If you haven’t taken a look at ScrewTurn wiki you should. In two words, it rocks!

Why?

• It’s free (licensed under GPL)
• It’s super easy to setup and has a variety of setup options
• Is actively developed
• Has a thriving online forum
• Is easy to administer
• Has a plugin architecture
• Doesn’t require a SQL server (defaults to file based storage)
• Is easy to theme
• Supports commercial licensing
• Easy to upgrade
• Is hosted by my ISP of choice discountASP.net
• Supports an easy to learn wiki syntax
• And more...

I think this wiki engine can easily serve as a starting point for a flexible small business web site.

I’m personally using this wiki engine on my own web site not to mention Falafel Software is using it as an internal company wiki. I’ve also installed it at a client location and it’s been well received and used daily.

If your company needs help getting this wiki or an entire web site setup feel free to contact me.

The last two days has meant a lot of down time for my domain as a result of a DDOS attack against my hosting provider DiscountASP.NET. In the response below is a link to an explanation of what happened as well as some graphs of the traffic spike.

Dear Customer,

We experienced a network-wide outage Thursday morning and late evening 
as the result of a distributed denial of service attack. You can read 
details related to the outage here: 
http://community.discountasp.net/default.aspx?f=6&m=18216&p=1

We would like to take this opportunity to make you aware of the 
DiscountASP.NET status page, located at http://daspstatus.com.

In the event of any future network-wide outage, the status page will be 
updated to provide you with as much information as possible. We hope 
such a page will allow us to communicate more effectively during an 
emergency situation, or when normal support office channels are affected by 
an outage. 

Our goal is to provide the highest quality, uninterrupted service 
available anywhere. We hope that we rarely have to utilize the status page, 
but we also want to be prepared to communicate during any possible 
emergency situations.

Thank you for your continued support,

DiscountASP.NET

I just learned via email from my provider, discountasp.net that they've suffered a major DOS attack accounting for the reason I couldn't reach my domain nor log into my hosting account. It appears as though they've at mitigated the attack as I'm able to post and login once again.

I've mentioned it before but I really like discountasp.net. Their service is very good and I got a reply from support via email after I inquired within a very reasonable period of time considering the cirrcumstances regarding the situation.

I've been running dasBlog for several months now and I'd been having problems with my login timing out very quickly. I added a HealthMonitoring section to my web.config so as to get email notifications when errors occurred. Right away I noticed that simply refreshing the browser could trigger an authentication error like:

Forms authentication failed for the request. Reason: The ticket 
supplied was invalid.

I Googled for ways to resolve these errors and found this article from my hosting provider no less. I then used the online machinekey generator and added it to my web.config and my dasblog login errors were history as well as the invalid viewstate problems! Basically, the key used for encrypting the authentication information was getting changed between request as a result of either the server or the ASP.NET worker process being recylced.

<providerplug>
You can probably tell I really like DiscountASP.NET they've got a great options, a great control panel (which is frequently enhanced) and they have some great technical staff who post to their support forums. I've gone so far as to join their referral program, so if you sign up please use the link above which includes my referral ID to let them know I sent you!
</providerplug>

No, you didn't read that wrong it's minus 24 days (and counting). I have a hosting account at webhost4life (not this blog) and I started getting periodic automated emails from them about 40 days prior to my account expiring which happened on December 8th 2006. Here is a copy of the email I've been getting:

From:	postmaster@webhost4life.com
>To:	-----------.com
Subject: Renewal Notice: -23days left before Account Item Expire
Date:	Mon, 1 Jan 2007 22:58:30 -0800

Ignore this email if you have already taken action.
--------------------------------------------------
Dear steven trefethen,

You have -23 days left before the following
webhosting account item expires:

Item Name = $9.95/Month Plan

Renew it before 12-8-2006 or it will expire.

If it is a Hosting Service Plan, make sure you renew it
or you'll lose your website, and all referral commissions.

And remember, when your referrals renew, you'll earn
commissions again!

Login to your account and click on the renew button:

http://www.Webhost4life.com/login.asp

Your Member ID = xxxxxxxx

If you do not wish to renew, please login to your account
and click on the "No Renew" button, so we'll remove this item
from your account.

Webhost4life.com

Now, I have no problem getting automated email notifying me I need to take action to renew an expiring account. So I log into my account looking for the "No Renew" button. But, where is it? (...and no, the renewal dropdown doesn't have a "no renew" option)

So I click the "Rate our Control Panel" link thinking I should inform them of this oversite and I'm given this form which I fill out:

...then click the Submit button and get...

The error reads:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server error '80040e14'

Line 1: Incorrect syntax near '('.

/demowcp/rating1.asp, line 25 

Now, I've read various posts on the web from people who really seem to like W4L though I've had much better luck with my current provider (see this post).