Tag: hosting

Cheap Is As Cheap Gets
I have nothing against people on a budget. I understand not being creme-de-la-creme and needing to be careful.

I really boggle at people who want to run a company website, but feel $15/month is ‘too much.’

How much do you spend on your car every month? We’re talking gas, insurance, cleaning, maintenance, and so on. You do that for a reason. You need your car to get you places. It’s an investment in your work. You can’t get to your work without a car so you take care of it to keep it secure, you clean it because it smells, and you pay for insurance in case the worst happens.

Your website is running 24/7 and costs you $15/month and that’s too much for your business? You need to rethink your business model. That’s under $200 a year. That amount of money should be affordable for anyone who’s running a business, even on a shoe-string budget. What really gets me, though, is the person who emailed me saying $200 a year was too much did it from an iPhone. They had the ‘Sent from my iPhone’ signature line still on it. While it’s certainly possible they got a cheap pay-as-you-go plan and a used phone, the reality is they look at the cost and don’t see an immediate value.

Let’s turn this around.

$15 a month is about:
- six gallons of gas (from the Arco down the street)
- five fancy cupcakes from Wildflour Cupcakes
- four grande lattes from Starbucks
- three gallons of milk (probably less in some places)
- two craft beers
- one tin of canned unicorn meat
But we get an immediate value in all those things. We can see the gas, the cupcakes, the unicorn meat, and we see the direct application of our money to a ‘thing.’ A website is different. It is a nebulous entity and floats out there in the cloud. When you’re not selling anything on your website, what’s the point?

Lately I’ve taken to asking people “How much are you planning on spending on advertising a month?” If the answer is ‘nothing’ then I tell them they need to consider it for their company if they plan on getting anywhere. If the answer is a realistic amount, I tell them to allocate $15 a month for webhosting. They need to have a web-presence. It’s 2015, people will want to see who they are, so make a good, informational, site. Don’t put a ‘blog’ up unless there’s a plan to publish to it regularly. Don’t use code you can’t support. Don’t use a host where you can’t get your content back easily (which is really my only issue with things like Wix).

But $15 a month is pennies to the traffic a website can bring you. If you sell three gallons of milk a month, you’ve broken even, after all.
11 February, 2015
Mailbag: Can I do it on WP (Legally?)

This one comes from Zara:

I’m about to create a website on wordpress. My website is an escort website. It is adult oriented. The new website would look exactly like my current website […] and I’m considering to build a new website on wp.

Since my friend’s website is built on wp and is escort oriented, plus it was banned by wp, now I’m worried about it all.

Is it allowed to build an escort website on wp?

Yes.

I’ve mentioned it before, that you can use WP for porn because the freedoms of the GPL allow it. More specifically, WordPress states that you can use it for anything you want.

So what’s Zara talking about when she says ‘it was banned by wp’ if that’s true? We’re talking about a couple things here, one is WordPress.org and the other is WordPress.com and yes, it’s a headache.

WordPress.org is the home of the software. WordPress.com is a hosting service that runs nothing but a locked down, managed, WordPress Multisite instance that you can use for free (or pay for add-ons). As a hosting company, WordPress.com has specific rules and bylaws that they restrict their users to. This is, in no way shape or form, a violation of your GPL permissions. They’re not restricting WordPress usage, they’re restricting your usage of their servers and their system.

So yes, Zara, you can use the WordPress software for your escort website, but you need to find a web host who will give you permission to host it. My advice to you is to make sure what you’re doing is legal where you live. Also, make sure it’s legal for your webhost. At DreamHost, I know we allow any website that’s legal in the state of California, which means we host a lot of sites I personally disagree with but will defend their right to publish with my dying breath. Not every website has the same rules, so just ask them if they allow escort sites. They should be able to answer, or pass you on to legal for confirmation.

Good luck!

19 December, 2014
When Sites Go Down

My webhost had a bad day. They ran a regular, normal, upgrade to some switches and a switch failed. It decided it would be fun to reboot over and over. Since running on one switch is rather dangerous, they decided to roll back so we could have two and everything would be okay. It didn’t work. In fact, nothing worked. It was one of those days where you put out a fire only to have an earthquake, and as soon as you got the place cleaned up there was a flood. And then the sprinklers thought they should go off.

We have, every last one of is, had a day like that. A day where absolutely everything went wrong when it was possible to do so. It was clearly one of those days.

I can certainly complain that my host wasn’t really the best when it came to explaining things, too. They would send us emails, which was fine, except my emails were on my server which was inaccessible to me. So many people went to their live-chat that it was impossible to get a rep. Tweets? Unanswerable due to volume. They actually replied by (heh) email. And when I went to their management panel on their website, it just said that it would be updated in ‘an hour.’

I resorted to opening a ticket. And I hated doing it, since I knew better than many exactly how shitty their say was. So I asked “Status Update?” and explained that I was unable to check my email but what was the status? I got the form replies, which I expected, and I pushed back for one detail. Just one:

“It is our aim to have this completed within the next hour by proceeding with this fix immediately.”

Hour from when?

Suggestion for your website: Can you timestamp things so we know when to kind of expect things?

By the end of that day, they had a static.html page with the information, and times(!), on it. They’re not ‘great’ at keeping it updated, but I know how annoying that aspect is, and I don’t fault them one bit. Once the work was done and everything was back to normal, I inquired as to the offered credit, which actually I’d forgotten about but they had mentioned to me in the support ticket! I think it works out to being about $4, clearly not very much, and honestly I don’t care about it very much.

A thought that never crossed my mind? Leaving them.

It’s not because my server’s been there for over a decade, and it’s not because I like the more and more ‘grown up’ corporate tone of their communications. It’s certainly not that I agree with everything they do. But what I do agree with is that I pay them for a service and, for the most part, I get it. When I don’t, after the dust settles, they’re as responsive as every other host.

I’m not paying them just for server space, after all. I pay for backups, some cloud services, and most of all, I’m paying them for help when I screw up. Not to be my consultants, certainly, but I do pay them for technical support and advice like “Can you tell me how to install Ruby on my server?” because there’s no KB article … yet. Also when I needed help tuning httpd.conf they helped out. They don’t do the work for me, they do their limit, and they’re generally friendly about it.

So how bad does an incident have to be to make me leave it?

I’ve only ever left a host when they didn’t offer the services I needed (SQL, PHP 5, so on and so forth). If I was paying less for a bare-bones host, I’d have to pay someone to help me with server stuff anyway, so for me the all-in-one matters.

As for outages, I’m pretty relaxed about it, At an hour of downtime, I pay attention. I had a total of about 4 hours over the course of a day, which is annoying, and bad, but not horrible because no content was lost, just traffic. It’s not that my website isn’t my life, it’s that I’m realistic about situations. If the host explains what happened and are working on fix it as fast as is reasonably possible, I’ll suffer up to 6 straight hours before getting really upset. I’ve never had an outage of more than 75 minutes in a row, though, and before this one, I never had one more than 45. So yes, this was the worst outage I’ve ever had with them (that wasn’t my fault).

Other incidents that may make me leave would be a deletion of my server without warning. That, hands down, is time to go. Any service promise that isn’t regularly met is grounds for a chat about expectations. I don’t count ‘support response time’ as a service promise, mind you, since when shit gets bad, that’s always going to drop. I mean things like backups or uptime. I’ve never been one to care about 99% uptime, but if the server’s always crashing no matter what I do, and they’re not willing to help me, then I have a problem. In general, I feel that if my site in particular is having issues, it’s probably me and my snowflake more than them. If all sites have the same problem, then it’s probably our needs don’t match the host services.

The funny thing is I don’t know of many hosts that fits that bill. Sometimes a host has to tell you no, they can’t offer a service, and sometimes they tell you that you’ll have to pay more to do something. But in general, most hosts want to keep you, they want to help you, and they sometimes have to be the bearer of bad news. I’ve actually met hosts who have told me “We won’t be able to provide you the quality of uptime you need due to the way your site is being accessed.” That was a fancy way to say “You get too much traffic for our small node to handle.” And then they handed me a discount for another host. Another Host. This small host was bought out years ago, but I will always remember Greg for that moment. He was awesome.

My point is that it’s not my host’s job to manage my website, so if I let the spam on my site go wild and it causes my server to crash, well that was my fault. Not theirs. Don’t like the way my plugins make my site work? That’s on me. And if they tell me “You’re getting hit by Reddit, we need to increase your CPU/memory to handle it, and that will cost you more money” I know they’re not just upselling me.

There are some hosts, sure, out to make a buck, but in general I find that if they know that I understand our relationship, things go well.

This isn’t meant to be a love song to any one host. None of them are perfect, and they all have weird quirks. This is a love song about remembering my relationship with my host, respecting that, and holding up my end of the deal. I’m not naming any host names (even though it would take you about 2 seconds to sort out who mine is, and who I work for, and yes, I’m ecstatic about both), because it doesn’t matter. I’ve had an experience like this with hosts that are maligned and vilified. My choice not to use them is not based on quality of service but on my morals and ethics. I chose not to fund people I am diametrically opposed to, for my own peace of mind.

But I find, for the most part, that when I make it clear I know how our relationship works, and better yet, I know how their job works, I get both the support I want and the results I expect. It’s funny how that goes. They keep my faith and I keep trusting them.

9 July, 2014
Videos: Local or Service
One of the hardest things to do is sort out where and how to host videos.

The problems

Let’s be direct here, videos are still one of the messiest parts of hosting websites, because of two major reasons:
1. Multiple formats
2. Bandwidth
I used to have “File size” on there, but these days with most of us having at least 5G of space on shared hosts, it’s not an issue. The other two are big problems. Since it’s 2014, I’m sticking to only HTML5 video stuff right now. It’s backwards compatible enough. If someone’s on IE8 or earlier, they’re left in the cold, which I feel bad about, but that was released in 2009 and while I know my last job was struggling to get off it in 2012, my ‘workaround’ was to include a line below all videos that says “Can’t view this? Click here…”

Multiple Formats

Got an iOS device? Great, you can’t play Flash, which means the smallest compression out there (flv) won’t work. There are a lot of different formats. Just have a look at the breakdown of HTML5 video browser support for a moment. It gets messier when you’re an Open Source advocate and you realize how jacked that makes you with iOS, which is pretty much ‘MP4 or GTFO’ these days.

Don’t forget that Firefox doesn’t like MP4s either (see the screenshot to the right) so now you must include a webm or ogg file to make that happy. This means, in order to get the broadest audience, you need to include at least two formats of video. This touches back to the ‘File size’ issue that I don’t really think is much of an issue these days.

This is a hassle since most of us don’t have a lot of great tools to take our amazing video of ducks and turn it into these other formats. I use Miro Converter or Handbrake much of the time to convert things, but by no means are these profession quality. Hang on to that thought, I’ll be back.

Bandwidth

Sometimes people lump this with File Size too, but bandwidth is how we measure how much data you’re sending when people visit your website. We relate it to file size because larger files use more bandwidth. Obvious, right? Videos are large files, so they use up more bandwidth. Right now I get 5TB of transfer per month before I have to pay extra, and my average is 150G, so I have a ways to go before I need to worry about it. That said, not every host is as generous, and remember that ‘unlimited’ means ‘within reason’, especially with Shared Hosting.

There’s also a related concern we call ‘hotlinking’ and that’s where someone takes your images (or videos) and links to them directly, which means they;re using your content (and bandwidth). When someone does it to you, we call it bandwidth theft. When someone does it to YouTube, we call it ’embedding media.’ Personally I use Perishable Press’ ultimate hotlinking strategy and block all my images and videos from this.

It’s actually the concern of bandwidth and the availability of embedding media that drives many people to external hosting.

Your options…

Now that we know what makes this hard, what can we do? it’s pretty simple, we can host it ourselves, knowing these woes and being prepared to address them as they come up, or we can host our stuff elsewhere. For many of my friends, this is a no-brainer. Host it elsewhere, pay a little extra, but have all the technology headaches solved for you.

But.

I work a lot with fansites and they face two major hurdles. Posting some videos is, strictly speaking, illegal as all get out. That 6 second clip of Mulder and Scully? Illegal. Hosting it? Illegal. Making money off it via ads on your site? Illlleeeeeeeeeeeegggaaaaallll.

You get the idea. But they’re going to do it anyway, and unless they decide to turn it into an animated GIF (still illegal actually according to some sources), they’re going to have a small video to host. Where can they host it?

The only place is their own server. Now, legally, you have to be given time to comply to a takedown DMCA notice, and really these monolithic companies are supposed to send YOU a takedown before going after your webhost with a demand, but that doesn’t always happen. Many fansites are banned from YouTube because of those clips, so it’s always going to be a fear.

Do I think that clips of TV shows should be illegal? Not within reason, no. I think a small clip, under 2 minutes, can be awesome advertising. And now a days, a lot of shows put their own, official, embeddable, clips up online. Of course… they also remove the clips after a while, which defeats the purpose, I feel.

What’s wrong with hosting locally?

Really? Nothing. It’s just hard, complicated, and complex. If you can do it, I actually suggest you do. You can embed most video files in WordPress these days, so it works well. I wouldn’t do it for large clips (I don’t go over 10 megs myself), because it can and will slow your site down.

Mind, I wish WordPress.com’s video server code was up to date. I’d like to try that. Still, that’s where I am today. I’ll put in the effort and minimize my risk.
8 January, 2014
On Beyond Shared Hosting

This comes up at almost every WordCamp or Meetup I go to. “How do I know when I’ve outgrown Shared Hosting?” In general, my reply is “When you’re really unhappy with your site performance, and you know that you’ve done everything right.”

For the vast majority of users out there, Shared Hosting is just fine. Even when they don’t really understand what Shared Hosting is (and if not please read Entry Level Hosting), they know this much: The site runs. And you know… that’s pretty much all most people care about. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. However you know that you may have outgrown shared when your site starts performing badly.

When I tell people this, they generally get pretty shirty with me. They tell me it’s the host, because this doesn’t happen on another host/localhost. In absolute fairness, sure, it could possibly be the webhost, however that’s like say your car is the only reason you get poor gas mileage. You have to consider the way you drive, the traffic you drive through (city vs freeway), the weather, and of course, the gas you put in. Where people are throwing these arguments are usually because they actually haven’t done everything right.

We’ve all done it wrong.

I’ve written code wrong before. Functional, yes, but really bad. I’ve given bad advice before. It happens. The point is that you never do things 100% correctly every time, which means the odds are against you having done absolutely everything right for the situation you’re in at that moment. And there’s the rub, isn’t it? What’s the situation? Did you study it correctly? Did you understand it right? Did you test your theories? Most of all, did you remember your server’s a special snowflake?

Accepting the fact that the cause for our sites being slow is us being wrong is not easy. But the truth is this: Your choice of hosts, plugins, themes, and features is why your site runs the way it does. And if that all adds up to ‘slow’ then you’ve made some miss-steps. Once you’re okay with that, you can make progress. Let’s do it right! This very basic step starts with being tough on yourself. Get rid of plugins you’re not using, or don’t really need. Make sure your theme hasn’t bloated itself with a million options you never use. Heck, see if anyone’s done a review on your plugins and themes. Try alternative plugins and themes. It’s always a possibility that the synergy of plugins you’re using are causing weird slowness issues that are only evident when they’re used together.

On general rule I have about shared hosting is that if I have to bump my memory for PHP over 128M, I’ve got a problem. A decent, clean, site be it WordPress or anything else, doesn’t need that much memory. If my plugins and/or themes make me use that much memory, then they’re a bad combination. The other thing to keep in mind is they may be a bad combination for how your site works. Like caching plugins, for example. I actually crashed my sever using one, because I was getting so much traffic and almost everyone left a comment, so the cache was flushing pages at a crazy fast rate. Turning off caching made it run slower, but more stable, and eventually lead to why I ended up on a VPS.

What’s a VPS anyway?

A VPS is a Virtual Private Server. It’s a weird concept, I know. A shared server is an apartment building, and a VPS is a condo. Where with shared hosting, you pay for room on a server that shares all its resources. That’s why you can have problems with noisy neighbors. If someone’s using too much power, it can blackout the building. A VPS is not just space on the server, it’s also an isolated mini ‘server’ inside the real server. So you can reboot without affecting anyone else, or install new resources and apps without sharing them. Your stuff is more separate from theirs. We call these ‘slices’ and a VPS is your own private slice.

Back in the day, I switched to a VPS because after doing the math, I realized I would spend the same amount hosting 4 sites on shared hosting as I would on one VPS. After six months, I found out how smart a move this was, as I could upgrade PHP without having to wait for everyone on my box to be ‘ready’ for it. The box was all me! I also got more memory for use, and since I wasn’t sharing it with anyone else, if I used too much and crashed things, the only person who got hurt was me!

A VPS was power, freedom, and yes more money, but it was easy to set up server-level backups. Also it was easy to add in extra caching on the server, like x-cache, or memcached, which then lets me use not a flat-file cache but a dynamic cache like Batcache. There are, of course, reasons you may want a file-cache like WP Super Cache provides, and don’t think that plugin isn’t awesome. But when a static cache isn’t quite right, this is a great idea. You can read up on Sivel’s review of various caching plugins for WordPress.

The point here is that a VPS gave me more options! I could even install Varnish on my server to use that instead. It’s also easier to add more RAM to a VPS, and allocate disk space. For most of us, disk space is not an issue anymore, but the RAM is important.

How do I KNOW I need a VPS?

Honestly, there isn’t a magic formula. I can tell you this, with regards to all types of CMSs: The more you do, the more you need. It’s really obvious, but it’s often missed. The more successful your site gets, the more people visit it, the more people comment (and you know these are all things you want), the more memory and CPU your site needs, so a-VPS-ing we shall go. It’s really like ‘How do I know I need new pants’ isn’t it? My pants don’t fit! They pinch me here or there. They’re slipping if I don’t wear a belt, and I hate belts.

Maybe you should think of the traffic on your website like eating. If you overeat once, say Thanksgiving, the pants are tight, but a couple days later it’s nothing at all. If you’re eating a larger amount for another reason (working out, growing taller, whatever), you’re going to have to get new pants after a while, because you just look silly when your pants end 3 inches above your ankles. Unlike the Hulk, you’re not coming back down to person size any time soon.

There is something good in this, though. Most sites have a pretty easy, painless way for you to move from shared to a VPS. They’ve got scripts and tools and click-magic buttons that toss your site up, change the DNS settings, and carry on.

Downsides?

You know the more power means more responsibility line? The expectation is that I’m going to manage it. If I can’t do that, then maybe I should look at Managed Hosting… but that’s another post. The managing of a VPS is a hassle. I’ve been in tears rebuilding things at 2am more than once, because I get in over my head.

So… that’s it?

Of course not. But as with all things, nothing is an absolute here. When you get beyond Shared Hosting and into what’s next, you open a door for a wide range of possibilities. And with more possibilities you have a Seussian range of options. Go on beyond Zebra and find what fits right for you.

23 December, 2013
Don’t Say WordPress

This time I’m absolutely 100% serious. Yes, I can be sarcastic and humorous when I talk about WP, but in this case, I’m being honest, and I promise you serious. I work for DreamHost as a WordPress Guru. I’ve been training people, and teaching them one at a time, and in doing so, confirmed a bias I’ve had for years: Tech Support goes blind sometimes.

I don’t think this is really their fault. They have to handle 60 to 100 tickets a day about everything from “How do I reset passwords?” to “My Database is speaking in R’lyehian. HALP!” In order to get through that volume, they look for the key words, the important ones that tell them that this is the problem. And one of those keywords is “WordPress.”

This is not great, because sometimes the problem isn’t WordPress. Like a PHP isn’t running, or the DB is missing, or a hundred other ‘It’s not WP’ problems. Naturally, that means a handful of tickets escalated to me aren’t WordPress at all, and I have to dig into it, and explain why.

Before my coworkers think I’m pointing figures or blaming them, I really don’t. It’s a volume thing, and it’s got to do with how the customer presents the error. If they tell you “My WordPress site is down, I’m getting an error 500 on all pages!” you think “Oh, it’s probably .htaccess or they’re using too many resources.” Those are the most common causes after all. After that, you start getting messy and into weird things like “PHP memory is set too high, causing WP to crash” (which I didn’t even know you could do to be honest until November). And sometimes it really takes someone who knows how WordPress works to put the pieces together and determine “Oh! This is it!”

However, hands down, when I’m working with Multisite and I see someone say “My wildcard subdomain isn’t working!” and the ‘error’ page they get is not a WordPress styled 404, I will tell them “DO NOT mention ‘WordPress’ or ‘Multisite’ to your host. Tell them this:” and here’s my copy/pasta:

I’m trying to set up a wildcard subdomain, so anything.mydomain.com will pull the files from mydomain.com, however I’m having problems. I’m getting a server error instead of seeing the content on my site. Is there a trick to setting this up on this server?

Now some hosts will look and say “Oh well you’re using WordPress, that’s why.” and I want to kick them a little. No, that’s not why. When you go to a subdomain and get the server error (like subdomain not found) or worse a DNS error (like Google saying the domain doesn’t exist), then the problem is not, and cannot be WordPress.

That’s why it’s really important to present your error in the best way possible. The most accurate to the actual problem. Of course, if you have no idea, then you should just be honest and say what you did. If you really, truly, didn’t do anything, though, be prepared for someone to ask “Are you sure? You didn’t change a setting on the dashboard?” And sadly this is because a lot of people lie, a lot of people misrepresent the facts, and a lot of people play dumb. There is a very small percentage of people who will come back and say “You know, I may have done something, but I cannot remember what I did.” I like those people a lot. They’re my people. They admit they may have, but they can’t recall.

WordPress FauxGo (yes, this is the FAKE logo)
Sadly all those people who aren’t quite as truthful screw it up for the rest of you, which is why there’s a time and a place to point at WordPress, and there’s a time and place to not do so.

How do you know the difference? Well you have to think. Is what you’re trying to do something you do with a plugin or theme? Did it happen after you made a change to your site’s settings? It’s probably WordPress. However if you’re trying to do something outside of WordPress, like domain mapping or wildcard subdomains or creating a database? Then don’t mention WordPress.

It’s counter-intuitive, I know. I’m telling you to be honest and say what you did or what you’re doing, but at the same time I’m telling you to leave out what might be important information. And that’s why you have to think. Is the error a WordPress error? Learning that takes a long time, so for a lot of rookies, the easier question is “Does the error happen without WordPress involved?”

Let’s go back to that subdomain thing. Turn off Multisite. Does the same problem happen? Probably not WordPress. So don’t bring it up just yet. Now if they ask “What are you trying to do?” or why, tell them. “I’m trying to setup wildcard subdomains so I can use it with WordPress, but at this point, I’m not even getting a WordPress error.”

Of course, it’s not always that simple. Like what if I told you that, on Multisite, not getting the CSS to display on subsites could be a server error? That’s when you get to say:

My complex .htaccess rules don’t seem to be honored by my server. Is AllowOverride set to either All or Options All in the httpd.conf (or equivalent) file?

Notice how I didn’t mention WordPress? This is because I know that if my .htaccess rules are right, the problem’s not me. Unless of course my host blocks that on purpose because they don’t want to let me run Multisite on a shared box.

It’s not cut and dried, it’s not ‘If this, then that!’ But what it is, is education and thinking. As long as you can learn what is and is not WP, you’re on your way to knowing when you ask about WordPress problems, and when you ask about server problems.

16 December, 2013