Description: Maza is a Dutch company who specializes in Mediterranean food. They have terrific falafel, salads, sauces and more. Only fresh ingredients, the best spices and traditional recipes are used to create that extraordinary flavor.

I created the front-end from a PSD and developed the store locator module with Google Fusion Tables and Google Maps, and content management system (ModX).

Description: Mobi is a Dutch furniture store in Alkmaar. They sell several design brands on three floors with great accessories for a great price.

I created the front-end from a PSD and developed the search module, and added brand options for the products. All in a already existing custom build CMS system.

Description: The MIDZOMERZAAN Festival is a Dutch festival weekend full of music, literature and art.
Get inspired and be surprised on the 3th weekend of June and enjoy everything the Zaan and its beautiful locations have to offer.

I created the front-end from a PSD and developed the e-mail marketing module, and content management system.

Project Url: http://www.vdak.nl

Projectmanagement: connectedconcepts.nl

Project delivery: Jun 19, 2010

Description: Van Daalen Assurantiën is a company that provides insurance, mortgages, loans, etc. They were in need of a new website and I took care of the design, hosting, e-mail, cms and development.

The website holds more than 40 different forms with numerous validation rules. The customer has total control over the content via the CMS that the website was built on.

Comrads

Purmerend, may 2009 - Since the beginning of this year ING and Postbank merged as one. Comrads put the combined ING brand identity into ING Merkwereld: one complete system with all basic elements for every brandexposure you can think of. The ING Merkwereld platform also takes care of the production process that is highly automated.

The ING Merkwereld platform enables all ING employees and external ING contacts to browse and download (media)assets. All actions are regulated trough an extensive permission system that features multiple roles, groups and document rights.
Read the complete article in Print Buyer 05/09 (Dutch).

Project Url: http://www.directemerken.nl (intranet so not available outside Achmea network)

Projectmanagement: Joostenmediamakers.nl

Project delivery: Jun 01, 2009

Description: The intranet of Achmea, FBTO, dDD and Centraal Beheer are combined in directemerken.nl. Earlier I developed the complete backend based on Modx CMS for directemerken complete with newsarchive, multiple security levels, etc.. Now they requested a team based extension on the intranet where every department could have their own little part complete with project archive, news archive, team member pages etc..

I transferred all my files, databases and mail account to my "UNLIMITED" everything account that I ordered at GoDaddy in December 2008. So far so good. Everything seemed okay aside from some latency during peak hours.

I opened a ticket to ask if they could do something about the latency and they promptly answered that they experienced no such thing. As a reply I send them a traceroute from my comp to my website and as a comparison a traceroute from my comp to the GoDaddy homepage. A difference of almost  2 seconds.

As soon as I pressed the send button on the support form they already replied that from their location there was no latency. At least nobody can complain about slow support.

But that was just one thing that turned out to be not so great... It turned out that the UNLIMITED everything package wasn't as unlimited as advertised. You can only create 10 e-mail accounts that do NOT have unlimited space. You have 1000 MB available that you can divide between your e-mail accounts. Now for most people this should do fine, but my local mailbox is now holding around 3 GB that I was planning to mirror online so I could access it via IMAP everywhere I go.

Disillusioned I again went looking for another webhost. In my initial search I also had Site 5 in my list of possible candidates. I looked at their offers once again and it turned out they had some great offer. I had a chat with the online salesperson and asked all the things that I wanted different from GoDaddy and he quickly confirmed that at Site5 there where no hidden agenda's. Unlimited truly is unlimited.

This means that I also had the option to create unlimited domains that are really separated vhosts, another thing I didn't have at GoDaddy where I could only work with domain pointers. This is absolutely fantastic since I have several websites that I could host under one main account and give people that are helping me to maintain some of these sites access to only that specific single website account.

I transferred everything once again to my third webhost in a year, but now I believe that this will be the last host I'll ever need.

It took my quite some time to find a suitable host for my needs. I started my search with the following things I really wanted my new host to offer:

• SSH access (because it just works superfast for maintenance jobs etc.)
• Unlimited space (I reached my limit at my previous host really quick when I uploaded all my raw holiday photos)
• Unlimited bandwidth (Holiday photos waste your bandwidth really quick)
• SSL (off course you can get that anywhere, but I'd rather have my host offering it then a 3th party)
• DNS management (I want to be in charge of my own DNS records)
• Off site DNS (I have some other domains that I would like to manage from one dashboard)
• WebDAV (Need that for my Mozilla Weave account)
• PHP (obviously...)
• MySQL (obviously as well)

At first I only looked at the Dutch market for hosting providers. No particular reason... I quickly figured out that they are incredible pricey in comparison with hosting providers abroad, and that none of them offer unlimited space / bandwidth. For example 'Yourhosting' (one of the top 5 providers in Holland) is offering 2000MB space and 100GB traffic for the price of 85 Euro a month.

I asked around at work if any of my colleagues might know a suitable provider that fitted my needs, and several names came up (all abroad )

• Site5 (a wonderful host, but doesn't offer off site DNS management and doesn't offer MySQL 5 (yet))
• Dreamhost (looked at some user reviews and most of them are negative, plus there own website was down for emergency maintenance when I went to look at the specs)
• GoDaddy (they are 'only' offering 50 MySQL databases, but I think that will make do)

In the end GoDaddy fitted most of my needs and for only $10 a month they can offer me unlimited space / bandwidth / SSH / (off site) DNS and more.

I registered, paid by creditcard, got a free domain which you are looking at right now and everything was just swell.

Then I went over to the domain manager to transfer several of my other domains to them (all .nl) and came to a unpleasant suprise that they apparantly don't register .nl domains, nor transfer them to them.

It's no biggie since I can redirect all the domains to my new server, but it was just a bit unexpected.

Right now I'm doing some stresstests, tracerts, etc to see what the uploadspeed, downloadspeed, ping time etc is. I suspect them from capping my uploadspeed allready, but I'll keep you posted.

At last I took the step to start blogging. You might call it a early new year resolution.

I registered peterruiter.com last week after looking trough numerous hostingspecs at GoDaddy. Unlimited bandwidth and unlimited disk space, YaY!

I'll mock up a few articles about my search for hosting and a little comparison between the different providers.

So far I'm pretty satisfied with what I'm getting at GoDaddy so far.

Also,

I'll try to keep most of the posts in English, but occasionally you might see a lost post in Dutch since that is my native language.

Project: Finish-profiles

Project Url: http://www.finish-profiles.com

Project delivery: Dec 08, 2008

Description: Finish-profiles creates steel profile plates. It delivers several types of profiles and also constructs small buildings with it.

I created the front-end from a PSD and developed the complete back-end system for this website with the e-mail marketing module, content management system and flash brochure reader.