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Hosting
For all of you interested in hosting. We get our hosting from Linode, which we talked about in the episode. Wikipedia also has a really great article on the subject. Now I will offer our advice to anyone who is thinking about getting hosting. Just tell us what you plan on doing with it, and then we'll point you at the best possible solution for your needs.
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You also have to pay for the domain. They aren't free. Lots of places sell domains. I use gandi.net. All you do is point the domain at the IP address of the computer. If it's behind a NAT router, then you have to use port forwarding for the services you want to provide. If the IP address ever changes, then you need to configure DDNS to make sure that the DNS record is changed to the new IP. Like we said on the show, DDNS kind of works, but it mostly sucks.
I really don't recommend running a server on a normal broadband connection. We went over a lot of reasons not to do so in the show. One reason I left out was security. For proper hosting you need a computer that is directly connected to the Internet with a static IP. That is the least secure situation that any computer can ever be in. Unless you really know how to configure a server, you will get pwn3d. It's almost a guarantee. There is a reason that hosting costs money and people pay for it.
At a hosting facility they have many giant internet connections. They pay a flat fee for those. You share them with everyone else in the hosting facility. Some hosts are faster than others. They don't charge you more or less based on how fast you want to go, that's silly. Everyone shares the same pipe.
What they charge you is total data transferred. If in the month of April people download 1 billion bits of data from me, that's no big deal. If people download 500 billion bits of data from me, that's a problem. Podcasting and video casting mean you are going to be sending out lots and lots of data. The good thing is that it is really easy to calculate.
Listeners * episodes * podcast file size = total data transfer.
Speed on a cable modem is unsatisfactory for any real use. Any non-free hosting from a decent provider will give you more than enough speed. The more total data you transfer in a month the more you have to pay. This is why things like libsyn are so important to podcasting. They only charge you based on how much total podcasting you do. There is no penalty for having a zillion listeners download it as there is with normal hosts.
Let's say I have 256KBps upstream, and my podcast (mp3) has a 64KBps bit rate. Does that mean, while I'm downloading something, it will subtract that 64 from that 256, approximately, and soak up my speed?
My disclaimer to doing this is the fact that I had a very small audience (family and friends that actually wanted to see my pictures). I did have to port forward through my router. And I also had to run the webserver on a nonstandard port (my ISP blocks incoming connections to port 80). I know there are free services that will let you share pictures, but there is always stipulations for using them. I was also using the crappy dynamic (free) ip service.
I would in no way recommend using your cable service to host anything serious beyond "personal use", but it might be fun to have to mess around.
I had also used konqueror to generate a thumbnail page, so that is an example of someone creating a useful 'static' webpage.
(60 minutes * 60 seconds * 256000 bits) / 8,388,608 bits in a Megabyte
Someone check my math on that.
Now, if you were streaming a 64kbps mp3 to one person then yes, it would use 64kbps of your 256kbps upload bandwidth. If someone is downloading the file from you, as opposed to streaming, then it will use all 256kbps until that file is done being transferred. So if you have an episode of your podcast that is 5 megabytes large it will take someone about 3 minutes to download that file from you. If two people were downloading the file from you, then it would take them each about 6 minutes each. etc.
Of course, all these numbers are just the on-paper numbers. In practice everything will be shittier, slower and less reliable. All the hidden factors like routing, bottlenecks, etc. will come into play. So the actual result will vary wildly.
If you want to be real stickler for standards, 1024 bytes is called a kibibyte (kibi is just shortened from "kilo binary"), while 2^20 bytes is a mebibyte rather than a megabyte, 2^30 bytes is a gibibyte, and so forth. Almost no one uses these, that I've seen (linode.com, the hosting company Rym and Scott use, actually specifies their bandwidth in gibibytes per month rather than gigabytes).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
Hard drives are a strange case of memory measurement. When a HD manufacturer sells a drive as being 300 gigabytes they mean it's pretty close to 300 gigabytes. The real way to measure hard drives space is cylinders. But nobody will understand you if you sell a hard drive based on the number of cylinders and platters They aren't disagreeing about how much a byte is, they are simply rounding off numbers to make things easier to understand.
Computer scientists, however, define it in a base 2 system instead, where Giga means 2^30 (1,073,741,824). Hence, the discrepancy.
Anyway, I need your advice. I currently have a WordPress website that has about 4k-5k unique visitors, and about 30k unique visits each month. We have the site integrated to a large vBulletin forum as well as an Ajax-based Chatroom, which usually has at least 20+ people in it at a time; they all share the same MySQL database. Keep in mind, the site is growing quite quickly, so the numbers keep getting higher and higher.
Now, unfortunately, it seems as if I keep getting this error, which leads to a Database Error and a crashed site:
MySQL Error : User 'justinv' has exceeded the 'max_questions' resource (current value: 75000)
iPowerWeb (the current host we've been using) responded to a ticket with: "We have a maximum concurrent database connection limit of ten. When that limit is reached you would get the error message. Unfortunately this limit cannot be changed as it is in place to ensure acceptable server performance. We are sorry for any inconvenience. Thanks for your time."
Obviously, it's time for us to ditch iPower for a better host. Do you guys have any recommendations?
The big companies are the worst. Take any site hosted with godaddy and do a lookup to see how many other sites are on the same server. Don't be surprised if you see over 1,000 sites hosted on the same server. Not only do you run the risk of other sites causing problems for you due to usage but you also run the risk of problems due to the neighbors on that server. All it takes is one bad neighbor to have the IP of your server blacklisted by email spam services. I had this happen to me and it was a pain in the ass contacted big ISPs to tell them that the sites that were put on the blacklist no longer resided at that IP address. Until I did that my emails were being blocked as spam.
Another point to look at is how much you spend per site. If you have ten sites and each one costs you $5 per month on shared hosting and you can get a dedicated server for $50 per month why would you not go for it? That is part of what pushed me towards getting my own server.
(saves thread for later)
Is there any reason not to go for this? I know dreamhost is real (i.e. not a Nigerian prince, Ponzi scheme, etc.), but that splash page feels shady. UNLIMITED! SIGN UP NOW! Help me out, FRCF.
I do know that their database servers tend to be wonky at times. Anime Boston had enough of their flakiness that they actually migrated (or are going to migrate -- it's been in the works for a while) off of Dreamhost to another provider. No idea who that is though -- I keep forgetting to ask AB's webmaster if it's done yet and who the new provider is.