The other side of the Arab-Israeli dispute has its effect even on hosting!
Hostweb, an Israeli hosting company, blindly blocks all incoming requests from ANY Arabian country to any of the domains it's hosting. The company says that this radical action is to prevent attacks from Arabs.

Weird, huh?

As I stated earlier that I will play with Linode VPS and see how things will go, I started testing their VPS for the past three weeks and the results were amazing. Few amazing things about Linode:

Setting up BIND DNS Server for Google Apps is a streamlined process if you have access to your BIND Settings in /etc/bind (YMMV).

The following zone file did the job for me (replace example.com with your domain name and myhost.com with your hosting primary domain):

$TTL   86400
$ORIGIN example.com.
@                                IN SOA   ns1.myhost.com. dns.myhost.com (

OpenPanel: Overall: 4.5/5 License: GPL URL: http://www.openpanel.com Installation: 4.5/5 Nothing can be easier, no long manuals, no experience required: two simple and easy steps and you're done! Structure: 4.5/5

Domain Technologie Control (DTC): Overall 3.5/5 License: LGPL URL: http://www.gplhost.com/software-dtc.html Installation: 3.5/5

Part of modern web hosting buzz has been about control panels. For starters, a control panel is that piece of software that helps end-users as well as administrators manage their hosting easily without getting their hands dirty and their minds tired with file configuration.

My first VPS was with KnownHost. I spent a whole year with KnownHost before I decided that CentOS is something one can't live with. And despite loving cPanel, I can't accept the idea that I have to go for CentOS to have cPanel. KnownHost took about 4 hours to install the VPS for me and since the installation everything was more than good.

Since I wasn't satisfied with what Zone.net delivered, even after promising that things will go better and they didn't. I decided to continue my search for a better hosting. I was basically trying to find a hosting with the following criteria: * OS: Debian * Control Panel: Plesk * RAM: ~512MBs * Private and Reverse DNS. * Backup is a plus.

I thought that the story is over but that wasn't true. Jeffrey posted in the open ticket that if I'd give them a second chance he promises that things will be better and he even offered a free month. I decided to try out the thing I have been struggling for in the past four days. So I agreed to try them out for the free month.

August 17 - 4:45PM: the same staff guy replied and once again said he will escalate the issue to the "corresponding department". August 17 - 7:45PM: once again I can't wait, I posted a reply again asking what's going on with the VPS and still no reply.