Tag: Web

Categories
Technology

My Hosting Conundrum: Follow Up

This is nothing more than a short follow up on my earlier post.

Not much has been done over the past “while”. I’m still hosting with Rackspace Cloud, and that looks to be where I am going to stay for the time being. Moving stuff at the moment would be a huge hassle, and it is just not a priority at the moment. The extra bandwidth and middle-RAM step would be nice over at Linode, but for now I will not be moving.

I also am keeping my email hosted over with Google Apps. I’ve been looking at paying for Google Apps for Business, but I cannot justify the cost for what I use the accounts for (mainly email). I would love to be able to host my own little Mac mini with Lion Server and run my mail from there, but it would require me to pay twice as much for Comcast Business Class Internet so I could get the static IPs. Not going to happen any time soon.

I was looking at Atmail Cloud as well, and I like their offering, but can’t afford to pay $40/month to get 10 user accounts, of which I need only two (that’s the minimum that provides ActiveSync for push mail to my iOS devices). If anyone finds an Atmail provider that does a per-user fee for hosted email (with own domain), let me know.

So, that’s the update. Staying put, but plans are in the works to double the RAM in the current server to alleviate some issues with low resources. Apache + PHP will do that to you.

Spotify now requiring Facebook account?

Spotify: Can you sign up for Spotify without Facebook?

Answer supposedly comes from a Spotify employee, stating that you will need a Facebook account to sign up for Spotify from this point forward. If true, this is completely and totally ridiculous. There are those people who do not want to use Facebook, or at least don’t want to connect everything they do to their Facebook account.

I hope that this doesn’t turn into some kind of precedent for other web properties.

Also, how long until Facebook just gobbles up Spotify as their own “Facebook Music” service?

Categories
Technology

My Hosting Conundrum

I’ve had the fortune of hosting some extra sites on my little Rackspace Cloud Server over the past couple of months, and now I’m starting to run into the limitations of running many sites on a single VPS. Bandwidth has now doubled for the past two months, and it is time to look for something a little better.

So, I thought I’d take some time to look around and see what is available. I first started looking at other VPS providers to see who else was out there after being with Rackspace and have settled on Linode as my next provider if I go the route of switching to a larger VPS to handle the new demand.

However, I’ve always had the idea of hosting my own stuff on real servers (as opposed to the virtual goodness of VPSs). For that, I have really two options: co-location or hosting at home.

To start, I’m fully aware of the problems that can arise from hosting only my own bare-metal hardware. We do it at work, so I have a little experience doing it, even though Mr. Spike happens to handle most/all of the sysadmin duties on campus. So it comes down to these factors:

  • price
  • service level
  • distance for emergencies

Co-location

This can get expensive, especially when I’m only looking at hosting maybe a server or two for a while. It becomes less of an issue when you are talking about someone at the size of 37signals working to get the most out of their applications, but that’s a laughable idea at this stage. I’m just trying to host some websites on a server, not serve hundreds of thousands of customers each day … yet (cue laughter).

How expensive? For a 5 Mbps dedicated connection for 1/3 rack (14U, lockable) I’m looking at about $715/month.

Right.

That’s not going to work at all. That price is currently WAY out of my league, even if I hope to get there one day. Add to the fact that the closest place I can get space at is over a half-hour away, and it becomes a little more of an issue.

There are huge advantages, like redundant connections to the world wide web, an actual data center where the rack is stored, 24/7 staffing at the facility, etc. However, as of right now, it is way to much to pay.

Maybe one day.

Home Hosting

Probably the craziest idea, but one the DIYer in me likes the most. I have to temper that part of me so that I don’t make any rash decisions.

Price per month is a little more realistic, even if the initial costs would be MUCH higher. Here is just a basic list of what I would need to find before I could even begin:

  • server rack
  • UPS
  • network switch
  • firewall

That doesn’t include running cable through my basement for purchasing the server hardware. Needless to say, I’d be on the hook for quite a bit of money just to get started.

The connection would not be redundant, but at about $100/month I can have a 22 Mbps down/5 Mbps up connection to my house. Granted, that connection would (at least at the beginning) be shared between the hosting network and my home private network, but that would mostly affect the down speeds (but is something to be aware of).

However, no raised floors here, no 24/7 staffing (since I work full time away from home), and no industrial strength fire suppression system, climate control, or power failover.

However, per month cost is about 1/5 that of co-location. That’s a major difference. Even on the high end of providing what I need to get started, after just three months I’ve already made up the difference in startup costs between co-location and home hosting.

The other major advantage would be the distance I need to travel. It would be my basement. On any normal day, I’m no more than 5 minutes away for an emergency. However, when I’m away from home, there is no one else on-call to come and fix things.

All things to think about.

So what’s the decision?

For now, I’m sticking with VPSs. The plan, for now, is to switch to Linode before the end of the year and then move up over there. As the bandwidth usage increases, Linode becomes more and more reasonable in comparison to Rackspace (they are comparable otherwise, if even a little cheaper to start).

The reasons? Money. I don’t have the money to get home hosting started, and not nearly the customers I would need to justify the $700+/month price to co-locate my servers in a data center. So, I’ll run with a VPS for now and see what the future holds.

Along with that, I still plan on contacting my ISP to ask if I can get a static IP or two to just use for a test server at home and maybe an email server as well. If they don’t allow that, oh well, no love lost, but it is worth a shot.

I’ll hopefully have more to post on that in the future because it also relates to my backup situation as well.

Categories
Business

Doing Less

I would say that I’ve been influenced greatly by companies like 37signals, Apple, and Google, especially in the past five years or so. I like a lot of what Apple has done with computing, and use many of their products in the work that I do. I use Google’s services every day and am using the design updates they just rolled out as inspiration for some of what I am currently working.

However, stumbling upon 37signals through Ruby on Rails thanks to being handed the first edition of Agile Web Development with Rails by one of my coworkers has probably affected me the most in what I have chosen to pursue in my life and how I think about the web, business, and design.

If you want to read a short book to give you a taste of what I am talking about, please check out Getting Real. A major theme of the book (maybe THE theme of the book) I like to sum up as “do less”. Not just building less, but also promising less, hiring less, having less mass (as a company), etc. It permeates a lot of what they talk about in the book and about how they talk about their own company. They released the book in 2006, and even though they’ve grown a lot since then, you can still see them sticking to the major points they make in their book.

However, one thing sometimes lost when people start espousing “doing less” is that doing less isn’t the end of it, you need to do less, better.

This is stuck in my head as I start to flesh out an idea for an application. Do less, better. Cut the scope of the project, do less “checkmarks”. However, what I do, I need to do better. I need to choose a limited number of things and then put all of my effort into making those things work better than anything else out there (where “better” can be a subjective term in certain contexts).

That’s the second part that some people miss. You can’t simply choose to do less, that is the road to failure. You need to take that effort you would have put into checking off boxes and make the stuff that you are doing that much better.

Do less, better.

Dangerous Ideals

They want you searching…. URLs are irrelevant. And I really think this is Google’s philosophy is that they want to make URLs just completely irrelevant.

The above quote came from the lips of one Dan Benjamin on Build and Analyze #33. Speaking with Marco Arment about the terrible URLs that Google is currently using for Google+, they came to this idea about why Google didn’t think more about how their URLs look, specifically about having usernames so that you could go to plus.google.com/username to get to a person.

The quote scares me, and coupled with Google trying to also minimize the URL bar (Gizmodo article link), really starts to worry me as to some powers-that-be trying to change the very foundation of what makes the web, the web.

I’m probably blowing this way out of proportion because I’m a little groggy this morning, but maybe there is just a little something there.