I’ve spent the past couple of hours researching VPS (virtual private server) hosting. It’s apparently the next step up after shared hosting. This site isn’t at that level yet, however, I suspect I’ll probably need to upgrade if I keep creating web apps. Anyway, I’m not sure I really made any progress. There are a lot of VPS hosts that look nice, but they’re either too pricey ($100+ a month) or I get horror stories when I Google things like “[hosting company] sucks”. It’d be nice if my current host offered VPS hosting, though according to their forums, they don’t plan to do that anytime soon.
Anyway, over the past week I’ve made a couple of minor updates. I’ll enumerate them below.
- The Snake game was updated to use a snazzy YUI loading dialog (see image below). The loading time is strictly taken up by div creation. I create 2000 divs so the snake can grow without any pauses when you “eat” the red dots. There’s probably a better way to do this, but I haven’t thought of it. Also, a lot of little updates were made to the Snake game, however, you probably wont notice the difference since it’s little stuff that only I’d care about. I know I said this before, but I’m now officially leaving this game alone (with the exception of bug fixes and possible significant performance improvements).
- The dual-thumbed slider bars on the Text Color Fader and Gradient Image Generator were updated so that the thumbs will move when you click on a color.
What’s Next?
I’m thining of making a couple more simple web apps for the site. Right now that’s just what I’m into. I spent a few hours this past week reading some tutorials on jQuery, and it looks really cool. After that I may do some C# or VB stuff. The programming section of this site recently became more popular than the software section, so I’m thinking I should probably try to expand that more – though I’m not sure what angle to take (the old VB stuff is what’s pulling in the visitors). I may make some quizzes, those were fun back in the day and they’re easy to whip up, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.
I think the forums are officially dead. They had some good exposure. I just don’t think they were targeted right for this site’s audience. Plus there seems to be database issues. Oh well though, there were a couple of interesting topics. I’ll leave them up for the next week or two, but after that I’ll probably take them down.
shame about the forums. i guess that forums are kind of dated though (which makes me feel even older). back to unstructured discussion, i suppose!
just make sure if you get a vps that you can get full root access and some kind of standard setup. package management is a necessity for upgrades. it’s unfortunate, but most places these days are either too pricey or generally not helpful with support, etc.
You’ll really only need the VPS if your CPU usage and total connections/connection time adversely affects other clients on the same host.
sloat – I may give the forums another shot later on down the line, though I’d have to come up with a different approach for them.
As for the full root access, I’ll make a note to look for that. Before I settle on anything, I think I’d use it for a month just to make sure I could get everything working right.
Awesome Andrew – I’m probably being a little premature in my search. Though I sometimes get a little paranoid that this site is going down without me knowing.
Another reason I was looking into it was that my roommate and I were thinking about opening up some additional websites. We throw ideas around all the time so it might not happen, but I figured it’d be good to know the details of everything before the wheels started turning too fast on anything.
Yo Pat. Have you checked out (mt) (www.mediatemple.net), they seem pretty slick and affordable, plus they host some of the most demanding sites out there.
If you get any good ideas on a forum let me know, I have some that I think would be pretty interesting, if your interested hit me up cbutler@ussco.com.
As odd as this sounds, mediatemple was actually one of the main hosts I was looking into. It was my top choice after reading a positive review on reddit and then reading over their website. However, after googling “media temple sucks” I got cold feet. It pulled up a lot sites with user complaints:
http://chawlk.com/web/notes/2806/p/1/
http://www.friskdesign.com/blog/2008/01/29/wordpress-slow-mediatemple/
http://chrisabraham.com/2007/03/23/not-happy-…-hosting/
http://www.marklangenfeld.com/2008/05/21/time-to-say-my-goodbyes-to-mt/
http://www.mzakariya.com/2007/09/22/mt-media-temple-speed-issues/
No host is perfect, but I’d hate to start paying more and then run into all sorts of problems. Are you using media temple? If it turns out good let me know.
As for forum ideas, I’ll probably keep them on the back burner until later. I’ll let you know if I come up with anything interesting though.
Edit: With all these links, I triggered my Akismet spam filter on myself.
One of our clients is hosted with mt and it really is a pain to work with. Apache is configured in some bizarre way. I couldn’t get any changes to php.ini or httpd.conf to reflect on the server… I had to use .htaccess directives on a dedicated box…
They also use Plesk. I dunno if that’s the only option with mt, but it’s a terrible piece of crap. Whenever I needed to do anything, I ended up doing it through SSH because plesk is so slow and difficult to navigate.
Load times are excessive.
Upgrading software is difficult (I was stuck working with PHP 4.3.2).
Basically, it just hasn’t been a good experience.
Have you thought about a colo service?
Yikes, that does sound bad. Thanks for sharing that. I think for now media temple is off my list.
I haven’t looked into a colo service, I’m not sure I’ve even heard of it before you mentioned it (though I just did some googling on it). I’ll look into it more though.
Yeah, lesson number one, don’t trust anything I say! Even though it sounds as if most of those sites are hosted on a shared server. I’m imagining the sites I have seen hosted on (mt) are popular enough they probably have hook ups and have extremely dedicated and customized infrastructures. Because I’m sure they would need it.
Something to consider as you review your choices, and prior to selecting a host: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8PidNJLrek
plastik – I’ve heard the same thing. They make sure and treat their biggest customers the best, so that word gets out that they’re a good host. While searching around, I even read about situations where a hosting company hosts a popular site for free, as long as the author of the site mentions who hosts them.
Andrew – Yeah, I looked at some of those sites but then decided I couldn’t trust them. Right now I’m going mostly on word of mouth from people and blog entry / message board reviews that I find.