 months minimum term. Now, I was intending to migrate my existing dedicated server (contract expired) to the new server.

However, I started working for Adobe, and was so busy that I never got a chance to move the server, and therefore ended up paying for both dedicated servers. Now 1and1 get a few bad reviews for locking people into contracts, but I have to say – they were great with me – I called them, explained what had happened, and they simply asked me to fax them the details.

The server is now cancelled: Including the 18 month contract! Yep! they just let me back out of it, by being reasonable and human about it all – so next time someone tells you that they are monsters, and hold people in to contracts, I suggest you ask them how they spoke to their staff, and how they treated them – I know other people who have been rude, and they get what they give..

I don’t know any other host that would do this – I can definitely tell you 3 other hosts that wont budge at all on these matters (though I don’t want to name them)...

BTW, I’m not an affiliate – I haven’t joined their program, so I’m genuinely objective – check them out if you want dedicated servers- for any small-medium scale project (read as, don’t need a server farm and fail over), they’re great!

This will no doubt be old hat to mysql and postgres users, but I came from sql server..

I was working on a site called visualchat.co.uk which allows users to chat to one another – and, as you might expect we get our fair share of nob ends.. As such we give our users the ability to block one another.

I recently made another version of this site and moved the entire stack from asp.net, sql server flashcom, to mysql, ruby on rails and red5, I was pleasantly surprised when it came to implementing the blocks in mysql.

I store the blocks in a table with the following field:

id, user_id, to_user_id, block_type

All of these are integers.

I found with mysql I can create an index on user_id and to_user_id

1. CREATE UNIQUE INDEX user_block ON blocks(user_id, to_user_id)

Now users can change their blocks to block, or unblock individuals, and also use that integer setting to indicate if they want to turn a clean chat filter on or off, as these might change several times in a users history, I can’t (in sql server anyway) do a straight update, I need to do a select, and then update or insert depending if the value is present.

I optimised that in sql server using temp tables, but I always was unhappy with the way it was implemented. When I moved to mysql I found that it has this great feature called ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE.

It allows you to insert into a table, and when an insert would cause a duplicate key, update the existing row. Now this is just what I wanted – I could now do code like:

INSERT INTO blocks (user_id, to_user_id, block_type) VALUES (1,2,6) ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE block_type=7;

This has made my life so much easier, I can now get my chat server to dump all of the changed block settings into a given session into a temp table and use this niffty command to persist the blocks!

I’m sure I’ll be using this again in the future too – super handy!