As Surpass hosting has started their 2-for-1 sale, I’ve signed up and am getting my account in order, for one of my less-used domains (to test the waters, before putting BlogD and The Expat in their hands). As advertised, once you sign up, setup is immediate–I got my setup email from them in a few minutes, and was able to log on to my cpanel and get into FTP right away. Just have to wait for the DNS to resolve, and I should be on my way.

One thing that hit me right away when I started fooling around with things was that they allow you to update AwStats at any time you want. For those of you who run web sites and use AwStats, you may understand why this is a bit of a thing. AwStats is the statistics engine that tells you all about who is visiting your site. Most web hosts will restrict AwStats from compiling your stats except for once every 24 hours, so you never see who’s visiting until a day later sometimes. Worse, the web host’s servers will not do it exactly every 24 hours, they usually lag by anywhere from 5 minutes to several hours–which means that you never know when yours stats will be updated. This is especially difficult whenever I have a visitor surge–like when MacSurfer linked to my site and I got 8,000 visitors in two days, and was unable to see it until some time after it happened, and was never sure if I was about to go over my bandwidth limits.

So being able to click an “Update Now” link and have the latest numbers when I want, as opposed to when the host lets me, is a very nice feature indeed.

I was also successful in transferring the AwStats records compiled over the past 2 years, so it is nice I won’t be losing those.

As another test, let me post the new Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 trailer there (Windows Media file), and see if the site responds to everyone’s requests. Since the domain hasn’t resolved to the new IP address yet, that’s a direct IP link. Please try it out (if you’d like to watch the trailer–and if you have broadband, it’s 26MB!) so I can see if everything works OK.

Update: It turns out that the stats don’t kick in until the domain name resolves (successfully is pointed to the new web host). As I check right now–some 12 hours after changing the DNS–the domain is still associated with my old host. So any access to the site won’t be metered. The DNS change usually resolves in less than a day, but the standard disclaimer is that it can take up to 72 hours.