I was recently looking for a decently priced VPS where I could host a couple of small to medium sized websites. I actually signed up for a few random ones that I found on Google and tried them for a few days, but they didn’t strike me as working very well. One of them actually crashed after about an hour, and it took about eight hours for support to finally restart it for me. Eventually I started looking around the internet a bit more, and ran into a relatively new company called Digital Ocean. Digital Ocean VPS I realize that not all web companies have nice looking web pages, but whenever I ...

After my recent mention on Reddit last week, I decided to try and improve the responsiveness of my little DigitalOcean VPS even more than it already was. I was definitely happy that I was able to withstand almost 20,000 visitors in just a few hours, but thought I might be able to improve things further by switching from Apache to Nginx. I debated it a long time ago, but never made the plunge for a few different reasons. First, I typically used hosting services based on cPanel. From what I gather, cPanel doesn’t really work well with Nginx (or at all), so that was never really an option. And ...

This weekend was pretty uneventful. I wasn’t feeling overly ambitious, so I hung out close to home mostly and rented a few movies. I’m not sure if there really are no movies, or if Apple TV is exceptionally crappy right now, but I hardly found anything to watch at all. Back in September I wrote a post about switching to Server Beach. For the most part, it’s been pretty rock solid. We have a dual core server there with cPanel on it, and it’s been relatively pain-free. One of the reasons we opted for a dedicated server was to make our lives a lot easier. Prior to setting it up, Dale and ...

About a year ago, I decided to slowly migrate away from Media Temple and move to something a bit better. Truthfully, Media Temple’s service was one of the worst I’ve experienced, especially since it’s priced at more than double what comparable packages are charging. I still think there’s lots of promise with their grid service, but I don’t think their paying cliental should be used as guinea pigs on technology. Unfortunately, I never completely got away from Media Temple, mainly because I have a few things there that need to be moved carefully, and I just haven’t had the inclination ...

About two years ago I decided I would test out Media Temple’s grid service package, mainly because it was highly recommended by WordPress users, and seemed to perform quite well. In fact, for the first few weeks I was a Grid Service user, I thought things ran actually pretty smoothly. Unfortunately though, over the next few months, things would degrade rather rapidly. My site was plagued by ever increasing latency, and would often go down for 4- 6 hours at a time due to MySQL outages or random, seemingly unannounced maintenance periods. It got so bad at one point that I actually came to the ...

Well, last night was interesting, to say the least. For those of you who follow around here, about a year ago I decided to host my blog from home instead of on some shared hosting account. My main reason for doing that was that I had been through around 3 shared hosting providers that year, and all of them had let me down on more than one occasion. So I figured I could do it better myself. Which was true to an extent. However last night, while I was packing boxes near the server, I guess I accidentally bumped the power cable, causing my server to reboot. Normally, that’s not a terrible thing, ...

I quickly stopped by Future Shop on my way home tonight and picked up a brand new power supply for my server at home. They had a really nice (that is, if power supplies can be described as such) $150 one that was on sale for $75, so I went with that. The good news is that my old power supply was basically taxed in terms of connectors, and it would have been impossible to add anything else to it. This new one has an extra 300W of headroom on it, and also 3 more SATA connectors. To be honest, I wasn’t even really sure it was the power supply, but it seemed like a pretty reasonable guess. The good ...

A while ago I did a quick and dirty hosting experiment with some of my readers. I actually need a bit more data, although what I’m after is a bit easier this time. So, if you have a blog, all I ask is that you let me know the following: The URL for your blog The name of the hosting company that you’re on If you like it or not So please post a comment if you have some of that info, or send me an email if you don’t really want it public. If you know of any friends and where they are at, let me know too. Thanks! ...

Yes, sports fans, it’s been twelve days since I decided to move my hosting back onto my living room floor. So far, it’s been 12 days of pure bliss, of heavenly visions filled with bunny rabbits and endless fields of sunshine and happiness, where kids run forever. But seriously, things have been going rather great. I haven’t had a single hiccup, and get complete SQL backups emailed to me twice a day, just in case something were to ever go wrong. All my data is backed up with RAID 5 storage (and will email me whenever a drive starts to get old, thanks to hourly SMART diagnostics), so unless ...

Ok, I’m going to go into rant mode. Why is everyone so enamored with Google these days? I read yesterday about their recent Google App Engine, and didn’t really see anything that particularly turned my crank. I’ve been bouncing around the web today reading what people are saying, and for the most part, everyone is down in the People’s Temple drinking the Kool-Aid. I don’t think the App Engine is a bad idea, I just don’t really get why you’d even consider it, especially considering AWS is around and has a much more flexible offering. First, I’m going to start by saying that 99% ...

So I’m not one to gloat, especially considering I recommended Media Temple to a few friends. But Media Temple just went down again, two days after I moved my blog back to a server in my house. Thankfully, my Linux box is chugging along nicely, and I didn’t experience an outage. Rebecca was Twittering how lame it was that web hosting companies struggle to keep a simple blog up, and I totally understand her frustration. It’s one thing to pay $6 a month for hosting and have the odd outage, but it’s another when you’re paying $20 a month and expecting three to five nines worth of service. ...