It has been well over a year now, so I thought I'd take a bit of time to revisit my old review of ReliableSite.net that I put up last year. This was prompted by a request I received from the original review asking me for my updated opinion.

So...would I recommend ReliableSite.net for your shared hosting needs today?

Depends on what you are doing with it...

Now... keep in mind that I have zero experience with their dedicated servers, virtual hosting, or cluster hosting. I am a shared hosting customer, and that is the extent of my experience with ReliableSite.net. I also only host a few small, low-traffic, personal sites with them.

For personal sites or low priority systems like mine then sure. Reliable has a great price tag, their speed is quite good, and the system is reasonably reliable as advertised. Everything that I wrote in my original review is still true and accurate.

But for serious business apps, commercial services, high-traffic sites, or anything that requires high up-time I couldn't in good conscious recommend them as a hosting provider. Not directly because they have failed to meet my own expectations, but just because there have been some issues over the last year that have eroded my confidence in their capabilities and the prospects for their long-term survivability.

What puts me off of giving them my full endorsement?

• No Visible Growth.

  ReliableSite.net doesn't appear to be evolving.

  Their site hasn't changed much. Their forums are a ghost-town. Their documentation and support KB hasn't added many new articles. I've not heard of a large influx of customers adopting them as a provider. There are no new "non-biased" third party reviews online that I can find. And there is no "buzz" about this company around the net.

  This company is going into their 4th year or more, so I'd expect to see soem serious traction from them by now.... but today they are in almost exactly the same spot they were in back when I signed up.

  The lack of customers talking on their forums especially troubles me. I'd expect to see all kinds of stuff on the forums, but instead there is almost nothing going on there. Either they don't have many customers, or the customers have nothing to say.

  Either way, it is not a confidence builder that this company will be around a year from now.

• Support

  I had a bizarre reoccurring problem. The problem itself wasn't something to worry about regarding their hosting capability. It was just that their backup script would sometimes trip up on my database backups. This caused the backup files to start growing very fast, and within a day or two each nightly backup would end up being like 1GB or more (for a database of about 5MB).

  The problem itself isn't too worrisome... I suspect it has to do with an automated process my site performs that messes with the backup script --Not really their fault as far as I can tell.

  But each time this happened, my file usage would exceed the 3GB limit of my account at which point their system would automatically shut down my account. This takes down the web sites and email access.

  This system would send a notification telling me I was over the space limit, but I'd never get that notification because the email server gets killed too.

  So I'd find out the hard way that stuff was down at which point I log in and delete the messed up backup files and contact support to ask them to restart my services again.

  And here is the problem... if my sites went down outside their regular business hours, I wouldn't hear back from support until after 9am the next business day. So when my site would go down on Friday at 1am; it was be Monday around 9:15 am or so before it was back online again.

  This happened 10 or more times during the first year until I finally turned off the backup script.

  Basically, the lack of response from support made it feel like the entire operation is run by just one guy that works a regular 8 hour a day job... And for all I know this may be true.

  It is quite possible with this kind of setup that ReliableSite.net could just be a one man operation.

  A couple of web servers in a web farm, a few database servers, and DotNetPanel to tie it all together is not beyond one good admin's ability to manage.

  The support replies were generally good though, and they seemed to know what they were talking about (unlike many providers I've had in the past where the support staff obviously had no idea how to even spell computer, much less how one works).

• Downtime

  Overall, the sites have been pretty reliable as advertised. But there have been some cases where my site wasn't available. At least 4 or 5 times that I know of the email server or the web servers were non-responsive. Since I don't actually use the site that often though, there could be many more occasions where it was offline that I didn't know about.

  These problems would always get fixed without me having to contact support... but not until after 9:00 am the next morning.

• Email

  Their email system is pretty decent, but I've noticed a significant jump in spam that gets through their filters these days. This suggests that they aren't keeping on top of the latest anti-spam measures.

  Overall, though it is also clear that email is not one of the services this company really wants to be heavily involved in. They provide some basic service, enough for personal use or to support the email requirements of your web application, but the options are rather limited.

  And as I mentioned, they don't expect their own email servers to be the host of your primary email address... otherwise they'd not turn it off when your account exceeds the allotted space limits and such.

So anyway, almost everything from my first review is still correct, but I'm not feeling as optimistic about the company overall. I had planned to move my own hosting over to DiscountASP.net this past year, but I decided to renew with ReliableSite.net one more year and see how it goes… moving all my stuff is a royal pain, and I had other things to do at the time.

I can recommend this hosting provider for small and personal sites, but considering how competitive the shared hosting landscape is these days, I'd recommend you put serious sites on one of the larger, more popular, and well established providers instead.

I've finally retired my Dell XPS M1730. The M1730 was, and remains, a very powerful machine but I'd only ended up with that beast because of bad timing. When I needed to buy last time there just weren't any reasonable machines in the upper mid-range. The available systems were either just a little underpowered, or you had to go with the overpowered gaming rigs.

The short battery life of the gaming rig has been a challenge though, so I have grown very eager to leave it behind for something a little more reasonable.

I picked the Dell Studio XPS 16, also known as the Dell Studio M1640.

So now it's review time again.

Here we go!

Here is my configuration:

• Intel Core 2 T9800 (2.93GHz 6M cache)
• 8GB DDR3 RAM
• 256GB Solid State Drive
• ATI Radeon Mobility HD 4670 (1GB Ram)
• RGB-LED Display (1920 x 1080 - 16:9 aspect ratio)
• Slot load DVD/CD burner
• Intel Wireless N-Ultimate
• 9-Cell Battery (std is the 6 cell)

The XPS Brand:

When Dell first came out with the XPS line, the purpose was to make ulra-cool gaming machines to compete with Alienware.

My last XPS screamed "I AM A BADASS!" as soon as you saw it! Even the packaging it was delivered with was somewhat over-the-top. It even came with a leather binder for the manual, and an inscribed micro-fiber sham to clean the screen with. When you opened the box, it gave the immediate impression that you just bought something special! The system itself was eye-catching. If you pull out an XPS M1730 in public, heads will turn and jaws will drop! It is so flashy that it may as well come with spinners!

But dell bought Alienware and has phased out the XPS gaming rigs in favor of the Alienware brand. The other XPS was an ultraportable that has since been replaced by the Adamo

All these changes left the XPS brand in a lurch. Recently Dell re-launched XPS as a sub-moniker for the Studio laptop line where it just denotes a high-end Studio instead of being a distinct brand in its own right.

The Studio XPS 16 comes in a plain black box without frills and extras now.

The new machine itself is very sleek and sophisticated, but gone are the flashy lights, complex color schemes, and gaudy logos. Anyone that looks close will still notice the high quality fit and finish, but it doesn't draw the eye from across the room like older XPS models did. Fortunately I have no interest in drawing attention, but if you buy for the "look-at-me!" factor, then get an Alienware instead.

Exterior:

The Studio XPS 16 is very thin and light for a full-size large-screen laptop. It is as thin as the last generation's ultra-portables were, but it still packs a lot of firepower into a small package.

The exterior surfaces are made from that glossy coated plastic that is all the rage these days. Mine is black of course, but you can get it in white or red if you want to spoil it.

The glossy finish looks fantastic, but it is a finger-print whore! You cannot touch it anywhere without leaving prints. Even the touchpad gets prints! You'll find this complaint in every review about this system because it really is THAT damned annoying!

Like the rest of the studio line, this one uses round side-mounted hinges. Because of this, the display doesn't "stand up" on top of the housing like it does on most laptops. Instead it falls off the back covering the rear of the system entirely when open. Because of this, you will need to tilt the screen a little further back, especially if you are tall. Sometimes this angle causes the glossy screen to catch some glare from overhead lights though.

Also, the new hinge design requires that all of the ports be on the sides of the system instead of in back. This cuts the number of ports down a bit, but it does has all the ports you'd expect; except for the odd decision to omit the DVI port. Instead of DVI you have HDMI, DisplayPort, and an old-fashioned VGA port (for projectors). Fortunately you can get HDMI to DVI adapters for a couple bucks easily enough.

Unlike other Studio laptops, this one doesn't put the power button on the side of the hinge, but it does use the space for the battery status lights. This looks kinda cool, but I'd rather have the battery indicator where I can see it while I'm working.

Screen:

Dell has always had phenomenal screens on the high-end laptops, and I've been very fond of their 17" displays for years. I've been using the 17" screens with a 16:10 ratio at 1920 x 1280 for about 8 years now (longer than they've even been available in external displays).

The smaller 16" screen of the Studio XPS gives you the option to switch to the 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio at a slightly reduced resolution of 1920 x 1080. This is the native resolution for 1080p HD TV, which is convenient if you watch movies on your laptop. I personally preferred the 16:10 ratio myself, but since the TV market picked 16:9 we may as well all just settle on the one standard and be done with the argument already.

What I wasn't prepared for though was just how much smaller a 16" screen would be compared to older 17" screens. Not only do you lose the diagonal inch, but the change in aspect ratio also reduces the screen's height considerably.

The screen is fantastic, but I really would love to see Dell offer it in 17" or 18" versions at 16:9. The drop in size is tolerable, but it really does cut close to the bone for those of us that need every scrap of screen real-estate that we can get.

The optional RGB-LED display on this model has gotten rave reviews, and I will tell you that those reviews are NOT overstated in any way!

This is the sexiest laptop display I've ever seen! Well worth the price of the upgrade (about $350 extra).

It is amazingly bright and vivid --So bright that I keep mine at about 1/4th of the max setting. If you turn it all the way up you will get tan, I promise!

The image clarity is fantastic too, and the colors are exceptionally vivid and distinct compared to traditional LCD displays. Keep in mind that I've been using high-end displays for years, and my eyesight sucks to boot; so for me to notice a significant jump is unusual.

My favorite part though is the uniformity of the illumination. The backlight on even the best traditional LCD always has a slight variance in brightness from one edge to another.

All this clarity and crispness is awesome for graphics and movies, but it does have a drawback too... White and black are also vivid colors, so back text on a white background ends up being TOO clear and crisp! This effectively undoes the deliberate blurring (ClearType) that most OSes use for more readable font rendering.

Most people won't notice this effect, but for programmers working in text editors all day this can be a really big deal!

You can compensate for too crisp text by using an off-white background, dimming the brightness, and/or modifying the cleartype settings. If your editor supports it, you can invert it to use a black background with light text -- my preferred solution.

Video Card & Gaming:

I'm not a die-hard FPS guy, but I do game a bit. I can live with slightly reduced detail levels, but I do like my games run smoothly at, or near, the native resolution of the display. I also don't like to be prohibited from playing certain games due to limited video hardware.

My enthusiasm for high-end screens and video hardware is not gaming related: My eye-sight is REALLY bad, and I was still losing a lot of vision even into my late 20's from staring at crappy monitors all day.

So for the last 10 years I've insisted on only the best displays and video cards, more as a matter of personal protection than for gaming.

Also, as a programmer, the tools I use really do benefit from large screens and high resolutions.

I figure that if I'm going to spend 10+ hours a day using a computer, the least I can do is invest in the best display I can get my hands on.

My last several laptops have used NVidia mobile GeForce GPUs, which handle most games well. But I've grown increasingly annoyed by NVidia’s lack of concern for mobile customers. They tend to abandon driver support as soon as the next generation GPUs hit the market (which is about 5 minutes after you buy your laptop). After that, you have to scrounge for hacked up desktop drivers online and hope they are stable enough to use.

I've also noticed a decline in the overall quality of NVidia’s mobile GPUs recently too. In my opinion NVidia is just so focused on the "next big desktop GPU" that they neglect the fine tuning and engineering in the mobile versions.

So this time I decided to give ATI another shot. At least they seem to actually CARE about the mobile market, and they've been doing much better on the high-end than they have in the past.

I haven't played a lot of games yet, but so far it has run everything I've thrown at it as well as my M1730 does. Left 4 Dead 2 just came out, and it runs at high quality settings at the native 1920 x 1080 resolution, though I did turn down the anti-aliasing to 2x instead of the default 4x.

Time will tell for sure, but so far I'm pretty happy with the ATI card.

Keyboard:

This laptop does away with the numeric keypad seen on most full-size laptops. This was necessary because the frame is a little too small, plus they put the speakers on either side of the keyboard instead of the front to allow the laptop to be thinner.

I don't mind the loss of the keypad one bit. Having my hands offset from the center of the screen is more annoying than any convenience that a keypad might add.

The keyboard is white backlit, and it has a very pleasant feel to it, though the action is a little mushier than on past Dell models. The tactile feedback is still sufficiently good though.

One thing I'm not sure about are the slightly oversized keys. This is taking some getting used to. The keys aren't crazy big, but for a touch-typist the subtle difference is noticeable at the outer edges.

My biggest gripe is the return of the dreaded "Apps" key (sometimes called the "context menu key"). I HATE this key on desktop keyboards and I wish the inventor a long and painful death. This key has been blessedly absent from most laptops until now. But the worst is that Dell put the apps key right next to the arrow keys... specifically to the immediate left of the left arrow key. This placement is an outright sadistic move on Dell's part!

Nothing sucks more than "CTRL+SHIFT+Apps" when you were just trying to "back-select" text in your text editor!

Fortunately SharpKeys makes a utility that allows you to perma-kill the apps key via a registry tweak.

Overall I like the new keyboard better than the one on my old M1730, but I REALLY wished they'd just pick a standard keyboard layout and stick with it on all their systems. I hate having to relearn how to type every time I change laptops. Actually, I'd much prefer that they just go back to the old keyboard layouts they used 5 years ago... that was the perfect layout, which is why dell had used that same design for 10 straight years before they started mucking about with new keyboards.

Solid State Drive:

This is by far my favorite part of my new Studio XPS, though it isn't a feature unique to this specific system by any means.

On laptops, hard drives have long been THE performance killer. It takes a lot of power to spin a metal disk around at several thousand RPM, and laptops don't have a lot of power to spare. While traditional drives have gotten faster over the years, the power limitations have kept the laptop versions performing far below that of their desktop cousins.

With solid-state drives becoming a viable option, it is moronic not to jump onboard with your next laptop purchase. The reduced power requirements alone are worth the price tag! But the best part about SSDs in laptops is that power and spin rates aren't an issue anymore. SSDs on a laptop operate at the same speed that they do in desktops!

Dell doesn't offer the "best" SSDs on the market. Mine is a Siemens, which is decidedly a mid-grade SSD. But Dell's price on these is crazy good (only about $300 for the 256GB SSD). Even with the lower-end SSDs the performance will still far exceed even the best traditional spindle based drives.

Since this is THE bottle neck, switching to SSD will improve every aspect of your system's performance. Everything is smoother and snappier. Boot times are amazing with Windows 7 (about 10 seconds if you don't load a bunch of startup junk!). Programs smoothly spring up when you launch them, and local drive searches are outright zippy!

I can't overstate just how much faster the whole system is with an SSD under the hood!

If you can afford the price of the high-end Intel solid state drives, then I'd advise you just buy the dell with the cheapest spinel drive they make and replace it with the Intel SSD yourself. But even if you are on a budget, I still strongly advise getting the Dell SSD.

This laptop comes with an eSATA (external SATA) port, so you can compensate for the smaller sizes of internal SSDs by just buying an external spindle drive to store your music and movie collections. The eSATA connection allows those external drives to operate at full speed unlike traditional USB based externals (and eSATA doesn't add but a few dollars to the price of the external drive either).

Battery:

The default battery is a rather small 6 cell lithium ion. The reason for this is that the chassis is thin and small, so the 6 cell is just what fits. You can upgrade to a 9 cell battery, but to make extra room for the additional cells the battery is taller. The 9 cell battery acts like a stand and has its own rubber feet. This jacks-up the back of the system a good bit.

The extra life of the 9 cell really is worth the upgrade price though.

After two years working on a gaming rig with only about 1 hour per battery, the life on the Studio XPS 16 is great! But this is a high end system, and so it has some power hungry hardware still. For that reason it isn't going to get the kind of crazy battery life that you hear about with more conservative high-end systems, but it still does very well.

With wireless turned off I get about 5 hours on the 9 cell battery. With wireless-n under heavy use I get about 3.5 hours. But with the power-hogging Verizon broadband card I get just shy of 3 hours at best.

Personally I dislike having the back of my system jacked up by the 9 cell battery, but many people do prefer this --it is similar to the angle you get with a desktop keyboard. I personally find that the angle adds stress on my hands, so I've ordered some tall rubberized feet to put on the front of the system to match the height of the battery.

For most people though, the jacked up rear is probably not a problem, so I still recommend the 9 cell battery.

Odd Stuff:

Core i7 CPU:

At the time I bought this system, the Core i7 CPUs have just become available with this model laptop. The Core i7 sounds like a fantastic upgrade, but it is also a major change in architecture. Last time I jumped onto the brand-new architecture was when the first Core Duo CPUs came out. Those were much faster and nicer than the previous CPUs, but they also ended up being a little flaky. It wasn't but a few months after that that Intel replaced Core Duo with the Core 2.

So this time I decided to go with the highest end of the previous generation rather than jump pre-maturely on the i7 bandwagon. Since i7 is out, the Core 2 line has gotten a major price cut too. This allowed me to get the extra-high-end Core 2 at a decent price tag. The Core i7 costs a fortune by comparison, but prices will drop for i7 pretty fast I expect.

If you are buying you should consider the quad-core i7. They will likely be worth the upgrade price over the Core 2, but don't expect miracles here. Most software still can't really unleash the true power of multi-core processors.

IR Receiver:

This laptop doesn't come with the "travel media remote" like many previous XPS systems did, but it is still supposed to be compatible with them. The travel remote is neat because it fits into the Express card slot. No one ever has an actual express card (I have NEVER seen one in person), so storing it in the express slot it is a convenient use of otherwise wasted space.

On the rare occasions that I connect to my TV, the remote is handy and having it stored away in the express slot keeps me from losing track of it.

But when I tried to move my travel remote to the new Studio XPS 16, it wouldn't work!

Eventually I discovered that there is a driver for the built-in IR Receiver, but for some odd reason Dell didn’t pre-load the driver at the factory. The device manager didn't report a malfunctioning or unknown device either (which is the truly strange part), so it was not obvious what the problem was about.

Once I figured it out and installed the receiver's driver the remote worked like a charm. No additional software is needed for the remote (another reason I really like it).

FastAccess Software:

One of the new toys shipping on many newer Dell systems is a software app called FastAccess. This is a face recognition login system. When you go to login, FastAccess will turn on the camera and take a look at you. If it recognizes your face, it automatically logs you in without typing your password. Otherwise you can just type the password as normal. The software "learns" how to better recognize you over time.

It is a neat feature, though not much of a time saver. The recognition is quite snappy, but typing a password doesn't take much time or effort either. Still it is a really nifty feature in that "pure-nerd" way.

The software also has some advanced capabilities beyond just desktop logins, and it does actually work surprisingly well! After a couple of manual logins it was able to pick me out almost every time (as long as the lighting was good).

The big problem though is this thing's insane usage of CPU resources. It sits there chewing up a massive 10% to 15% of my CPU resources... continuously! All the time!

Since it isn't doing anything unless I'm actually logging in, I have no idea what it needs all that CPU power for. I tried turning off all the optional features, but it still sat there sucking down clock cycles like mad.

So I uninstalled it of course. Neat utility or not, nothing is worth sacraficing 10% of the available CPU!

Maybe future versions will fix this problem.

[UPDATE: 6/14/2010] New information (see comments) from the manufacturer suggest that the latest version of the software for FastAccess should alleviate the CPU usage issues. I have not tested this myself though (for completely unrelated reasons, I've had to disable the camera on my system).

If you are a developer using Windows Vista, you are may be a tad annoyed by the lack of a built-in SMTP server. I was too, but after I found Antix SMTP Server for Developers (download mirror), I was actually grateful that Microsoft didn't deliver a built-in option.

The Antix SMTP server has become one of those utilities that I just "can't live without" and it is a whole lot better for developers than any other SMTP server I've ever used.

The reason may suprise you though.... it's because the Antix SMTP server can't actually send emails.

Confused? Read on...

The Antix SMTP server is a just a simple little .NET application. You launch it manually and it runs as a user process, so it really isn't a "server" in the classic sense of the term. 

I like this because it isn't sitting there when I'm not using it putting my system at risk or using up resources like a real SMTP server would.

The Antix SMTP server cannot actually send emails. It sits there listening for local apps to try and send mail then fools them into thinking they succeded. It just grabs the email and dups it to a file. It can't actually route or deliver the email though. This means you can't accidentally send emails from application you were debugging to your real customers by accident!

As an applicaiton goes, it is excessivly simple. It minimizes to the notification area, and when open it just has a little window that displays the list of emails that it has recieved. You can double click the emails to open and view them in your email viewer.

And the new version uses Microsoft's ClickOnce so it keeps itself up-to-date if new versions come out... very cool! I wish ALL those tiny little utilities I use did that!

Anyway... while it has no use as an actual email server, but for developers the Antix solution is far superior to a real local SMTP server.  

[UPDATE - 1/17/2010] after a year with ReliableSite.net, I have posted a newer review of them. You should still read this review, as I've not re-covered the same ground again in the update and what I wrote here still stands true.  

As I posted last week, I am no longer hosting my sites with webhost4life. Once upon a time webhost4life offered a fantastic service at a reasonable price, but over the last few years I've grown increasingly annoyed with them. 

Instead, I've moved my hosting over to ReliableSite.net. So, I thought I'd spend a little time describing my experience with both providers for the benefit of anyone else that might be considering either hosting provider.

I first considered a switch to ReliableSite.net last year after hearing about them on a forum somewhere (dunno where). What got my attention was their pricing model; you buy the base service then customize the plan by purchasing additional services and features one-by-one as you need them.

Brilliant!

With other providers, I end up having to buy a lot more than I really need just to get enough of one minor feature that I overuse a tad. With ReliableSite.net though, I'd be able to pickup and pay just for features I actually need. 

But at the time, ReliableSite.net had only been around a year or so. It had good reviews, but I've been through at least a dozen providers that failed shortly after starting up or were unable to scale their services as they grew. So I'm cautious about jumping onboard with new providers. 

Webhost4life was hosting my personal sites, and I was increasingly unhappy with them, but I decided to wait another year at webhost4life to see if they improved and to see if ReliableSite.net would survive long enough to be a viable alternative. 

Five years ago, when I first started using webhost4life they were amazing!
  
They were one of the earliest providers to have a decent base hosting package under $20 and they were also the only provider at the time to have a fully comprehensive online management system. And my favorite part was that webhost4life offered early acces to new Microsoft platforms while they were still in beta.  

But about 2 years ago, webhost4life started sucking.

Stuff that cost webhost4life my business:

• Starting about 2 years ago there was a noticable decrease in performance of my sites, and this has continued to worsen ever since. I have also seen my sites become inaccessable for no reason much too frequently. The worse part of this problem was that I often had problems maintaining a sustained connection while downloading files from the web site, or when uploading files over FTP. It is really annoying to have to restart a deployment of your web site 15 times because the connection keeps dropping. 
    
• They abandoned support for SQL Express on the claim that it didn't scale well. Of course, the real problem was that they were putting far too many users on their servers without scaling out the hardware and decided to drop SQLExpress so they could squeeze in a few more users. 
    
• They released a new control panel that was more convoluted than their older one, but added no relevant features or convieniences for their customers.
    
• They had botched two email server upgrades during the time I was with them, and in one case I had to wait over a year to migrate to a newer system because the new system couldn't handle email lists. This would have been fine, except that the old system didn't have any anti-spam protection.
    
• There was a significant decrese in the qualituy and response times from their support staff. I used to get a decent reply back in just a few hours, but the last few times I had an issue it took over 24 hours to get a reply and when the reply came back it was just some form-letter that had almost nothing to do with my actual question. 
    
• Worst of all was that they stopped offering early access to new platforms. When  .NET 3.5, Windows Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008 were in beta, I was left in the cold. Even after those platforms went into the public market, it still took webhost4life several more months to bring an upgrade option to their customers... and they still aren't offering SQL 2008 support yet.
    
  I evaluate new platforms by upgrading my personal sites before the platforms are released. This way I can stay on top of new stuff before I'm asked to use it in my larger professional projects. Not having access to new platforms until months after they release to the public is not acceptable to me.
    

So this year, when I was up for renewal at webhost4life, I decided to switch. ReliableSite.net had survived their second year and were still getting good reviews... though the reviews are rather sparse. 

What I like about ReliableSite.net:

• Managment Tools:
    
  Reliable uses DotNetPanel for their online managment. DotNetPanel is a pure joy to use compared to the clunky online managment tools I've used at other providers. Not only is it pretty, but it is exceptionally intuative to use. Managing IIS, web sites, file systems, databases, DNS, and email systems is NOT a very easy task, and I'm a certified expert in all of those areas.  But most online tools for doing this kind of managment are even harder to deal with. 
  
  But I found that DotNetPanel makes things very simple, while not holding back on any critical options. 
    
  DotNetPanel is so good, Microsoft should consider buying out the company and getting their developers write their own native admin tools.
    
  DotNetPanel is a shining example of what administering servers should be like! 
  
  This is the first provider I've seen use this system, but as you can tell I am very impressed. Perhaps the best thing about it is that ReliableSite.net hasn't done much to customize the stock DotNetPanel. This isn't a problem since it is more than capable enough to get the job done. It also means that ReliableSite.net will be more able to upgrade as new versions arrive. Even better, I'm not a the mercy of ReliableSite.net's own developers to maintain and improve a custom tool over time. Instead, they can spend their time and resources making my service reliable and fast, and leave the development to a 3rd party with a direct financial incentive to improve the product. 
    
• Pricing Model:
    
  ReliableSite.net allows you to upgrade nearly everything about your account on a per-feature basis. This allows you to incrementally ramp up your services as you grow without paying for stuff you don't need.
    
  Another thing I like is the option to pay monthly, quarterly, or annually. I chose to take an annual payment option. Even better, when you add an upgrade to your service they pro-rate the charges to align them with your regular billing cycle.
    
• Performance:
  
  So far, the site is fast... at least 10x faster than I was seeing on the degrading webhost4life account I had been using. It isn't like crazy fast, but it is certainly as fast or faster than I expected. I haven't had the account long enough to say much about reliablity, but so far I haven't had any downtime that I'm aware of and speed seems consistant even at peak usage times.
    
• Affiliate and Reseller Programs:
  
  Though I no longer use these features, ReliableSite.net has a nice reseller system going. This is very useful if you are a free-lance developer or small site design company... you can offer your customers "hosting" as part of the deal, and still reap part of the reoccuring profits. And you don't have to deal with all the hard server and network stuff..  

What I don't like about ReliableSite.net:

• Email Options:
    
  The base plan is a little shy with emails, only giving 5 boxes and 5 aliases. They have well priced add-ons for increasing these but you can't buy just aliases or just inboxes... you have to buy both together.
    
  The price isn't bad, and even the unlimited option is quite affordable. But I can't help but feel like I'm getting robbed on aliases... aliases are just redirectors and don't really "cost" the provider anything much. I had to buy additional email boxes just to increase the number of aliases.
    
  They use SmarterMail, which is a fantastic and popular system. It is also the same system that  webhost4life used. I like the system, but ReliableSite.net didn't enable the built-in admin tools via the SmarterMail web client.
    
  Instead you are stuck using the simpler DotNetPanel tools to add accounts, aliases, and lists. The DotNetPanel allows you to create aliases, but it only allows one target email address per alias.
    
  Had they enabled the built-in SmarterMail tools for "aliases" I could have had multiple destination addresses for a single email alias.
    
  Due to this odd limitation of the DotNetPanel alias feature, I had to create a full mailbox for these kinds of addresses. fortunatly I was able to setup multi-target forwards on the inboxes via the SmarterMail personal account settings tools, but it sure seems like a waste to have to deticate an entire inbox just to forward mail on to multiple destinations.
    
  None of these problems are deal-breakers, just minor annoyances... but they still seems like an artificial and unnecessary limitation.
    
• There are a few differences in password requirments for some services. For example, the password policy for database user accounts is stricter than the requirments for the billing system, FTP accounts, and online control panel. This is REALLY annoying because I like to keep the same user and password for all services related to my hosting provider. While I was able to create the same user, my password didn't quite meet the policy requirments for their SQL server, so I had to go back and change all the other passwords to adhere to the stricter policy.  
    
  On a similar note, there are too many user accounts and passwords. I have a billing account, a site managment account, an FTP account, a SQL user account, and an account for the online statistics feature. Too many accounts. Sure, I understand that each of these is a different system internally, but it would be nice if the system attempted to create the illusion of a unified user and password... at least for the primary account owner.  
    

Stuff that is just strange about ReliableSite.net:

• Some of the base package seems extraordinarily generous, while other parts seem overly restricted. In the base package you get unlimited DNS domains and web sites, but you can only setup 1 sub-domain with the base account. This seems odd because sub-domains are just DNS tricks while web sites actually use resources.
    
  You also have unlimited FTP accounts, but you only get 5 email aliases (and 5 email inboxes boxes).
  
  Not a problem, just an odd choice. I would have thought that paying for additional domains, web sites, and FTP user accounts would make sense, but unlimited sub-domains and email aliases would be thrown in for free. 
    
• When you buy packages, you get to choose a billing cycle (monthly, annually, biannually, etc.). When you buy add-ons you only get to choose based on a monthly rate. When you buy the add-on, it charges the monthly rate to your card. Then a few hours later another charge appears that is a pro-rated amount for the remaining billing term of the base package.
  
  I don't mind this at all... I'd rather they pro-rate add-ons and sync the billing to the same cycle as the base package, but I did find it odd that the checkout process did not indicate that this would happen. From the point of view of the buyer, it appears as if you are going to be purchasing monthly. There is no mention that you will also be billed a pro-rated amount. Not a problem for me, but if you were on a tight budget and are just expecting to be billed for one month then this could be a major problem. 
    
• I had to setup static machine keys in my configuration files. When I didn't do that, my sessions would just abruptly end and it would not persist logins. I assume that this must be a web farm setup, but nothing in the documentation or marketing mentioned that. 
    
  Not a problem, but had I known this was a web farm environment it could have impacted my decision to host here. Fortunatly my apps are all adaptable to web farms, but I've had sites that were not in the past.
    

Overall I am happy with my initial experience with ReliableSite.net. The problems are very minor compared to any other provider I've used, and the advantages are significant. Hopefully, I'll remain as happy over time.

Part 3 in my roundup of the new breed of web browsers. In this installment I'll discuss the beta version of Internet Explorer 8...

Browser Roundup Series:

Part 1: Firefox 3
Part 2: Google Chrome
Part 3: Internet Explorer 8

Ever since IE 5, Microsoft has been letting me down with each release of Internet Explorer... but I think with IE 8, Microsoft may have redeemed themselves.

IE 8 could, possibly, restore Microsoft to legitimate technical dominance, instead of just having the inherited market-share dominance that allowed previous versions of IE to skate by for so many years.

First off, IE 8 has finally dropped automatic backward compatibility with pages that make use of poor HTML techniques that run counter to W3C recommendations.

This has been the biggest problem that IE has faced over the years. IE is the only survivor of the original browser wars, and so it carried a lot of baggage with it. There was a time before there was a W3C to "decided" what was going to be "standard", and back then browsers were making their own rules.

IE has always had to maintain a certain level of backwards compatibility for those non-compliant pages simply because there were so many popular sites using them. Making things worse was the fact that some of those techniques made more sense and worked better than the official W3C way; so a lot of lazy developers continued to use non-standard IE specific techniques long after they had became obsolete.

I'm guilty of this myself.

Then making it even worse... newer browsers entering the market also had to support some of those non-compliant mechanisms too... which gave lazy developers even more room to continue using the IE specific techniques.

The result... 10 years later, there are still a LOT of crappy sites out there.

Microsoft has always felt compelled to tread carefully when adopting newer W3C recommendations where adoption would break backwards compatibility. They didn't want to "break" half the internet when IE users upgraded to a newer version.

But finally, IE 8 will embraced the W3C recommendations full on with the new "super-standards mode". Futher, this will be the default mode for IE 8.

For those sites that still suck, there is button at the address bar that reverts to the IE 7 style of rendering. .

IE 7 was a good step in fixing the security and privacy issues that plagued IE 5 and 6. But IE 8 has taken this to a whole new level. If you want a more detailed summary check out this post at the IE blog.

There are major improvements in every area of security, but my favorite part is in how IE 8 keeps the user aware of privacy and security conditions as they browse around. The security and privacy settings are also much friendlier this time around too.

Like Google's Chrome, IE 8 has a special super-privacy mode. IE calls it "InPrivate" while Chrome called it "Incognito", but they are essentially the same feature. It handy for those times when you don't want to leave a trail of history, cookies, or saved passwords behind you as you browse. Useful when you check your bank accounts on a public computer, but we all know that the REAL reason this will be popular is for surfing for car-bumper porn without anyone else finding out about your "special interests".

While it remains to be seen how secure the underlying browser actually is, the user features around security and privacy are much improved compared to previous versions and in most ways are better than those of rival browsers.

IE 8 has a mixed story with add-on support. IE has always had decent extensibility and support for add-ons, but security issues have been a bit of a problem in the past. IE 7 didn't really try to do much with add-ons except lock them down against abuse. This gave the competition, especially Firefox, a lot of time to gain ground with much newer and more modern add-on architectures and management features.

IE 8 still has the classic add-on mechanisms they've always had, though much improved under the hood. Management of add-ons is quite a lot better in IE 8 though. Compared to Firefox though, the add-on system still kinda sucks overall.

The good news is that "most" of the popular toolbars and media plug-ins for IE 7 will still work in IE 8 too.

Instead of a major overhaul with add-ons, IE 8 has added some features that are totally new in IE, and are a bit different from what you find in most other browsers.

"Accelerators" are a new type of add-on. What these do is allow you to select (highlight) something on a page and a semi-transparent button will appear. This allows you to select an accelerator. The specific accelerators that will be shown will depend on what exactly you selected on the page; it is pretty intelligent about not showing options that don't make sense for the selected text. I'm particularly fond of the "Define with Wikipedia" accelerator.

The other new type of add-ons are Web Slices. Web slices sit on the toolbar, and when clicked they pop-up little mini-windows that show content pulled from a web services somewhere on the internet. A classic example is the "Facebook status" web slice, which just pulls recent status updates from your account. Web sites that have support for web slices can expose those slices very similarly to how RSS feeds are exposed so that when you browse a site with an available Web Slice, a button will appear at the address bar to allows you to install that slice.

You can get slices, accelerators, toolbars, and add-ons from an online add-on gallery too, and thisis very similar Firefox's add-on system. IE also has a centralized add-on manager that resembles Firefox's equivalent. Firefox's add-on system still remains better overall, but IE 8 is taking a pretty good step in that direction.

Probably the most important change in IE 8 for me is the increased performance and much improved visual quality of the rendering engine.

IE has always been a tad on the slow side, and the ugly rendering has been a source of constant frustration. But pages on IE 8 look are almost as good as those rendered in Firefox, and is very comparable to Google's Chrome. The speed is amazing, much faster than Firefox 3 and very comparable to Chrome.

The majority of the UI features remains the same, or are very similar to those in IE 7. It is clean and professional. The only down-side is that it doesn't feel very "new" when you first upgrade from IE 7... so IE 8 has a little less "wow!" factor for the users.

A highly marketed feature is the color coding of tabs. Tabs are color coded when opened from the same source tab. This is kinda neat at first, but overall I don't find it very useful after having used it for several weeks. I do; however, find that the color coding detracts from the overall visual appeal of the browser making the tabs area seem noisy and out-of-sync with the clean and crisp appearance of the rest of the user interface.

IE 8 also improves the pop-up prompts that you see when you type in the address bar. Pretty much everyone has improved this feature, but I think IE 8 has done the best job organizing items in the pop-up suggestion box. Unlike Chrome though, IE 8 doesn't include suggestions from online searches in the address bar's pop-up... Instead it still has the separate search box. Oddly, the search box has it's own pop-up suggestions that does show suggestions from an online search provider, as well as suggestions from history, favorites, etc. that are pretty much the same as the address bar's pop-up.

While I find that the suggestion pop-ups are incredibly well done in IE, much better than those in the other browsers, I also think they should combine the search box with the address bar like Chrome does... It seems crazy to have two different suggestion boxes that look almost the same, but behave differently. It's even crazier since it was IE that actually invented the "search from the address bar" feature in the first place. It wasn't until IE 7 that there was a separate search box.

One step forwards, two steps back I guess.

The beta of IE 8 still has some rough edges, but it has narrowed the gap with Firefox for the majority of users. Microsoft is clearly taking the renewed competition in the browser space seriously. It has plenty of advanced features, is very fast, renders pages much better, has an intuitive UI, and still manages to keep a clean and professional design despite the highly advanced and complex feature set.

IE 8 will compete very well with Google's Chrome simply because the two share so much in common, but IE has features that remain absent from Chrome (for now).

Power users and developers may still prefer Firefox for the add-ons and customization advantages though