spacesocket.com

While we do not require members to log into cPanel or the forum every x days, we do require people with hosting accounts to use it for a legitimate purpose. Therefore, unused accounts will be periodically cleaned out from the system to save resources.

Please make sure you have made an attempt to use your account within 31 days of the creation of your account. Otherwise, it will be terminated. You are free to make another account later if you wish.

Forums are currently being moved around and condensed to make the front page hold more and look better. New forums are being made and old ones are being modified. Some forums now do not increase post count and therefore, do not require quality posts. A summary of the changes:

1. New Suggestions forum
2. Installations forum moved under Support
3. Development forums all moved under one category
4. Introductions forum no longer increases post count (welcoming people isn't exactly useful information people come to see)
5. Installations forum no longer increases post count (the only people posting are those wanting to get someone to install something for them or are mods saying they've installed the thing)
6. New Opinions & Forum Games forum under General which does not increase post count
   

Because of all the "no post addition" forums, you may notice your post count will drop significantly and you may drop your current hosting package. On last check (just now), no one seems to have been downgraded or will be for a while. However, these changes may bring you closer to being downgraded. I expect that the addition of the no-posts package along with the statistics that say no one is using much bandwidth should allow for sufficient warning to get your post count and PPD count back up to where it was before.

More changes will be coming shortly mainly involving the hosting system and the packages.

Hello everyone,

We are proud to announce the addition of a new package requiring no posts whatsoever. No initial posts, no monthly posts. Being smaller than our Starter package, this one is intended for small to moderate sized forums or personal homepages.

The following are the specs of this package:

10MB disk space
100MB bandwidth
PHP, ASP.NET, Lua, Perl, Ruby, Python, SQLite
1 subdomain
1 parked domain
1 additional FTP account
1 email account
1 MySQL database

Although 10MB space and 100MB bandwidth may not sound like a lot, if you choose your scripts properly, it should be more than capable of handling a decent sized site. It will also give you a chance to experiment with our many features and decide whether or not you wish to upgrade.

Get your account here! http://www.spacesocket.com/forum/hosting.php

Hello everyone,

As you may have noticed recently, there have been a few changes around here.

Firstly, the old automated hosting script is back in action. As are upgrades, downgrades and terminations. Business as usual continues...

As part of our promise to bring you the latest available (stable) software, Apache, PHP and MySQL have all been updated to the latest versions. Because they should be mostly backwards compatible, there should not be many issues. The only issue encountered so far is a small problem with the posts table in MySQL but that was resolved quickly. (To resolve it yourselves if you have a "corrupted" table, go to cPanel->MySQL->Repair)

In addition, GD and FreeType are back. As are PDO and PDO_mysql. The addition of these should allow for increased support for a greater variety of different scripts. That includes web analytics scripts like Piwik which we recommend you use at this point as Awstats is no longer active.

Django has also been installed. For those who don't know what that is, Django is a web framework for Python. Python was always supported here with our CGI support. Now, after taking the appropriate steps, you should be able to use the Django framework as well.

Finally, possibly the biggest update to our service so far, we are proud to announce support for the Lua programming language: http://www.lua.org. Lua is one of the smallest and likely the fastest scripting language available today. Benchmark tests conducted by myself and others have shown Lua to be as much as 40% faster than languages like PHP. If you do not plan to be using Lua, you should not expect any detectable slowdown in our service as Lua has one of the smallest footprints of any programming language every made.

According to Google, we are the only free hosting provider which officially supports Lua with the exception of software forges like LuaForge. So if you're looking elsewhere for hosting which supports Lua, you will either have to pay for it or your site will have to be about a piece of Lua software you wrote. With us, it's free and it can be about anything which abides by the TOS.

Lua is currently supported by CGI. cPanel appears to have huge issues with adding mod_lua into the mix. Nonetheless, it should still work. Lua files should be named either .lua or .cgi and be placed in the cgi-bin folder to run.

We support much of the Kepler framework (the equivalent of Django for Python and Rails for Ruby) as well as a few other libraries. The below should work.

• CGILua (cgilua) - Some common functions you would expect from CGI
• LuaSQL (luasql.mysql and luasql.sqlite3) - Bindings to MySQL and SQLite3
• LuaFileSystem (lfs) - File system functions for modifying files, folders, etc.
• WSAPI (wsapi.cgi) - API for CGI server interactions
• md5 - MD5 hashing
• des56 - DES encryption library
• LuaSockets (socket) - Access through HTTP, FTP, SMTP, etc.
  

Lua is installed at /usr/bin/lua. To be portable, it is recommended you use /usr/bin/env lua instead.

There are plans for future changes. They will be announced once they are ready for deployment. The goal is a new and improved site and better service.

Note that there are other languages available under CGI, namely: Perl, Ruby and Tcl. Lua is the latest addition.

Hello everyone,

The server has been cleaned up again. All accounts by users with < 0.1 PPD have been terminated. The script has been brought back and is in full service again.

In addition, Starter accounts have been properly adjusted with the correct features as advertised. This is to encourage further posting to gain access to more of the features.

Just a reminder to always back up your data. We, as a free hosting provider, do not backup for you. It is your responsibility to generate your own backups.