Chris Wiegman

Archive for March, 2009

As I start another redesign of the SIU Aviation website I find myself facing a dilemma. Do I rewrite the CMS that has served me well for the last 9 years to take advantage of newer technologies or do I redesign the site around a CMS like Joomla and spend more time both extending Joomla and working on the content? What do you guy think?

By the way the site is at http://www.aviation.siu.edu. Please give me some ideas!

There’s a lot of buzz about Twitter lately and a lot of people out there trying to explain what it’s good for. For the most part the uses fall into two categories: self-promotion and celebrity stalking. In other words, many would say to make the best use of Twitter you need to excel either in vanity or in creepiness. Personally I disagree.

I’m on Twitter for two very different reasons. First and foremost I’m there to learn. My job doesn’t give me the luxury of attending numerous conferences or interacting with too many others here in this small town, and although I can learn a lot from a Google Search you are still often limited by your own imagination. Twitter gives me the power to follow others in my industry and gain all sorts of ideas from the links they post and sometimes even the posts themselves. For instance, following a lot of Joomla tweeters has lead me to believe that Joomla is the way for me to go with my own sites. Also, when I was looking for a new web-host Twitter gave me numerous real-time feedback on a number of hosts I would not have otherwise considered.

In addition to random ideas and trends Twitter is also invaluable in the ability to get a question answered quickly by people not in your normal network. I’ve seen everything from twitter tech support for web hosting companies to the name of a song gained within minutes by posting a simple tweet. Of course in this respect it can also be beneficial to answer questions when the pop-up and help those as they might help you.

Next, I use twitter simply to interact with people who are not in my normal network. Although conversations might not be as long or detailed as those in real life there is still a lot to be gained in 140 characters. Not only can these conversations be entertaining and help build your network, but they can also be a great way to brainstorm and throw around some new ideas as you can always get feedback from someone.

In many ways both of these goals reflect my following and tweeting habits. I follow as many people as possible without worrying if they follow me back. No, I can’t track every tweet from every person I follow, but I don’t need to. Instead the enormous amounts of new tweets give me the opportunity to scan for information that is important to me and follow up where necessary and that, in my opinion, really is the whole point.

So while self-promotion and tracking your favorite celebrities are certainly valuable pursuits for some, it is the wealth of information that can be gained and shared that is the true value of Twitter and is, in fact, why I Tweet.

So I updated the site theme a little today. Please let me know if you see any problems.

So you’ve got a great idea that you want to put online but you don’t yet know where you are going to put it? For many of us running our own web server isn’t an option due to both the overhead involved and the technical skills required to keep it running. Instead we have to turn to the web hosting industry to take care of our needs. When we do this we are confronted with dozens of options with prices ranging from free to hundreds of dollars a month. So why does the price vary so dramatically? Although there are a few variables involved the bulk of the difference can be attributed to capacity. In other words, the more you pay, the more users your site will be able to handle.

In the cheaper plans you are typically paying for what is called “shared hosting.” In these plans you share a server with dozens if not hundreds of other websites all of which must compete for server resources such as memory, CPU, and to an extent network bandwidth and storage space. A few years ago it was common to see these plans advertise limits on disk space for storage and network bandwidth however as both of these have become increasingly cheaper many hosts are now offering unlimited bandwidth and storage. Instead what they don’t tell you is that they are typically limiting your CPU load. If your site requires a lot of database queries or simply gets too many people (usually 10,000 or more per day for the average blog) you might start to hit CPU limits which can render your site unavailable to users for a period of time.

The next level up is usually VPS or Virtual Private Server. On a VPS you are still allocated disk space and other hardware resources on a server your application is typically isolated from other users providing you much more access to CPU and memory. In addition, VPS tends to give a user much more control over their web host as many are running their own protected operating system and webserver for each user. These sites can typically handle a LOT of traffic although they can still become overburdened by a site that does a lot of heavy number crunching associated with online games, multimedia, or heavy database usage. Some hosts may also recommend VPS hosting for application requiring a dedicated IP address which may be necessary for ECommerce or other types of sites where security is a little more important.

Finally, the most expensive hosts often offer dedicated servers where you are essentially paying them per month to keep an entire server running for you. This is the ultimate as you are often responsible for configuring the server and services you use and you may be responsible for a misconfiguration or other problems encountered. Only sites with very high usage and or very heavy processing requirements need to look this high end.

So how do you know how many users you’ll get on your site and which of these types of hosting you will need?

To answer this question I’m going to assume you’re starting a new site for personal or small business use. In either case the first place to go would be a traffic ranking site such as Alexa. Here you can enter the address of sites similar to your and get some feedback on the number or users and general popularity of the subject matter.  It’s important at this point to keep in mind that the sites you are comparing yourself to might have been running for sometime and be very well established in their subject community. In this case their traffic is often something to aspire to as a medium to long term goal rather than what you can expect to see at the beginning. Another place to analyze your competition is at http://www.whoishostingthis.com/. This site can tell you where your target sites are being hosted which may provide a little insight into what kind of hosting their site requires which in turn can help you decide what type of plan you will need.

So I have an idea on how many users I’ll get. What’s next?

The next step is to choose an actual company to host with. To answer this question we will first need to figure out a couple of the technical requirements of our site. These include what language the site will be coded in (PHP, ASP, Ruby, etc), what kind of database (if any) is needed, and are there any special features that I’ll need. These answers will help us decide between the two most common types of hosting at any level which is plans that run on Linux and plans that run on Windows.

The most common software for blogs (Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal) will often run better on Linux as it makes use of some of the requirements that are native to the Linux web server, Apache. In fact, unless you know you will be using .NET or another proprietary Microsoft technology a Linux plan will serve you just fine and might even save you a little money due to the licensing costs of the server software.

Once we have an operating system and a level of hosting picked out our next concern should be for support. At some point even the most experienced developers will probably have to talk to tech support. A good judge of this is by simply searching for reviews of the company in question on Google. It’s amazing how much information is out there. Note that while there are hundreds of companies available many are simply resellers of one of the bigger companies and many more are start-ups that won’t last the year.

Finally, remember that for most sites you can change a host fairly easily so don’t get too hung up on your decision.

For the record, over the years I’ve used winsave, gearhost, 1and1, GoDaddy, hostmonster, and a few others which are no longer in business. I currently use Bluehost for my personal sites including this page.

I’ve been hosting my personal sites with GoDaddy for a few years now and for the most part, as long as I didn’t want to change anything, I had no problems. Making even the simplest changes however could result in all my sites being offline for days however and yesterday I had enough.

Friday morning I tried to upgrade my account to take advantage of SSH. No big deal right? Their online tech support told me it would take about an hour and before I started I needed to delete all of my MySQL databases. OK, weird, but whatever. So I did so and made the switch. Within a few minutes a messages appeared in my control panel that indicated that the sites were down due to a pending account change and would be up in 24 hours. Well, they told me an hour but whatever. It was cheap so who am I to complain. After all, this isn’t the first time they’ve put me in a similar predicament.

So last night, about 36 hours later, I realized my site still was not online. Now I’m a little angry so I call tech-support on the phone (not a fun task) where I am politely told that it could take up to 72 hours to activate SSH services on my account. Now this wouldn’t be too bad if the sites were available during this time but as I indicated earlier I was required to delete my MySQL databases so they were all down.

Anyway, I tweet my frustration on Twitter and within a few minutes @GoDaddyGuy pops up saying he has seen my problem and is sorry for the frustration. As a fix he was going to simply create me a brand new account so I would be back online last night. OK, cool. I was pretty impressed with the proactive tech support and sure enough within a few minutes I had a new account listed in my control panel. I went to set it up as I was asked to do however and here I hit another road block. I can’t set up a new account when there is an account already in place for my domains. Hmm. So I call tech support and ask for direction. I didn’t mind deleting the old account, but I wanted a full backup first just in case. GoDaddyGuy indicates this should be easy and have someone zip my data and I should continue setting up the new account which didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.

So after waiting on hold for about 10 minutes I explain my situation to the guy on the phone who tells me that my predicament is impossible. First, they don’t have the capability to archive my data during the SSH upgrade and second, they don’t have tech support on twitter. WTF? Then who the heck got into my account and set up another hosting account. After putting me on hold a couple more times it turns out there is twitter support, and that as the twitter support is separate from the main tech support they have the capabilities of archiving my data during the transition and I was promised numerous times that this would be accomplished within the hour.

As of this morning still no archive, and more importantly, still no running sites. Time to go. I can handle bad support as it seems to be indemic to many of the hosting companies. I cannot however handle being lied to.

After a little more research (I keep up on hosts normally, but haven’t had to actually make the decision to switch in a while) I decided on Bluehost. They’re only $4 a month and the reviews are great. In fact when I signed up for GoDaddy I almost went to Bluehost then but decided to stick with GoDaddy as it was cheaper and I had had a positive experience with them as a registrar.

For now it looks like Bluehost is going to be great. Setup was easy, changes are instant, it’s a lot faster than GoDaddy and they seem to have a much happoer following than GoDaddy. Hopefully that will continue to be the case for some time to come.