Tag Archives: nearlyfreespeech

Moving… To A New Old Host

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I’ve been using Slicehost for more than a year now (since March 4th, 2008, with a little break in between May to October of that year). All the while, I’ve become a huge huge fan of their service. Why?

Montastic tells me that Slicehost suffered a bit of downtime during my time with them (via a quick Gmail search), but it happened so rarely that I can’t recall ever being frustrated at the service. (How about Dreamhost, you ask? Ahem.)

It’s been quite the experience, trying to admin a VPS at Slicehost. It was a lot of fun and pain trying to set up an Ubuntu server from scratch. I learned quite a bit, and found respect for all the unsung sysadmins out there.

But lately, learning more and more about the art and science of system administration almost feels like premature optimization. That’s not to say that the subject matter is not interesting (or easy, because it’s completely insane how the Internet exists), but I’m going to wait until when the optimization becomes that much more effective.

This feeling is magnified by what I’ve been doing with this slice. The full potential of this $20/mo slice has gone to waste, being used to host only this WordPress install.

The fact is that I bought this slice, thinking that I would be deploying some major webapps. You see, past-JK would have thought that future-JK would be awesomeing all over the place. Current-JK is sad that this is not the case.

But he is hopeful. Uh, back to first-person.

I’m hopeful. I also have a couple non-programming projects I want to start up, and it’d be nicer to have a solution that has a more pay-as-you-go style of billing. I am back to NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Change. Change always brings something new and exciting, doesn’t it?

And this post is how I end the first half of the year of 2009. Kinda not very exciting, but I’m learning to find excitement apart from dates that have merely numerical quirks.

Inching Towards Completion

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  • Almost done with fixing the feeds. I don’t know what’s wrong with it right now. FEEDS WORK. HUZZAH.
  • Deleted ALL Twitter Posts. I’ll be advertising my twitter account more, however. I need to bring back the streaming tweets somewhere on the blog.
  • NearlyFreeSpeech issue with .htaccess. Not sure what it is, but WordPress seems to be unable to write it or something. Probably a strict permissions setting.

Tomorrow. More work tomorrow. One day, I’ll get to work on some projects… one day…

Unless Fable 2 stands in the way.

This Weekend: The Big Move

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I’m moving a few things around this weekend on the Internets. For one thing, this blog will hopefully be on the new server by the end of Sunday.

This means some things might not look right. I probably won’t be posting too much, either.

Hooray for deadlines that come from actually doing things.

NearlyFreeSpeech.net Mini-review

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I’ve used NearlyFreeSpeech for less than a day now, and I already feel at home. It”s definitely not for beginners, for whom I would definitely suggest Dreamhost to start.

In terms of pricing, I”m enjoying this Amazon S3-esque pay-as-you-use scheme. Here”s the cost break down at this page. It actually comes out to be something much cheaper than what I”m used to paying with Dreamhost.

I”m digging the design. There”s a real lack of random ladies-with-headset images and other random fluff images. I love it. Except, the Support FAQ page needs a full expand link (which I somehow figured out myself… just pass a “?all” to the page: LINK).

Being a little sysadmin n00b myself, I had to learn a couple of things. And still, a few things are iffy, but I”m certain I”ll pick it up as I go. I have a working domain up and running. Just copy and paste and wait for DNS to propagate… but that”s for tomorrow.

One issue that concerned me was that my new MySQL process took a long while to start up. I wasn”t sure if it had broken, and so I was ready to contact support. After going to the gym to run and coming back, it started to work. I don”t know, maybe it was just me.

NearlyFreeSpeech feels a lot like Slicehost (which I will continue to pay for, so I can host my Rails projects), but with much less features. I”m not saying this as a bad thing: NFS seems like it does one thing very good: a service to host php/mysql websites. Indeed, I have to wait for a couple months to see how good the uptime is, but from what I”m reading, I haven”t heard too many negatives (and where those negatives existed, they were about the lack of features, which is a plus for me).

Note on MediaTemple

A quick mini-sidenote on MediaTemple: I definitely did not like the UI. It was really funky and hard to work with. The fact that I had to assign a domain name to my server to start out with was really strange. All other new domain names I would create would be associated with the first one (I know that there”s a view to fix this, but that”s not the default). I”m waiting for my 30-day guarantee refund. I would have liked to try them out though… but NFS is so much cheaper.

Note on GoDaddy

A second quick mini-sidenote on GoDaddy: No more. I actually moved one to NFS, just to try them out. Catalyst? I didn”t know that there were other registrars that were cheaper. I guess I stopped look around after I figured out how cheap it was at one point. And wow, I can”t believe I sat there and worked around that atrocious UI. And seriously, I contacted Wil Shipley why golden-braeburn.com (which is up now) was down. Ah, the power of Twitter.

Note on UI/Design Flaws

Oh, one huge sidenote: I really should justify what I don”t like about these UI”s or designs, but I feel like… why bother? They really should have fixed them… why spend the time to explain it. HIRE ME and I”ll tell you how to, heh. This is one of the reasons why I have yet to start my screencast yet.

Ugh, so little time. SO LITTLE TIME.