My best friend dcolumbus is in town for a couple of weeks so we’ve put our heads together on a new project we’re hoping to crank out in the next week. Development and design has gone spectacularly smoothly, and I’d even say I’ve enjoyed working – it doesn’t even seem like work. We’ve been coding like madmen all week, and I swear we’ve completed in 3 days what might have taken us 3 weeks if we were not in the same room.

So the project we’re working on basically uses mod_rewrite to change a path to a URL variable in ColdFusion. So for example if you went to www.domain.com/foo/, the system would interpret the path in the form of www.domain.com/index.cfm?username=foo.

We checked out Adobe’s ColdFusion 8 Hosting Partners and eventually decided on HostMySite.com.

We sent our payment and domain registration request, and waited for a time. Because of the way we entered the payment (the name associated with the domain didn’t match the credit card),  we suspected there might be problems processing the transaction. Sure enough, we received a note saying our payment was declined. dcolumbus and I then began second-guessing ourselves and after further investigation, we noted that HostMySite.com only offers ColdFusion on its Windows hosts. Not only that, but they exclusively use IIS – not Apache. Thus, very good chances no mod_rewrite option, which was an absolute necessity for the project.

So no offense to HostMySite.com (who have been extremely helpful), but we saw this as a blessing in disguise. So we went in search of an Apache ColdFusion host, which was slightly more difficult than I expected. As always, Google gives up the goods when you ask the question correctly. We probably should have looked for “ColdFusion Linux Hosting” and that might have shortened the search. Finally we came across Strategic Solutions which offers both Windows/IIS and Linux/Apache ColdFusion hosting packages, and are cheaper to boot. So we passed along the information to the purchasing department today, with the expectation that we would purchase a package later this evening.

The wrench came late this afternoon when I received another email on my BlackBerry stating that the payment had been accepted.

Crap.

Due to a miscommunication, we had resubmitted our payment information and it was successfully processed this time. I, for one, stressed a bit about it this afternoon even as we went for a swim at the lake, then out for dinner in town. When we returned home, I immediately contacted HostMySite.com support and requested information regarding alternatives for mod_rewrite. The support was extremely prompt and helpful. The rep I talked to said that they offered a 30-day money-back guarantee, but said he’d issue a ticked to look into what they might be able to do with IIS for equivalent mod_rewrite service, and that the ticket turnaround time would probably see me a response by Noon tomorrow.

So I eagerly await the response, but I’m no longer stressed. One way or another I’d be impressed if they came up with a solution, and I’d be equally impressed if they gave us our money back (minus the domain registration fee).

But more than anything I’m excited to get this project live.

Update:

After some back-and-forth with tech support at HostMySite.com, they graciously gave us a full refund and released our domain name. We are proceeding with Strategic Solutions after more cautiously confirming they had the functions we needed.