Some Tech Tips to find a better WordPress or bbPress Host

I’m going to reprint some advice here that I shared on bbPress.org as there is a great deal of confusion and misguided ideas over how to find a good host for WordPress or bbPress.

A quick google shows there are dozens of “Top 10″ lists of hosts. Some are dubious with commission links and others that as well intentioned as they are, focus on non-technical aspects that don’t matter much in the end.

There is a MASSIVE amount of competition in the hosting world and virtually everyone offers things like “uptime guarantees” and seductive low prices to try to grab customers. In the end it doesn’t matter. You can go with a provider that’s been highly recommended and have the worst experience, or try one out that others have complained about and have a good experience.

Firefox plugin to detect when website sessions in use?

update: presenting my very first firefox plugin!
http://bbshowcase.org/firefox/website-sessions-detector.xpi
Detects if any of several session types are in use on a website. It has some room for improvement but the fact that it works at all is good start…

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I dislike the use of sessions to track users between web pages because it slows things down on active websites and if cookies are disabled, they can create a mess when they get appended to the URL. They are also useless across multiple servers if they aren’t stored in a common memory pool (memcached, etc).

Here are some common session names:
ASP uses “ASPSESSIONID”
PHP uses “PHPSESSID”
.NET uses “ASP.NET_SessionId”
JSP uses “JSESSIONID”
ColdFusion uses “CFID”
(let me know if you are aware of others)

I try to avoid using sessions in my bbPress plugins but there are two (Human Test & OpenID) where I’ve been too tired (aka too lazy) to come up with a complex way around them that would involve mysql tables, etc. However I try to make sure that sessions are not activated when not needed (in most cases, only during registration. But there is a popular third-party plugin that I’ve taken over ownership for (bb-topic-views) that uses sessions all the time when reading topics to prevent re-counting on multiple pages of the same topic.