I am going to Iran in three days after 6 and half years away. I moved to United States March 2002 and I have not had a chance to go back and visit.

I am very excited about this coming trip and will try my best to post some pictures while I’m there. If not, I will definitely post all my pictures when I return early August.

This post in one sentence: “MidPhase hosting” is terrible.

My first ever web hosting company was IPowerWeb which had awful customer service. So I moved to a new hosting and after some research (not much) decided to go with Midphase hosting. At the time they offered pretty good prices and I didn’t look hard enough to find more information about them. So I signed up for a one year shared hosting.

After almost one year I decided to move to a new hosting but since I had many websites hosted on MidPhase I couldn’t transfer them all soon enough (didn’t have the time) so I signed up for another year of MidPhase while I was moving my files to my current hosting company. During the second year with MidPhase I really didn’t interact with them too much as I only had one or two (not so important) websites hosted there.

Here are some terrible things about Midphase Hosting:

• Their servers were slow
• The CPanel was not user-friendly
• Their customer service was rude and/or would take forever to get simple tasks done
• They offered very basic hosting service and charged for EVERY single thing (ex. extra charge for AWState, etc). So what used to seem a good price ended up being much more than the other guys.
• The website uptime was nothing close to the 99.9% guarantee. And when I showed them that my website had not been online even 85% of the time they said they don’t accept other companies tracking tools. After fighting them for a while MidPhase ended up offered to add one extra month to the end of my one year contract - but they wouldn’t go any further.
• It seemed like everyone (from CEO to the customer service people) were sitting in one room and doing each other’s jobs.
• And many more reasons to leave them.

A week ago I received an email from MidPhase about my contract being automatically renewed on July 7th unless I would cancel it before that time. I called them today to make sure that it doesn’t renew anymore as I didn’t want to use their services anymore.

The lady on the phone asked me why I wanted to do that and I told her because of “poor customer service”, “slow servers”, and more reasons. She didn’t even try to explain that they had improved or in anyways to convince me to stay with them (which is what would a normal company do).

I didn’t have the smallest intention of staying with them anyways. But another thing that surprised me was that if I didn’t want the account to automatically renew my contract and charge my account, I had to cancel my account. Canceling my account also meant that all my files would be gone. It seems normal if my account was working until the July 7th date (that I have already paid for) and then it would be canceled automatically on that day. Not only I couldn’t use my account anymore (after today that I canceled my hosting account with MidPhase) they didn’t have any refund policy to refund me the remaining two weeks.

Bottom line, don’t fall in the trap of MidPhase seemingly cheap prices. Avoid them and you will have a much better time. You won’t also have to call them every day to see why your website is down! and the answer was always the same: “We are moving to a new location so it is normal”.

Yahoo messenger was the first messenger that I used back in the time. I (and many others) used to love it. It had a lot of features, not very many ads, and one of the only chatting software available online.

However, they changed. I still use Yahoo (MrGoodFox on Yahoo) but I use MSN and AIM more often. I mainly use Yahoo to chat with my friends from back home in Iran. Recently I even started using it close to as much as AIM and MSN, but Yahoo had to do it.

If you click on any links sent to you on a Yahoo messenger hat window, it will be opened in Internet Explorer and I absolutely hate that - even though Firefox is set as my main browsing software on my computer. I can’t stand Internet Explorer. It is slow, not webmaster friendly, and many other things that I don’t want to get into right now.

I’m not asking Yahoo to open links in Firefox. Just open the links in whatever people have as their main browsing software. If someone doesn’t like IE, Yahoo’s new action won’t get them interested in using IE, rather it will deter them from using Yahoo messenger.

“Mehdi Akhavan Sales” is my most favorite Iranian modern poet by far. I have great memories with his poems. I used to memorize many of his poems. At some time I will try to translate his poems here.

The other day I was looking around on PersianHub to find some persian songs to downlaod. I came across an album that I had been looking for years. I used to have the album on tape in Iran and never thought I could ever find it again (especially here in U.S.).

The album that I’m talking about is “Mehdi Akhavan Sales” reading his poems with his own voice. Here is the link to download the files: PersianHub Download.

If you want to learn more about “Akhavan Sales” you can read his profile on Wikipedia.

I just installed a Wordpress Poll Plugin. It allows you to install a poll in your blog post or the blog sidebar.

Out of box (when uploaded and installed) the plugin works fine. However, I had to tweak the template a bit as it almost had no styling on it. I have added the border and some spacing and positioning myself to it. Either way I really like the plugin and will be using it often on this blog. The author of the blog also seems to be updating it quite often which is always a good thing.

I will also add the poll to the Plugings Used On This Blog post.

I also just made the first poll. The main purpose of this poll (other than showing you how the plugin looks like in a blog post) is to see how many of my readers are actually webmasters. Here is the sample poll:

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