A couple of thoughts... or two

[Parser]

Hi, My name is Parser. I am new here and I have been dry now.. (Whoops different place!)

I wanted to introduce myself and thank Tony for all the help he gave me in setting-up. Thanks Tony, your patience was greatly appreciated..

My first site is up, take a look (articlearcade.com). It is written totally in Zend Framework, which I think is the greatest thing since... girls.

I spent the last week trying to find a host that would meet my needs and it is amazing to me with all the folks out there, it is tough to find a good one.

Just to give you an idea, my initial isp, whom I am still with, is a great guy with terrific support but he won't install PHP5 so I went a-looking.

First guy I signed up with didn't have recurring billing. If you are out of town and it is time to pay the bill, you are out of luck and your site is suspended. You can get recurring with their top account. $70 per month

Second guy I signed on with was a joke. Very flashy site, all kinds of promises. I was a little worried when I reviewed their forum and most of the remarks were negative in regards to their service. But I figured I won't need much service. Then I found out they had PDO disabled and ALL of my software requires PDO. Of course they could provide it at a higher rate thru a VPS account. See ya!

Then I remember seeing Hawk. Not real flashy, kinda low-key, not much activity in their forum but at least it wasn't negative. They say they are Zend Framework ready so I will give them a try.

And I am glad I did!

A couple of suggestions:

1. To the forum - If you want to help your host, get in here and form a positive community. I am not the only one that checks the forum to see what people think of the organization they are dealing with.

2. Tony - How about a Zend Framework section on the forum? Even tho I am new to the framework, I would be happy to help where I can.

And lastly, I signed up as an affiliate. Are they any graphics I can use to build banners, etc?

Sorry about the way I write, I talk exactly the same way!

Regards

Parser

Just parsing through!

[Tony]

A couple of suggestions:

1. To the forum - If you want to help your host, get in here and form a positive community. I am not the only one that checks the forum to see what people think of the organization they are dealing with.

2. Tony - How about a Zend Framework section on the forum? Even tho I am new to the framework, I would be happy to help where I can.

And lastly, I signed up as an affiliate. Are they any graphics I can use to build banners, etc?

Sorry about the way I write, I talk exactly the same way!

Regards

Parser

Just parsing through!

Zend Framework forum is a good idea I doubt many would use it but I'll add a section. We actually use ZF ourselves for internal applications so I know the framework quite well myself.

As for the affiliate program it's not actually active I don't think it'll let you do anything. The billing system we pay for right now puts the option in even when it is not enabled and it's not worth the trouble modifying the templates every single time they update the software.

[Tony]

Just an update I did end up making the forum and it's a sub section of the PHP forum.

You can get to it by http://www.hawkhost.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=15

I'm sure even if it's not used a lot it'll be great for our search engine rankings. We're already pretty high with all Zend Framework searches anyways but it never hurts to add more keywords. As a result of this we also have a lot of customers making use of Zend Framework So just a matter of everyone participating in the forum.