Category Archives: Alurium Hosting

Lucy, I’m Home!!!

Well I’ve been away for a while. Ah, okay maybe it was longer than a while. It’s been a little over 9 years since my last post. Life has a way of taking over and before you know it, everything is different. When I last posted here, I was knee deep in the hosting business. Alurium provided shared CFML hosting and VPS hosting services. We had just moved from Southern California to the suburbs of Atlanta to be closer to my wife’s parents. Then dad’s health deteriorated and he eventually past in December of 2014. During this time I had systematically reduced the hosting business and transitions my clients to Vivio Technologies.

Then in March of 2015 life took a turn once again and I agreed to join the family owned business my father in law had help start as PAI Industries’ CTO. There was much cleanup work to be done and eventually the infrastructure was upgraded, data center cage setup, virtualization environment setup, and multiple locations were connected via redundant wide area network links.

Then in April of 2018 we turned our attention to our software stack and rebuilt our e-commerce site from the ground up using CFML, Lucee, and CFWheels. With the backend data residing in MS SQL Server, MySQL, Rocket UniVerse, and ElasticSearch. In the short few year from our launch in January of 2019, the site has become to be known as one of if not the top site in our industry.

Life wasn’t finished throwing curve balls. In May of 2019 we officially moved back to Southern California. I still work for PAI and in fact work East Coast hours with my days starting at 4:00AM but finishing at 2:00PM. We adopted Zoom, even before the rush to online meetings which was ushered in by the Corona Virus Pandemic, and I spend a majority of my day in a Zoom Room so I am physically in California but virtually in our IT room in Georgia.

This almost brings us up to date with the fog of the pandemic and lock downs of the last couple of years not whit standing. During this time, I’ve had time to reflect on my personal goals and I plan to pursue a few of them more vigorously. One of these goals is to write a technical book. Yes, people still do that. I plan on writing a programing book on CFWheels based on an awesome book call the “The Ruby on Rails Tutorial” by Michael Hartl. Michael has graciously given his blessings on this project.

So what can you expect in this space going forward, as I’ve been looking at the beginning chapters of the book and formulating my outline and content, I’ve noticed some deficiencies in the CFWheels tooling so I’ve been busing contributing to the CFWHeels CLI project as well as the CFWheels project. Additionally I’ve been working on the package management for CFWheels and posting packages to Forgebox. All in all my intention is to make it very easy for someone to take CFWheels for a spin without much friction.

You can expect to see posts on specific topics as I learn through this process and tackle different technologies.

cPanel missing dedicated IP

Every now and then I get a site on our cPanel servers that stops working. After investigating the issue it turns out to be a missing IP from the cPanel server. Here is the latest remedy I found for this:

/scripts/rebuildhttpdconf
service httpd restart
service cpanel restart

Automatic Sub Domain Creation

For those of you who have wanted to sign up for hosting but didn’t have a domain name to use, you know that we allow you to use a sub domain off our ALURIUM.NET domain name. A fully qualified domain name is required because our Railo integration requires that a fully qualified domain name be use to map the host header to the directory path of the account.

Well, up until now you had to ask us to set this up for you because there was no way to automatically test to see if a sub domain name was available for use. Today we released a module that allows you to test the availability of a subdomain in the order form and use an available sub domain and have it provision automatically.

To use a sub domain simply begin by selecting the hosting plan you wish to use. When adding a domain to the account use the ALURIUM.NET drop down from the TLD list and type in a sub name you would like to use.

subnameselection

After you have made entered the sub domain name you wish to use and selected ALURIUM.NET from the drop down menu, click on the check domain link to see if the name you have selected is available. If the sub domain name is already in use by another client you will see the following message.

taken

Otherwise, if the sub domain name is available, you will see the following message with a button allowing you to add the domain to your hosting account.

available

That is all there is to it. When you submit your order your account will provision automatically and you will have full access to the hosting resources provided by the account level you selected.

FREE Trial Railo Hosting

We just announced and release our Trial accounts. The best thing about them is that they are absolutely free. It is a 60 day account that gives you limited disk space and bandwidth but full access to the Railo Administrator so you can test and play with our Railo hosting offerings. If you decide you like the service you can upgrade to a paid account and all of your setting carry forward to the new account.

Why are we doing this? Well we want to lower or completely eliminate the barrier to entry. We want everyone to be able to test our services without feeling presured to sign a lenghty contract. Besides you wont know how good we are until you try us out.

Alurium Hosting Launched….

Just launched the hosting service. Alurium Hosting is now officially open for business. I know some are wondering why we choose to get into the hosting business in these economic times. We were able to employ automation techniques to reduce all our projected overhead and allow us to enter this cut throat market with some pretty exciting features; Dedicated IP addresses, Railo 3.0 CFML scripting, Tomcat 5.0 JSP scripting, and Ruby on Rails.

If you’d like to kick the tires you can use coupon code “RailoHosting” which will wave the first months fees.