Clazh » Web-Hosting

Shared Hosting Sucks Moved To Dedicated Virtual

Arpit Jacob — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:13:46 +0000

My apologies since its been a while since I posted on this blog. My real life took over my online life, hence I was unable to dedicate anytime to this blog. A number of interesting events took place over the web while I was away. Notably Apple release the new and refreshed line of Mac Book Pros that I had been waiting for. I am currently waiting for them to appear on the Apple India Store before I can purchase one.

Shared Hosting Really Sucks

I while back I recommended bluehost, since their uptime and response time is comparably better than other shared web hosting providers even better than Media Temple overrated Grid Servers. I would like to withdraw my good opinion about them, after they banned my site without giving me a reason. I had to contact tech support to ask them the reason why they had banned me. The reason they gave me turned out to be a really dumb one, according to them I had violated there TOC by posting about a security flaw in myspace and mind you this offending article is more than a year old. I knew they were just looking for a reason to ban me since my site takes up a lot of bandwidth.

Shared hosting sucks for a number of reasons.

There are too many Websites crammed onto a single server.
You don’t have control over the server resources and application.
You are rarely given root/SSH access.
Most shared hosts are slow and put restriction on your CPU Usage. My site has show the CPU exceeded error a number of time.

Since my site has grown and deserves much better. The first thing that I did was to purchase a basic Dedicated Virtual Hosting package from Media Temple. I am totally loving the huge increase in performance and response time. My Pingdom account shows that the average response time for the site has dropped below 1 sec unlike the previous 1.5 – 3 sec.

Since MT Dedicated Virtual Hosting is too expensive for me. I did a lot of research into Dedicated Virtual Hosting and finally settled on Slicehost. While I am not a Linux guru I don’t mind getting my hands dirty so currently I am busy teaching myself how to setup a Linux Box from scratch. I plan to run this site on a combination of Lighttpd, MySql, and PHP called a LLMP setup. Expect this site to load 10 times faster than before.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2008. | Permalink | 11 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, Open Source, Technology Tags: Web-Hosting

FastCGI for IIS is Released, PHP On IIS Faster Than On Apache

Arpit Jacob — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 17:10:46 +0000

Microsoft has released FastCGI for IIS. Also did you know that PHP on IIS is about 10-15% faster than on Apache(Linux). Here a list of guides to installing Popular Open Source Php Applications on IIS. You can install IIS only If You have Windows XP Professional version. Here is a guide to installing WordPress on IIS, there don’t seem to be any extra steps involved in getting it to run and install successfully. Looks like Apache is in for some tough competition, it has been steadly losing market share to IIS this year and there are other web servers that run PHP faster.

With Microsoftâ€™s implementation of the FastCGI open standard, IT Professionals will be able to host PHP applications on Windows ServerÂ® 2003 and IIS 6 with increased reliability, scalability, and security. Customers also know that they will be able to count on Microsoft to stand by and service the Microsoft FastCGI Extension. By supporting the open standard, Microsoft has made it possible for PHP and other CGI compliant languages to be hosted efficiently and effectively on Windows Server 2003 and IIS.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: General, Microsoft, Open Source, Software Tags: Web-Hosting, Windows

Advanced Guide On How To Choose A Good Web Host

Arpit Jacob — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 16:18:14 +0000

After my recent frustrating experience with various web hosts I decided to write an article after some of my readers requested me to. My focus is on web hosts that provide shared hosting since and does not cover buying or using Dedicated hosting, since Shared Hosting is the most commonly used web hosting.

There are three Major factors you need to look at when you are about to buy Web Hosting. We’ll explore each point one by one and various tools to asses and collect data.

Uptime
Response Time
Tech Support
Ease of Use

Uptime

100% uptime is a myth when it comes to shared hosting no shared web host can guarantee you 100% uptime. Why because, servers need maintenance to keep them running in top notch condition maintenance means downtime and In the case of Shared hosting this is very much true. In a month calculate the total time that your site goes down and if it is more than 5-6 hours then your Web host in very unreliable (DreamHost). Its is common for a shared hosting site to go down a few minutes(not more than 5 minutes) once a week.

I used tools like PingDom, mon.itor.us and Site24X7 to monitor my site uptime. Out of the three tools I highly recommend Pingdom (they have a 30 day trial which should be enough for you to do your research) since they have more servers around the world and you can configure it to check your site every minute.

Response Time

Response time is the time that your web site takes to respond to a HTTP request(When a Web Page is loaded a number of HTTP Calls are made depending on how many pictures, CSS and JavaScript files are being loaded). The Ideal response time for a site should not cross 1 sec. Most Shared Hosts cram a lot of websites on to the same server this can cause the web sites to become slow. In case there are a lot of high traffic blogs/Web Sites on the same servers as the one you are hosted on your site is likely to be slow. Use this tool http://www.myipneighbors.com/ to check how many other sites are hosted along with you. It is common for web hosts to put 150-200 low traffic sites on the same server, if you notice more than 2-3 High traffic sites on the same server then your site is likely to be slow.

Again PingDom is a great tool to monitor site response time, they have more than 15 different servers located around the world that tell you response time around various parts of the world. Or you could use this completely free tool to check your site response time from 5 different locations around the world. http://internetsupervision.com/scripts/urlcheck/check.aspx

Tech Support

You might face hiccups along the way when hosting a site. How fast do they reply to your emails. In my case BlueHost provides Instant live chat support. Most Web Hosts have some kind of ticketing system based on priority and complexity of the problem and you would be required to for 2-3 hours before you receive any reply. After being with BlueHost for a while I fail to understand why other Web Hosts also cannot provide live chat support, my previous experience with Media Temple was horrible with replies taking more than 24 hours. On DreamHost when I posted a support ticket I could mark the ticket as HIGH, Medium, Low etc and depending on the priority I found the response varied but on Media Temple they don’t have any such priority marking system which I think sucks big time like in my case my site was down for more than 3 days.

Ease of Use

How easy and intuitive is the Web Hosting Control panel. I have used DreamHost, Media Temple and BlueHost. And I found Media Temple User Interface a pleasure to use and understand. But both DreamHost and Media Temple Control Panels are rather slow in loading. BlueHost has a blazing fast Control Panel they use CPanel with their own enhancements and Addons.

While There are other factors that can slow down your site like having lots of images, widget, scripts. etc which can effect your site. I think I’ll cover them in another post since I myself am guilty of making some of these mistakes. Hopefully when I have finished redesigning my site I can tackle this topic.

If you want to learn more about on site optimisation here are a bunch of links that you find useful.

Tools and Extensions

http://www.pingdom.com/tools/fpt/
http://internetsupervision.com/scripts/urlcheck/check.aspx
http://www.webwait.com/
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1433
FireBugÂ

Articles

http://www.glazkov.com/blog/client-side-performance-tip/
http://www.vandelaydesign.com/blog/design/designing-pages-to-load-quickly/
http://paulstamatiou.com/2007/07/25/how-to-optimize-your-site-with-image-sprites/
http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/dev/enhance-your-page-performance
http://learningtheworld.eu/2007/performance/
http://meiert.com/en/blog/20070621/load-time-the-ux-factor-facts-and-measures/
http://immike.net/blog/2007/07/24/css-redundancy-checker/

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 11 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Technology, Tutorial Tags: How To, Web-Hosting

Moved To BlueHost Media Temple Grid Server Overrated

Arpit Jacob — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 08:00:32 +0000

Its been a bad week for me. I moved to Media Temple hosting 4 days back, yesterday night I moved again to BlueHost. In my hurry I was unable to backup my previous post I apologize to everyone for the lost comments. My Site has been horribly slow and constantly down for 2 full days and the average response time for the site was more than 8 secs (ideally it shouldn’t cross 1sec). While the initial experience with MT was good i.e. buying and setting things up. The support later turned out to be very slow and poor MT doesn’t have a 24X7 support since I am an international customer they took more than 24 hours to reply to any of my questions. BlueHost was a refreshing change I clicked on the Live Chat button on the main page and was immediately connected with a sales person who clarified some of my doubts later I again used Live Chat to get help configuring the MX records since I use Google Apps to maintain my Email. I like to keep track of my site uptime and response time and I use multiple Site monitoring services like Site24X7, mon.itor.us and Pingdom. I highly recommend Pingdom to anyone who is serious about maintaining and monitoring their sites. Pingdom played a huge role in my moving from dreamhost and MT to bluehost. I can already see a huge differences in the response time (its all below 1 sec) and page load and my Pingdom data also confirms this. (Since My DNS is still propagating it still seems a bit slow in Britain and Europe)

Overall MT has been a bad experience for me. For the high cost of hosting it is not worth it. Though they themselves admitted that they were overwhelmed with support questions and hence replies were being delayed. But what I cant understand is why they can’t have a 24X7 support like dreamhost or live chat support like bluehost and the ability to mark support questions as High, Critical, medium etc.The only positive part was they were very professional in handling the issues and immediately refunded my money back.

The most funny or should I say stupid thing that I did was that I had done my research for the past 3 months (using data collected from site24×7 mon.itor.us) and found that bluehost had better uptime and (more important) response time for the sites they hosted over MT. In fact I even commented on this on paul stamatiou’s blog 2 months back and wanted to do a blog post about it but never got down to doing it.

Hey paul I been monitoring your site (MT)and a few others (bluehost, dreamhost etc) using moitor.us and various other tools. I found your response time(MT Grid) a bit slow. I eliminated sites hosted on dedicated accounts. I found that people hosted on bluehost seemed to have much better response time. I will do a write up shortly when I get back home from office. what are your thoughts on this?

So why did I still go for MT ? Well to be frank I am got sucker into the Grid hosting marketing, everyone seemed to be telling how good they were and able to handle the DIGG effect etc. (heck dreamhost handled the DIGG effect for me without a glitch) I now realised that MT grid server is nothing but a marketing bluff.

"Bust A Name" Helps You Find A Good Domain Name

Arpit Jacob — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 15:50:02 +0000

I found this great tool called bustaname for brainstorming Domain Names. I wish I had know of this tool when I registered my Website. Coming up with a cool and short domain name is very hard. This tool is useful since it does most of the work for like making combination of words automatically and showing only the available which are available for registration.

Type the keywords that that you want to be in your domain name, you can also click the red icon next to each word to add more related keywords.

The a combination of the various names with available domains is shown.

You have more options that you can tweak at the bottom for example if you would like to append “i” in front of every word.

Word of advice if you do find a good Domain Name register it immediately. I had a bad experience a while back, I used to check for a Certain Domain from a certain Service quite frequently, after a few weeks it was immediately registered by a Domain Squatter. How I got the domain name back is a long story and I’ll reserve it for another blog post :).

source: Ajaxian

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 26 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Internet, Software Tags: Web-Hosting