This is not an ad.

This is not an ad. This is a bit of sincere praise for my webhosting provider, Rimu Hosting, who continue to rock my world almost every time I interact with them. Near as I can tell, they’re a bunch of crazy Kiwi linux hackers running a company named after a tree. They’re (comparatively) cheap, rock-solid stable and give me a reason to praise them to random strangers roughly once a week.

I had the vague notion that I might check my server logs to try to determine whether this blog had increased in readership from four to five readers. So I decided to install Webalizer, a pretty good web statistics package that I’m using to generate stats for Global Voices. It isn’t a difficult package to install, in the grand scheme of things, but it does require a certain amount of yak shaving, mostly having to do with installing a couple of tricky little graphics libraries. Having shaved this yak recently, I dove right in and quickly got the appropriate packages built.

Webalizer compiled, but when I tried to run it, choked and died an ugly death. As I started to debug, I had an inspiration – what if the fine folks at Rimu had already installed the darned thing?

They had. It’s installed and fully configured with each account. Within about five minutes, I had reports on the last year’s worth of traffic on this server.

And while that’s unspeakably cool, that isn’t my favorite thing about them. My favorite thing about them is this: when it’s midnight in Massachusetts and I’m ripping out my hair trying to figure out how I’ve most recently broken my server setup, it’s 4pm tomorrow in New Zealand, and their best geeks are wide awake, fully caffeinated and absurdly helpful.

So yes, hire them. They’re one of those rare businesses that you’ll find yourself recommending to complete strangers, whether or not they have an interest in web hosting.

Oh, and if you were wondering, we’re now up to seven readers. Welcome, you three new people. Enjoy your stay.