No Mod Required

I just started looking into this hosting upgrade option, so I’m looking for advice/anecdotes wherever I can find them.

To that end, anyone out there have any experience with either of these two services?

Dedicated-Virtual Server from Media Temple

Low Cost Virtual Private Servers from JohnCompanies.com

Failing that, anyone have any really good alternatives to the above two?

I know I’m being terribly lazy with the last question. Sure. Sue me I’m just hoping I can go to bed and wake up with a half dozen or more fantastic hosting alternatives that I can kick the tires on over the next few months.

Looking at the pricing and features, these VPS’s look like the perfect upgrade track for me as I start to push the limits of what I should really be doing in a shared environment. I’m cool for now, but I’d rather be prepared for a potential move than have to scramble at some layer date. VPS’s also open up a lot of options in terms of what I can do for some of my clients in terms of hosting, which would be (a) a cool thing to offer and would (b) help offset the cost. The problem is, I just don’t know anyone that’s actually got any experience working with them, so I’m not sure which way to go in terms of companies/options. All the guys I know that know about this stuff are all knee deep in multiple (often load load balanced) machines hosted at the RackSpaces of the world. They don’t have a lot of experience with the kinds of options available at my (comparatively) puny computing budget.

Yes, the show includes some of my work:

Hit the Deck- SXSW, 2008.3.13 @ Light Bar in Austin, TX

I used to have an Ubuntu partition running on my old Dell. I used it for development from from time to time and I just enjoy using Linux/Unix systems, so it was always nice to have that partition to switch into when the need arose (How often was it to use wget? Pretty often.) When my Dell died and I got my new HP, I really didn’t have any time set aside to set up a dual boot machine. I had client work hanging over my head and had been without a computer for something like three weeks so it was a desperate situation. There was no time for niceties. I had to toss the Adobe Creative Suite disc in there, watch that thing grind through its install; toss the MS Office 2007 disc in and watch it do the same; and then I had to go.

Fast forward to this week. With the release of Internet Explorer 8, I set up a new Virtual PC using the IE App Compat VHD (in English- the Internet Explorer Application Compatibility Testing Virtual Hard Drive.) While testing that promising browser (and it really is promising), I was struck by the thought of setting up a Linux instance on a Virtual PC. One quick Google search later I was presented with this:

Installing Ubuntu on Virtual PC for Windows Lovers

Which seemed promising

Following the advice presented, I was able to set up Ubuntu pretty much without issue and I’ve been happily messing around, setting up the environment for my needs (installing Apache, Mysql and PHP5, Subversion, Wordpress, etc.,) ever since. Even running inside another OS, it’s actually a reasonable experience and everything else is pretty seamless. There’s also the added bonus of being able to switch back and forth between Linux and my Windows desktop, which allows me to keep up with the day-to-day while still hacking mad gibsons on the Linux side.

As an aside, while I’m comfortable on the command line and on Linux/Unix systems, I’m not all that great at anything web-centric beyond what you have access to in a shared environment, so it’s kind of fun for me to actually build and configure a server. I normally don’t get a chance to actually edit apache configuration files (instead I have to on .htaccess files,) so a lot of what goes on there is a learning experience for me. Being the unrepentant geek that I am: Learning Experience + Computers + Open Source Software = Good times.

Anyway, even if you’re not looking to set up a server and are just curious about the Linux “experience” this is an easy way to go about getting a taste without putting your current system into danger. Try it, risk free!

What are you waiting for?

Random stat of the day: in the past year I’ve had visitors from 190 countries, including single visits from:

Niue looks like the place to be, by the way.

(photo thanks to flickr user fearlessRich)

Replubocrats unite.

Blogged mostly for the fantastic photo on the page, which is this close to being my desktop wallpaper (for at least a day- then it’s back to something nerdy. Cowboy Bepop FTW.)

“Ready from Day One, we’ve crossed the Commander-In-Chief threshold!”

McCain/Clinton — The Dream Team for 2008

I found these when going through some books I was recycling/donating:

1987. The throwup is so much from that era.

I know this may not be of interest to anyone but me. Thing is, it’s so interesting to me I’m pretty much forced to share it.
First of all, here’s what two large traffic events do to the charts in Google Analytics:

See any trends there? Me neither. With huge spikes like the ones I received this week and back in August, the day to day and month-to-month trends are flattened out to the point where the charts are useless. Here’s the space in between those two dates:

Look! Trends!

Referrers

Taking the same 3 day period from last year, I received 551 visits via 78 referring (not direct/not search engine) sources. From March 5 through March 7th this year I received 24,270 visits via 228 sources.

To illustrate the concentrated power of the Slashdot link, here I’ve presented the top twenty referrers from the past twelve months. The bold domains are all NEW to the past week:

For what it’s worth, Google.com there at #20 is for the Google homepage and not Google search. Google search, in that same period, generated 136,591 visitors. Google owns my traffic.

Some data transfer numbers

I serve just text (Javascript, CSS and HTML) off of my main web server, I do my best to scale things down code wise and I Gzip most of that content- even still I served 1.18GB of data on Thursday alone. From Wednesday through Friday (the span of the the entire “event”) I served 3.14 GB of text.

Thankfully, I moved all my image hosting over to Amazon S3 a few months ago, because in the three days of the event I served a total of 10.35GB of images*. That’s a little under 1/2 of my normal monthly total.

Third Parties

Compete, sadly, misses the bump in their daily attention graph:

Alexa, however, recognizes the bump, moving me up from around 243,000 last month to 71,014 on Wednesday and finally #32,527 on Thursday.

Multiples

Comparing, arbitrarily, March 6, 2008 to March 6, 2007 we get the following multiples

All the metrics aren’t good, of course. The paltry 1.49 Pages per Visit I got this week kills me, especially when compared to the robust 7.36 I got the same day last year (a drop-off of -79.78% ouch.)

Still, would I take that kind of traffic bump again? Of course, especially if I could get those 13,000 people to all visit 7 pages

*I love S3. That traffic spike cost me all of two bucks. Before, since I was always bursting at the seams with data transfer all of that would have gone into overages and would have cost me some outrageous sum.

I’m kidding of course, my overall initial reaction is actually quite positive. For instance, I just saw it do this:

That promises good things in my future

Still, looking at my site, I’m presented with my very first Internet Explorer 8.0 Mystery ™

I use opacity to do the image replacement in my logo. As the following image shows, neither of the two techniques I’m familiar with to set opacity work in IE8:

The Internet Explorer filter:


#logo a {
filter:Alpha(opacity=0)
}


and the CSS3 Color Module color property:


#logo a {
opacity:0
}


both fail.

The Google tells me nothing and searching MSDN also turns up nothing, so I’m left to grapple with my first “what the?!?” of the IE8 Era…

Where oh where has my opacity gone?
Where on Earth can it be?

I’m going to keep at it, since I do use opacity often enough to turn this into an official “issue” for me. To that point, if anyone out there has any idea what’s up with opacity and IE8, I’d love to hear about it.

How are your sites doing?

I’m up to 85,675 (and that was before getting flooded with glorious /. related traffic.)

By the way, with the flood of traffic, while the server is now perfoming admirably, getting knocked off the net makes me feel slightly like Han Solo with the Falcon - “C’mon baby, hold together!”

In case you were wondering why the site went down, I’m currently hanging out on the front page of slashdot.

I’ll have a full traffic report up tomorrow. Preliminarily, it looks like the second biggest traffic day ever here- which is crazy since the other major traffic event didn’t knock the site out of commission like this one did. I’ve now witnessed firsthand Slashdot’s l33t site killing power