We are looking to upgrade MySQL from version 5.0 to 5.1 for all of our production servers within a week. MySQL 5.1 improves overall performance and offers plugin architecture for table types. This upgrade process will also upgrade phpMyAdmin to version 3.

Since there are some core changes to MySQL this upgrade could adversely affect any php/mysql scripts you may be running. Please make sure your scripts are updated to the latest version AND it is compatible with MySQL 5.1.

Hank of JHenry Video services contacted us regarding a redesign of his web site.  After speaking about what EMWD could offer him and quoting a great price, Hank hired us and the project was started.

Now three weeks later, Hank has a great looking web site that presents his information in an easy to find and attractive manner. Hank’s web site is also now compliant with existing web standards which will allow his site to be viewed in a consistent manner in a variety of browsers and on a number of Internet accessible devices.

We also installed EMWD’s new solution on Hank’s project: EMWD CMS. EMWD CMS is a php application that will allow a design client to maintain their own web site once EMWD is finished with their project. EMWD CMS will allow changes to be made to the main content areas of a site without the client having to worry about inadvertently harming the design/layout of their web site.

Here is a before and after shot of Hank’s web site:

T

JHenry's Old Site

JHenry's New Site

So if you are in the market for a DVD/Video service, make sure you pay Hank’s web site a visit at www.jhenryvideo.com.

Need a New Web Site?

With a New Year upon us, some of you may be thinking that last year’s model may not be enough for this year. Well being the beginning of new year, this may be a great time to take advantage of EMWD’s web design services.

A Design to meet any Budget.

EMWD’s design packages are affordable and will not break your bank. All of our design packages include a great looking color scheme, a user friendly layout, and a web standard compliant web site that will insure your web site will look great in any browser on any platform. You can view our web design packages at http://www.emwd.com/design.php.

EMWD, a Webmaster you can depend upon.

If you are just needing some modifications or updates done to your site that does not require a full blown redesign, then look no further. EMWD can be your Webmaster on the spot. We can do just about anything went it comes to web site development. Image design, page layouts, database setup, installation/updates of php/cgi scripts, and much more. Just contact us at sales@emwd.com if you need a small project completed.

EMWD has deployed a new server running php 5. 3.1. Php 5.3 comes with a number of great new features that cutting edge php developers will want to take advantage of. You can read more about the some of these new features of php 5.3 at

http://php.net/releases/5_3_0.php

Many hosting companies have not deployed this version of php due to the fact it will break a large number of popular php applications. This is why we decided to just deploy a new server running apache 2.2 and php 5.3.1. We have also seen a need in the web developer community for this version to be available to them. We believe we can now meet those needs of web developers that need a stable and reliable hosting platform that supports their latest applications.

Hosting special: To celebrate this new offering, EMWD is now offering a 5 gig hosting package for $6 per month to those who wish to take advantage of php 5.3.1. Please contact us at sales@emwd.com if you are interested. This offer is for new sign-ups only and will only be available for a limited time.

We have just completed the development of a new site for an  Import Car Service in the Oak Harbor, Washington area. Check it out at http://kaisersgarage.com.

Let us know if you are in the market for a new site or redesign. You can read more about our design services at http://www.emwd.com/design.php.

Be on the lookout for a new EMWD web site in the next month or so.

Host3.emwd.com is currently down. We are rebooting the server to see if that will bring it back up. I will update this post once we find out more information.

EMWD Support

UPDATE:

The server came up fine after the reboot. Thank you for your patience.

EMWD wishes to extend a warm Happy Thanksgiving to all of our great clients. We hope you enjoy the fellowship of friends and family in the context of a wonderful meal.

EMWD is particularly thankful for how wonderful our Birthday sale went. We are also thankful for our clients who use our services year after year and for seeing another year of growth.

Now for a special promotion, please comment on this blog post and let us know what you are particularly thankful for this year. A random comment will be chosen to receive a free month of hosting.

Nov 15th will be my 42nd birthday. Now that I am over the hill, I realize life after 40 is not so bad. To celebrate my new outlook on life, I am offering a very generous 40% discount on all new domain and new web hosting packages. This discount is for the life of the package. This is an incredible deal and should be taken full advantage of.

The sale will be on Thursday, Nov 12th, and Friday, Nov 13th. Please mark your calendar.

continue reading "EMWD’s Incredible Birthday Sale!"

We have been experiencing a degradation of the hardware on our host7.emwd.com server in the last few days. This culminated in the two outages, one yesterday and again this morning.

We have brought an enterprise class server online and are currently setting it up for production. Once the server is ready, we will be migrating accounts off of host7.emwd.com to host10.emwd.com. These enterprise servers come with 8 cpu cores for a total of 16ghz computing power. The main drive will be a blazing fast 15,000 scsi drive setup in a raid 1 array. Once your account has been migrated, expect to see a huge increase in the response time of your web site.

These enterprise type servers have been our bread and butter for about a year and half now. The ones we have in production have not gone down once.

We do apologize to our host7.emwd.com clients for the inconvenience of these recent outages and please be assured we are on doing everything we can to bring a server back online when an outage occurs. All of our servers are monitored and as soon as monitoring software detects a problem, we are on it within minutes.

As always, thank you for using EMWD and please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.

The Techies at EMWD

Dear EMWD Clients:

EMWD is in the process of putting in place a new backup system called EMWD Guardian. EMWD Guardian uses the acclaimed R1Soft CDP backup software. We now have 3 of our servers using this and the rest of them will be updated within a week’s time.

With EMWD Guardian we will be performing daily and weekly backups with3-4 (possibly more) restore points on a dedicated backup server. Our clients will have the ability to restore files, directories, or mysql databases from these restore points. All you will need to do is click on the R1Soft icon within the Files section of your hosting control panel to access your backups and choose which file(s) or directory to restore. It is that easy and very convenient if you need to restore something in a hurry.

Another direct benefit to our clients in the move to this new backup system is that instead of our backup jobs taking 8-14 hours to complete, our backup jobs are now completed in about 4 hours or less per server with no adverse effect on the server load.

With EMWD Guardian we now have the ability to offer continuous table level backups for any mission critical MySQL databases our clients may be running. The cost for this option is a $25 setup fee and $5 per month. Please contact us if you are interested in adding this additional level of protection to your disaster recovery plan.

Needless to say, we are very excited about EMWD Guardian due to the immediate benefits it brings to EMWD’s abilities to protect the integrity of our clients’ data.

P.S. Look for a new web site design of our company’s web site soon!