I made the mistake and let myself get carried away by recommendation of Veerle, a decent designer I would say, and subscribed to the Layers Magazine e-version for some 30$ a year. First of all, I did not receive any order confirmation, which is really unprofessional when you give someone your credit card number and allow them to charge it for 30$ - then I mailed them asking if they had received my subscription for the international e-version Layers Magazine. An employee replied that they were sorry but did not receive anything. Four days later I did receive a confirmation (a bit pathetic I find) - now today I got the first copy of Layers Magazine and I must say I am shocked.

First of all, the email said that the Magazine was being published six times over the year. That is one magazine every two months?
Most of the articles are contributions by well-accredited designers such as Veerle from Belgium, who has been in the business since 1992 - then they drop in some reviews and miscellaneous tips and tricks that you can get from any cheap tutorial site or tech-review page.

Where is the added value?!
Half of the magazine (it has some 110 pages) is advertisements, so you pay 30$ a year for a magazine that is published every two months that is filled with ads, ads, ads. (UPDATE: I counted: 51 full pages of ads!) I must say those ads are really targeted and interesting to the audience, but still that is way too much for my taste. I will not pro-long my subscription and find it stumbling that people like Veerle recommend the magazine so highly (e.g. under every post). Of course, her tutorials (which are great!) are published there, but still the Layers Magazine SUCKS as for the reasons given above.

I cannot recommend Layers Magazine

P.S. The Zinio delivery manager is very annoying and looks like spyware, I don’t trust it. However I can imagine that Layers Magazine does not want to send around PDF files directly (else people would upload them to their blogs and sites bluntly).

If you want to waste some money you might be interested in subscribing to one of the worst paid e-zines I have read and visit Layers Magazine here at www.layersmagazine.com

I can recommend the Before and After Magazine, which is short, concise and to the point. Nine to Fifteen pages, no advertisements, sources included and cheap (costs 24$ which is like 16Euro for 32 articles that really help you out)

BA Magazine offers even free samples of articles for PDF download: free of charge, high quality! Link 1 | Link 2 - and no I do not work for them or am related or anything, I am just stating my honest opinion and review here)

While the EEE is more economic in terms of price (one-seventh of Macbook AIR price), it is limited in functionality and size - but the Macbook Air looks like a portable Notebook for the fashion-victims to me. $1700 is a lot of money, even though the Dollar keeps on declining to the EURO (1,150€) I would rather not get a Macbook Air right now. The screen is powered by LEDs, so it is said. This new LED technology should reduce the battery drain and increase the usability. I am waiting for the first reports to come in, because this feature sounds really interesting… clear and crisp picture while having longer usage time? Also the keyboard has received an ambient-light (often called ambi-light). A neat feature, but worth that much? I am already cursing buying an ordinary Macbook (discounted student version for 950€), even though the battery times are great (6 hours), the performance is not that great in comparison to my old Sony VAIO which was 3 years old).

The EEE looks like a tool/toy for kids just by the looks of the promoting website - while the Macbook Air is sure to appear on managers’ desks in no time. I project Macbook Air sales to be massive… my quick 5 cent

UPDATE: more pictures

Sometime around May I decided to have my website transfered over to zone.net as I outgrew Dreamhost.

Dreamhost, which now offers quite some cool setups (such as pimping up your server by additional ram etc), has kind of “chucked me” off due to excessive CPU use that was triggered by my Wordpress install (running WP-Cache of course).
I was told, I outgrew a shared environment and should opt to either switch to their (at this time) 360$/month plan or get another hosting provider. when asked what to get, I was told “a vps with plenty of ram”.

I had a particular setup in mind and was thinking of either joining jaguar pc hosting or zone.net.

What I did like at zone.net at this point was the working live-support. I clicked “live support” - chat now and within seconds I was talking to someone who had a clue and cared about getting me to move over.

I opted zone.net as they promised to set-up my domain(s) in before of moving for free and making the transition happen without any downtime.

It worked this way, I sent my sql databases to them and uploaded a four gig rar-file to third-party server (always handy to have another one at hand). They downloaded everything and setup my VPS with CentOs, plesk and virtuozzo.

From my GoDaddy-domains I know there were plenty of discount codes around- as I couldnt find any for zone.net I blunty asked them if they had a promotion campaign running and if there was a zone.net discount code.
Their honest reply, which I appreciate, was “yes” and I was given the code to discount my setup and monthly fee by 10%. Seeing as I did not find any codes on Google, this was a good catch.

The transfer went smooth and the first weeks passed. Without any trouble, my site(s) ran smoothly, quicker than ever and with no downtime. Thanks to the watchdog module, that one employee installed, services that killed itself were automatically loaded again.

Ever since I moved my site to zone.net it has been growing prosperously with 15,000 visitors daily and increasing. Wordpress and WP-Cache are working smoothly, Permalinks with htaccess are operational, too.

When I had trouble setting up WP-Cache (at one point you have to run a shell command to create a sym-link file), their Live-support helped me out in seconds.
I really liked the free and high-quality support at zone.net and the polite, yet direct employees.

The advantage of “sticking” with a company with a dozen employees is that in due progress you get to know everyone and they get to know you. You dont have to explain your setup and problems all over again, as your setup is known and sending passwords over etc has become obsolete.

Amongst my domains are also two German denic (DE) domains, the setup of them is very annoying, as you have to observe all kinds of regulations (like specific TTL time), different class C ips etc. - zone.net has been so accommodating to setup those different C-class ips for free.
I am quite sure that I would have had to pay additional money at almost every other company.

At my VPS I had Plesk and CentOS running, what I did not know is that you SHOULD not (seriously!!!) try to update your VPS (plesk) manually.
I pressed “auto-update” under plesk, and the whole vps went into full-out lockup mode. zone.net´s experienced techies had the website up within minutes, but still plesk was unaccessible.
This was the case for a week roughly and I did not receive any email for one week. This really annoyed me, but who to blame? It was all my fault- if I had not played around with things it would not have locked up so bad (internal errors all over the place). I decided to wait one week for them to find a solution, as the website was up, I was earning good money with it (around 40$ a day) and I did not care about emails… since it was only a secondary email address.

yet I wanted to have my plesk back.- so one employee worked on my vps for two days in a row and tried all kinds of hacks. still I did not work. so without asking, and I appreciate that, they cloned my “running” site and setup another vps and routed all traffic over there. wow. I did not know this was technically possible!!!

anyway, I had my plesk back and every setting I had done, was input kindly by the zone.net tech-man. If I had to do this all myself I would have lost valuable time at university that (at this point) I did not have.

Just a few weeks ago I received an email saying that my vps (and basically) every VPS had to be moved, as zone.net had bought their own network or net of servers or datacenter, I cannot remember what it was, anyway… my vps had to be moved, meaning starting at “zero”. A new vps was setup again, but since the ips changed, too I had to undergo the whole IPs annoyance with the german denic domains again.

luckily zone.net helped me out quickly and assured me things would work.
Indeed it did, the transfer went very smooth, as the old vps was not shutdown until the new one had been successfully “talking” with my nameserver.

Bad thing though was, that I lost several posts and comments, as in the meantime I was accessing (randomly) two different sites on different servers.
At one time, the old site loaded, the next hour the new one loaded and vice versa.

If you plan to transfer sites, you should not post anything and close comments. just as a matter of fact, that was my learning…

What I did not like about zone.net is that after the server move and in the meantime, they have seem to taken off the live-support. I loved to quickly address my problems and have them sorted out.

Now I have to reside to their (working!) ticket system, where I usually receive a reply within hours, but sometimes also days (but that´s my fault then again to not “bump” my tickets every now and then).

In general, I am very satisfied with the performance at zone.net, the level of support and the possibility of having almost EVERYTHING customized to my needs. I appreciate being a customer there, seriously! as soon as I experience something else, I will post it here, promised!

Yours,
jez

(lol this is almost a whole book of a post)