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Strato Hosting Billing Hell
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Loading ...As some might know I have been renting a VPS server with Strato hosting for over a year now. But for some reason since last month it’s been a living hell.
I don’t know what is going on with Strato, but for the last two months the automatic debiting on my credit card seems to be failing. Not just failing, but they don’t even attempt to bill the credit card any more. I had some contact with my credit card provider and they informed me that Strato never attempted the billing.
Fun part of this story is that the automatic billing fails, Strato sends you an e-mail with the notification that the billing failed. And arogant as they are charge you an aditional 10 bucks for a problem with their system. When I called them last month they even admitted that they had a problem charging some credit cards. But also assured me that the problem would be solved before the next billing.
Guess that they didn’t think it was important enough to solve. Well suppose I will have to make yet another call to a support agent whose English is very poor to try and find out what the hack is going on.
Oh my final advice. Never do business with Strato Hosting. They seem to have serious problems with the credit card providers. I can guarantee you that I will be looking for a new VPS hosting company.
How To Get An Accurate Session Count With Tomcat
Recently we started to notice that even after disabling a server in our loadbalancer we still get traffic on it after two months. At least for as far as we count it. We currenlty count traffic by using the SessionListener to get notification of people leaving and coming, but somehow our counter gets stuck at about 500 sessions 2 months after switching the server of in the load balancer.
Some time back I already wrote about the setup we use in counting sessions. Read more on that in the ‘Cleaning Up Java Sessions’ post. We put live this change some time back. But I’m still having some issues with the sessions.
What we do is something like this. When a user comes in through a servlet we look if a specific object is set in the session. If not we invalidate the session and add the object. In a seperate class we catch all session starts and destructions.
Upon the session start function in HttpSessionListener we increase the counter. Upon the destruction of the session and if the our session object is set we decrease the counter. But for some reason we have some sessions that do not get cleaned up by Tomcat. Or there are some users that simply stay online for over 2 months.
To get a semi accurate count of the active session I looked into getting the amount of active sessions from the Tomcat StandardManager class. In theory you would be able to obtain this through the tomcat implementation of the HttpSession object. But for some reason these objects are package protected.
There has to be an easier way of getting an accurate count of the amount of active sessions through the tomcat API.
Little bike trail through Limburg
Today I took a little bike trail through some parts of Limburg. Thought it was nice to share both the route and some pictures I took allong the way. First the route I took, truthfully told I didn’t plan a route so it just happened to be like this.
You can view the route in Live Maps by clicking this link. Or by looking at the picture below:
All the pictures I took during the route can be seen below:
Home Improvement Photographs
All of the photographs below were taken during the home improvement of my house. This has been some time ago, but still fun pictures.
Can Search Engine’s know Index Flash pages
Just yesterday Adobe published a press release that indicated that they will start working with the major search engines, like Google and Yahoo. This to help the search engines with indexing flash pages.
As most developers know that have tried to get their flash pages indexed by search engines this is almost impossible. In the past the search engines were unable to read the content of the flash page. Simply because they don’t understand flash.
For now only the future will tell if this cooperation between Adobe and the search engine will help in getting flash pages in the index. And even better in the index with decent results. But given the dedication of Adobe I have no doubt that it will be a success.
Read the official Adobe press release
Read Matt Cutts reply to the announcement
