From time to time I like to try out new technologies or explore established web publishing techniques that I just haven’t tried yet. And so it was that I had set up a dedicated hosting server, loaded up the Plesk control panel from Parallels, and launched a test website.

In the process of learning how to navigate and operate in this new (to me) environment, I ran into an issue when I tried to upload a logo file to a certain image directory. Of course, I Googled ‘Plesk’ and other variations of my Plesk permissions problem to attempt to troubleshoot the issue myself. I also extensively read the ‘Help’ section of the Plesk interface and was still unable to get my files uploaded properly and into the correct directory. Now while all clients of our hosting company will get exemplary support – I can simply walk downstairs and speak face-to-face with anyone on the expert support team here at HostMySite.com. I am glad that I did.

I met a technical support expert here that I had not really spent much time with – his name is Keith Mitchell. Since September 2005 Keith has been a dedicated and virtual server engineer with HotMySite.com. Of course Keith was able to easily take care of my permissions problem – it was a matter of ‘root’ permissions set up on the dedicated server – but what I came to find out is that Keith has a very useful blog that touches on a number of areas of support that many virtual and dedicated server hosting customers may encounter.

If you check out Keith’s blog entitled ”The Mind of a Mad Tech!” you will find a wealth of valuable information in a number of interesting categories. Topics range from the straightforward – for example ‘301 Redirects’ which gives step-by-step instructions on how to create a proper 301 redirect for Unix, Linux, ASP, JSP and Ruby – to the more complex: Trouble updating to MySQL 5 in Cpanel.

For a variety of really practical and often encountered (and often frustrating) technical issues, Keith presents a wealth of information on his blog. The topics and posts are organized on the right hand nav. So take a look and bookmark if you have the occasion to work with VPS and dedicated servers – you can probably save yourself some time and frustration by glancing over ‘’The Mind of a Mad Tech’’ first.