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Last March I wrote a post about PowWeb’s Secret Price Increases. Well, I just received my latest invoice from them for my 2011 hosting, and guess what? Same story. They charged me $107.40, which works out to $8.95 per month. The regular price shown on their homepage is $7.77 per month. At that rate, my bill should have been $93.24. I must admit this year’s bill is slightly better than last year’s, when they tried to charge me $111.24. But still, it’s a far cry from the so-called regular price they advertise.
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I immediately contacted PowWeb support and requested that they either bill me the correct amount or update their homepage to reflect the price they charged me. They chose to correct my invoice, as they did last year. And I have no doubt I’ll be placing the exact same support request next year.

As far as service and hosting reliability goes, PowWeb performs well for a shared host. Even so, that does not excuse these secret price increases. I could understand if they charged more for added features. Even if they decided to jack up their prices for no reason, I wouldn’t complain if they at least had the decency to inform their customers of the increase. But keeping an inaccurate price on their homepage year after year and hoping customers won’t notice the discrepancy? That’s just wrong.

I would recommend to anyone who is hosting with PowWeb that you check your invoice carefully. If you’re being charged more than $93.24 ($7.77 per month) contact support and tell them to charge you the correct amount, as shown on their homepage. You shouldn’t have to pay more.

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I have installed the PHP extension Xdebug on multiple platforms and for some reason I keep forgetting how I manage to do it every time.

Below are the steps I followed to get Xdebug working with Zend Server CE 5.04 with PHP 5.3 on Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit.

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  1. Download the correct Xdebug extension from here.
    Note: Although I am running a 64-bit OS, Zend Server CE 5.04 is 32-bit and requires 32-bit extensions so I downloaded the 32-bit version of Xdebug php_xdebug-2.1.0-5.3-vc9-nts.dll
  2. Copy the DLL to C:\Program Files (x86)\Zend\ZendServer\lib\phpext\
  3. Add the following lines ABOVE [Zend] in your php.ini file which is located at C:\Program Files (x86)\Zend\ZendServer\etc\php.ini 
    [xdebug]
zend_extension="C:\Program Files (x86)\Zend\ZendServer\lib\phpext\php_xdebug-2.1.0-5.3-vc9-nts.dll"
  4. Restart Apache
  5. Log in to the Zend Server GUI at http://localhost:10081/ZendServer and check the PHP Info page for Xdebug
  6. If you have an Xdebug section then it works. Now you’ll want to probably add some more configuration to the [xdebug] section of the php.ini file. See xdebug.org for more info.
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