I got an email a few weeks ago from Heart Internet showing me their current special offer of .eu domains for 99pence a year.

I bought 8 domains from them for a few projects that I am thinking of doing in the near future.

Their other prices are not too bad either:

Domain Price List

As part of my Chemical Engineering I do a placement year during my third year where I spend 12 months working for a company as a Student Engineer (This is for me to get my DIS with my degree). I will be starting at Croda on the 2nd September.

I was supposed to start work at Artenius one the 1st Sept but unfortunately they went bust 2 weeks before I was supposed to start work. I fortunately managed to get a new placement at Croda, which seems to be a better placement. And they give me the first 4 weeks of accomindation free of charge which will keep my costs down nicely.

Will keep you updated.

I never knew that it would actually be a challenge to find good games/ videos / animations and pictures for SpudMud After countless hours of browsing the web for good quality media we now have 196 games, 264 pictures, 75 videos and 16 animations.

My personal favorites:

Pictures:

This is going to seriously hurt on landing!

Games:

Great puzzle game that has swept my office

Animations:

A truly touching animation of a kid who lost her father in 9/11.

Videos:

How the hell did I miss that!

So now I just have to keep this up for the next 4 years

The plan I got with them was the VM400 (now the XVM400 plan because the hosting packages have been changed around a bit). The main sites that I have hosted with them are www.spudmud.com and www.bakie.net and also about 8 other smaller ones.

Setup and configuration
When I ordered the plan from Zone.net it only took them 4 hours to setup my account which in my experience is above average. Once the VPS was setup I needed all of my sites moved from my old VPS to my new VPS and all I had to give the support staff was my login details and they did everything else for me within hours and without a single hickup.
I also requested some software to be installed and configured to my specifications i.e. Imagemagick,ffmpeg etc and they did this very professionally and to my specifications.

Performance
Once all of the sites were moved and the domains had propagated I got to fully take my VPS for a spin and it sure as hell was a dream to drive. All of my pages had very low page load times and with my previous VPS I had noticed a slight increase of load times at peak times (8-12pm GMT) but with my new VPS from Zone.net I saw no increase at all. This is all probably due to the excellent hardware used.

Support
Every ticket that I sent to the Zone.net support staff is normally responded to in under 10 mins and under 2 hours at the latest but I have only sent around 6 tickets so its probably not the best thing to go by for and accurate reading for response time.
As I have stated previously the support staff are very experienced and professional and have so far done a very good job of managing my server.
There has been 2 issues where phpMyAdmin hasn’t worked due to an auto-update in cpanel but the staff fixed this quickly.

Uptime
Well in 4 months my 5min uptime monitor hasn’t showed a single outage so am very pleased with that. Zone.net has a 99.99% server uptime guarantee so I think my uptime so far supports this guarantee.

Conclusion
If you are looking for a mid-high end VPS solution Zone.net defidently seems the way to go. If this is not quite what you are looking for Zone.net can also do you some VPS clusters for a very affordable price too as well as the lower end self-managed VPS’s too which sets them above the rest in my opinion because if I outgrow my current VPS I can easily upgrade to a better VPS or a cluster without needing to change company. Normally when I write a review I can find something bad to say about the company but zone.net seems to be different because for the 4 months I have not had a single negative experience and that is quite something.
So overall, a very positive and enjoyable 4 months of service and hopefully many more to come too.

If you are gonna sign up it will be greatly appreciated if you use my referral link because that way I can get some money too:
http://control.zone.net/aff.php?aff=024

Review also posted on WHT:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?p=5030821

Adsense: $216.00

Intergi:  $218.56

Total:  $434.56

One of my mates at Huddersfield Uni is studying Game Design and he has not had a single exam so far so has only had coursework and even that coursework sounds like fun because he has to do research into games like Half life 1 and World of Warcraft etc. I was really tempted to study Game design at uni but I would have probably gone to America because there are more game companies over there than over here in England. I would have probably gone to http://www.iadtvegas.com/ because I have heard good things about it.

So to summarise I am quite happy on my course “Chemical Engineering with Management”, and even though there are other courses out there that might have been more fun and less work, I would still stay on my course.

I have been looking for a good CPM ad network for SpudMud and I stumbled across Intergi over at Talk arcades. The main thing that caught my attention was the nice and high CPM of around $2.00 – $3.00 for some ads which is a lot more than my current eCPM of $0.60 – $1.00 from Adsense. So I have just submitted my application to them and lets hope that I get accepted so I can post some further feedback later on.

 EDIT  21/01/2007

Got accepted into the program and have placed the ads codes on my SpudMud. Did have a few small problems at first but they support was very good and fixed all issues fast.

EDIT 31/01/2007

I am almost speechless about how good Intergi’s CPM is, making $231.97 in 8 days is simply amazing for me, way better than I ever expected and as you can see this doesn’t include the revenue from Adsense which accounts for over half of the impressions and that averaged around $3-$8 a day. The only problem with them that I see is the Net45 payment method so I have to wait for the 15th march before I get paid but they do pay by PayPal which is great.

Ok I better stop with the boring bit to do with my life and get back onto what this blog is about. Over Christmas I am hoping to get some work done with the new design of SpudMud , I have already gotton a designer to do me a new design and now that that is finnished and coded (by me) I am slowely brining it to life. You can have a look at how the development is going over at beta.spudmud.com. I have still got a lot of work to do i.e. finishing off the games, video and pictures sections as well as trying to make all of the code valid (not sure why I want it to be XHTML valid but I just do).

I better write a bit about the designer now that you have seen the great job he did with the design. I found Ed’s site over at the DP forums and immediately contacted him to ask for a quote after seeing his great portfolio. The quote he gave my shocked me at first, it just seemed to low (I wont mention any values), but I shouldn’t complain should I. His work was done in about 1 and a half weeks which I was quite happy with considering it was 5 pages fully custom designed. He was great at communicating and always kept me updated. The thing that I was really amazed about was the way he could understand what I wanted because as you probably can see from this blog, I am not the best at getting things across.

I am hoping to get the new design up and running by Christmas but I think that that’s very unlikely because I’m simply too lazy at the moment due to Uni taking everything out of me and I have coursework and exams to revise for.