About Chris Hope

Posted November 22nd, 2003 (Updated October 29th, 2010)

Chris Hope, that's me, is a website developer based in Auckland, New Zealand, and this is my LAMP blog website where I post about Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP etc, Windows and Linux applications and other web technologies.

After completing a computer course at Auckland University of Technology in 1997, I started a company called Webenz in 1998 with my brother-in-law Greg McNamara and Jacqui Jones, his partner at the time. Webenz was a website development company which worked on many websites including Personalised Plates for which I still do the website develoment work.

While working at Webenz, I developed Minerva Mail and the e3 Commerce System, which were used by many customers and websites.

I moved on from Webenz in 2003 and began working as an independent contractor, and continued to maintain a working relationship with Webenz, managing their Linux webservers and offering help and advice to their developers.

The Webenz hosting business was sold to Web Drive in July 2004 and I managed the migration of all existing customer websites, ensuring the various PHP, Perl and database driven websites worked correctly on the new servers. Minerva Mail and the Webenz development customers were sold on to BKA Interactive in October 2004 and Webenz closed down at that time.

I continue to manage Linux servers for Personalised Plates and Minerva Mail and run my own sites currently on a VPS servers at Sitehost and Linode. As well as working on my own various projects (e.g. Kidzstuff, New Zealand Running Calendar), I currently work on a contract basis for Personalised Plates, Motorhome Roadtrip and in partnership with the ecommerce site healthy.co.nz.

I am not taking on any new customers at the present time and recently have been cutting back the number of people I work for, and am looking to change direction away from being a web developer for end customers.