After my recent move to HostMediaUK I've been able to see more in depth statistics about one of my sites, including traffic and data usage. This also includes having visibility of other domains that are linking directly to my content. This is popularly known as hot linking, and if you haven't asked permission is considered very impolite.

This also uses up your servers bandwidth rather than theirs. This article explores how I use a URL access file, either .htaccess of http.ini depending on your platform, to stop other domains from linking directly to your hosted resources.

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I'd been unhappy with my current hosting provider for a while, the performance just wasn't there, and the more I pushed the boundaries of development the more blocks I encountered. Also they were running old versions of ColdFusion and an old JVM which was having an effect on some Java development.

About three months ago I bought a test account with HostmediaUK. I thought I'd venture into Linux based ColdFusion 9 hosting and see how it worked out. I dropped a few test sites onto the platform and discovered a few migration issues around Linux, obvious things to me now, but case sensitive database table names and a totally different file directory system caused me major headaches.

That being said the server performance is great. sites respond well to requests, is easy to manage through the software layer installed on the servers, and when I requested access to the DNS settings it was freely given (albeit with the usual 'here be dragons' warning!).

The customer service is great too, they keep winning awards and I can see why. I've just finished migrating the rest of my site to their platform, it is rare that I recommend a service but I'd point anyone in the direction of HostmediaUK.

It seems as though the newest version of the server management software 'Plesk' v 10.1.1 is now officially ColdFusion 9 compatible.

Previously Plesk could only integrate with ColdFusion 8 as it caused instability issues with ColdFusion 9.

There isn't much about this in the release notes, just a simple statement.

The full release notes article is here: http://download1.parallels.com/Plesk/PP10/10.1.1/release-notes/parallels-plesk-panel-10.1.1-for-windows-based-os.html

I'm hoping it works well as I've just commissioned a new server running both these software versions.