Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with hosting

Considerations when adding a periodic email update function to my website (with PHP's mail() function)

stuehler — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:56:47 -0800

I'm planning to add a feature to my website that will allow users to request periodic updates by email. I've cobbled together a little PHP script that uses the mail() function. It works perfectly when I test it myself, but I have no idea how this will work when released to a signficant number of users. One problem - I don't know how many users I'll have, so I'm trying to keep my up-front costs to a minimum. Optimistically, I'll have a few hundred users. In my wildest dreams, I'd have a few thousand.

Another problem - the email will be dynamically generated based on user-entered criteria - i.e., the user will log in, and enter some parameters. A php page will pull the appropriate data from the MySQL database, assemble the email, and send it out. Also, the emails will be sent on demand (not according to some predetermined schedule). So, I think that rules out something like Campaign Monitor's newsletter service.

My site is hosted at Media Temple, on a Grid Server.

Is this a disaster waiting to happen, or is that kind of demand/load trivial?

If the former, is there a better way to handle this? A reliable third-party service?

Many thanks in advance for any advice!

Cheers,
Matt Stuehler

Creating a website. Help!

cameradv — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 09:54:04 -0800

A friend recently purchased her own domain. She's a graphic designer, familiar with print design and article layout, who wants to create a website that might be used for self-promotion, learning web design, etc. She needs advice on hosting, and tools, and resources. I know this is a big, wide open subject, but the Hivemind is good at this sort of thing. Though facile with Indesign and Photoshop, she has no web design expertise. She does have Dreamweaver, but is a little overwhelmed.

She's a Mac user, if that matters.

How can I host an anonymous Wordpress blog, and not get unmasked?

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 11:38:36 -0800

How can I set up and host an anonymous Wordpress blog? I want to write about stuff, and I don't want other people to know who I am. How hard is this? I have read the EFF guide to anonymous blogging, I've got tor, Portable Firefox, and all that stuff... what I am concerned about is the actual domain registration and hosting.

The blog has the potential to get some real traffic, and to have some fairly determined people trying to figure out who I am. Or maybe I am just deluding myself, but I want to be very careful regardless. I'm not going to be doing anything illegal, so I don't need to be subpoena-proof, just amateur-sleuth-proof.

Do you trust regular wordpress hosts, or do you think I should go to some shady offshore host that won't ask me for any identifying details?

Do you think is there anything else I'm forgetting?

Email me at anonymousblog-askmefi@gmail.com if you want... thanks very much!!

Backup web interface?

Aanidaani — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 06:55:23 -0800

I recently got a new web host that I'm going to use for backup and I'm looking for a free AJAX web interface / CMS to manipulate files online. See inside... Essentially I'm trying to create my own hosted version of an online backup service like Dropbox or Mozy. I found a cheap host that gives me a lot of bandwidth/storage and I'd like to find a good web interface that I can use to access and manipulate my files when I'm not at home. Does anyone know of an open-source (or otherwise free) CMS that I can use for this?

Also, are there any programs (again preferably open-source) that I can download to regularly back up files to my server? I use Windows, OSX, and Linux. For Linux and OSX I know I can use a variant of Rsync, but I'm at a loss for Windows.

Fireboard plus Joomla: "Out of Memory" error.

darth_tedious — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 11:48:17 -0800

Joomla and Fireboard Memory Problem: Whenever I click on a post, Fireboard breaks and reports that it's out of memory. I've increased memory allocation with php.ini and .htaccess-- it's now at 64m-- and this has had no effect. I'm using Hostgator. Any suggestions on how to get Fireboard operating properly (or for that matter, a host which runs Fireboard easily)? Thanks.

Free linux dynamic dns hosting?

Thoth — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 08:39:35 -0800

What is the best Linux friendly free dynamic DNS hosting provider? I'm in the process of setting up a server at home that I would like to access from work etc, so I'm after a good free dns service that features an automatic update client which runs reliably on Linux.

A google search of "dynamic dns" and many other permutations thereof throws up what seems to be about a million "free" dns providers, so I would be eager to find out if there is any consensus on what's good out there.

Thanks very much!

Getting a simple https folder to call my own

tinkertown — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:22:40 -0800

Is there a hosting service that will provide me a directory to put some simple https (SSL) content without a lot of $$$ and effort? Basically I want to drop 10 GIF files in a directory that can be accessed by an https:// URL. This would let me create customized buttons for my secure mals-e shopping cart without triggering the "unsecured content" message on browsers.

My hosting service is Dreamhost but they have a ridiculous series of hoops you have to go through just to get a simple https server, including getting a static IP and certificates. I recall years ago my old hosting service let you just switch out http with https in the URL and get the same content, which Dreamhost doesn't allow. I tried.

Again I just want to put 10 GIF images in a directory of my own and not be paying $200 and spend half the afternoon setting things up. What would be the best route for this?

Share your IT infrastructure, hosting and version control thoughts for web development firms?

twiggy — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:47:38 -0800

I work for a small web development company. As we are growing, I have been tasked with looking at a few pieces of our business: - Version Control (Currently we don’t do it. We’re starting to use Subversion at my recommendation) - Development Environments (We don’t exactly have formalized dev/stage/production right now, more like just dev/production…) - Hosting (How we host our different clients varies… too much… we need a good solution) - Infrastructure (i.e. how we host our own email, how we back up our data) I already have some thoughts and recommendations, but they’re based on my personal experiences, so I thought I’d see what other experiences are out there and find out what other people/companies are doing… A few notes:
- We’re a small shop – a little less than 25 people. We’ve been growing quickly and won’t have a dedicated IT person for probably another year. As a result, we’ve currently just got an Outlook server (as in.. not full blown Microsoft Exchange) and the inability to do things like share calendars, etc, is causing some pain. Any recommendations for Exchange hosting or alternatives would be welcome.
- We do both Windows (ASP) and Linux (PHP) based web stuff, so as far as dev/stage/prod environment suggestions go – we basically need to do double that. Most of our projects have involved only one or two developers at a time, so version control and loose environments haven’t really caused any huge problems [yet?]. I feel pretty strongly that we should take preventive measures anyway, but I’d love to hear your thoughts/experiences.
- Since we don’t have an IT person here, we’re hosting stuff for our clients on sort of a seat-of-our-pants basis. We’d been partnering with a hosting company to an extent, but they’ve proven extremely unreliable. I’d definitely be interested in hearing what other web shops do as far as hosting things for their clients. I like the idea of finding a solid provider to partner with, rather than trying to bring it all in house… but what do you do?
- Finally, I’m pretty impressed with our backup practices, for the most part. Machines are backed up daily to both a RAID and alternating sets of tapes that are taken offsite. However, network-based backup would probably be much better. Problem is, our network connection stinks (a single T1) – but we’re looking at moving to business class Cable, which these days is much faster (and cheaper). Any thoughts on this move would be appreciated.

Looking for a new webhost

FritoKAL — Fri, 23 May 2008 15:36:19 -0800

Halp! I need a new host for a wiki. My RPG has a wiki, because we're wordy and five years old and ... well, we're dorks. Our current host is not so good for us anymore for reasons of database size. We're hosting our wiki on mediawiki - right now we're several revisions back, I am looking to upgrade is to 1.12.0 as soon as I can get things working again.

Because we are wordy and many years old and there's lots of us (it's a LJ RPG, mefi-mail me if you really want the links), the wiki is surprisingly big for a RPG. Our current host limits mySQL databases to 100mb, we're currently over that by about 45mb. (They say it's a 100mb limit and really give you about 140-150)

What we need now is a hosting solution that allows for a reasonable mySQL database size and some growth. Ideally, being able to pay for extra space as we need it is ideal, but starting out with something biggish is okay too.

Since we're on MediaWiki, we need mySQL and PHP. FTP access, SSH access and being able to transfer our domain are also necessary.

We are NOT: Willing to switch off Mediawiki, willing to cut back on the info in the wiki, or willing to NOT have a wiki. We love our wiki, the wordiness is necessary, and we just got 40 players trained on mediawiki, we're not training them on something new.

We don't need tons of filespace or bandwidth, just a place to put a wiki and a database, with room to grow. It should also be affordable.

Help! We're about to lose our domains!

fvox13 — Mon, 12 May 2008 09:48:01 -0800

How do we get our domains back from a less-than-scrupulous host? I work for a marketing firm that hosts about 25 sites. We decided to switch hosting providers, and our current provider is not cooperating (he claims we owe him money; my boss claims we paid him, etc).
We have until Wednesday, when he will be switching off all of our sites. It's especially complicated because he is also our registrar (a reseller through ENOM). We have hosting all set up on our new provider, but how do we get the domains transferred over?
Should we go through ENOM directly? Will they even listen to us? All of our domains have Plesk 8.2.0 installed... is there a way to hack our way into it? We have FTP access still; can we modify some file through FTP that will let the transfer go through?

What do we do? HELP!

What are some super awesome and reliable Canadian email hosting companies.

chunking express — Wed, 07 May 2008 11:54:49 -0800

What are some super awesome and reliable Canadian email hosting companies. A friends company is looking for a company to do email hosting for them. She doesn't want to use Google Apps for your domain, and she doesn't want to use an American company -- like Dreamhost for example. Can anyone recommend a Canadian company that does this? Preferably one that you or your company uses already. (She can google for Canadian email hosts as well as the next girl.)

Is NearlyFreeSpeech any good?

Rabulah — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 03:02:04 -0800

What are your experiences with NearlyFreeSpeech.net? I'm looking into getting some new hosting, and I've been attracted by NearlyFreeSpeech, based on a comment here on Ask, and this review. It's going to be for a Wordpress blog. I'm interested in finding out what the level of service is like.

Does anyone have any experience of this setup?

Also, I use the wp-db-backup plugin. It seems (to me, though I could well be wrong) that this plugin uses cron, which NFSN doesn't support. Does this mean that the plugin wont work automatically?

New website on old hosting

Rabulah — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 15:41:03 -0800

I have some hosting. I use oldtld.com currently as a TLD, to point people at it. On oldtld.com, there are several subdirectories, which I'll call /olddir1, /olddir2, etc. What I want is to be able to buy a new TLD - newtld.com - and point it at the same hosting, yet keep the two separate. I want to be able to keep directory structures like oldtld.com/olddir1, AND be able to have a new directory structure, like newtld.com/newdir1. I'd to have the hosting set up so that each TLD has it's own directories, but without someone being able to come along and type in oldtld.com/newdir1 and have the directory appear. I want to keep all the "old" and "new" sections separate, on the same hosting.

Confused yet? :D

Is this possible, and if so, what do I need to do/say to my hosting provider to make it happen?

Help me make my Barack Obama event successful

brandnew — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 02:54:10 -0800

So, I have twenty-some unknown Barack Obama supporters coming to my house on Sunday, and I don't know what to do. So, I had this great idea. I wanted to host an event where local Barack Obama supporters could come together to meet each other and discuss various political topics. Easy enough, I just went to Obama's web site and posted a "meet & greet" event open to all. Great idea, right?

Now, I have twenty-some random strangers planning to come to my house this Sunday evening, and I have no idea what to do! Please help me!

The session will run from 5:30 - 7:30 PM Sunday evening. I want to make this event as enjoyable and productive as possible for everyone. However, I've never hosted such an event (or any event for that matter), and I'm not sure what to expect. I'm afraid that a bunch of people will show up, stand around in silence for 15 minutes, and then leave.

What are some things that I can do to make the event most enjoyable for all? What can I prepare? Should I have literature available? Should I have snacks? Are there ice-breakers tactics that I can use to loosen people up? Any tips or tricks would be helpful...

NetSol, .Mac or other host for .ca domains?

Marquis — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 08:30:59 -0800

My friends have a webhosting account with Network Solutions. NetSol seems to be saying that you cannot point a .ca domain-name to that account. Is that really true? Are .Mac accounts compatible with .ca domains? If the answer to both is no, can you recommend a webhost for .ca domains? (They have already bought the domain.) [NB: I don't want to just use a page forwarder - that is, I want www.mysite.ca/blogs/newblog etc urls to work.] Thanks!

Webhosting reviews

mr. creosote — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 13:43:09 -0800

How do you find good shared web hosting, aside from word-of-mouth? Is there a "Consumer Reports" (or Ars Technica?) of the hosting world? I've found word-of-mouth from a handful of people to not be entirely reliable, so I'm wondering if there are some websites that actively review and rank web hosting providers in terms of uptime and reliability. Barring that, are there any good forums for discussing this topic?

The one forum I'm aware of offhand is WebmasterWorld, but their forum is atomized into a lot of other subjects and overall it's pretty much unsearchable.

Basically I have been on Dreamhost for a couple of years now but it seems like the wheels are starting to fall off. The downtime on mail, mysql, web, and panel is gradually increasing and I'm now seeing problems on a daily basis. I think it's time to pack my bags.

If you want to make recommendations for shared/dedicated hosting, that's fine, but resources and forums dedicated to webhost shopping are preferred.

Streaming audio service recommendation?

papafrita — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 23:37:08 -0800

Recommend a streaming audio service, please? A couple clients of ours have asked us to provide not only web hosting, but streaming audio of their radio stations as well. We use Ritech Hosting for all our hosting services, but their prices for streaming audio are too high.

Googling around, I've found some providers that charge as little as $21/mo for 56k quality and 200 listeners, which sounds quite reasonable, but not only have I never heard of them, I can't find any reviews either. Has any of you used the services of a company you could recommend?

Equally helpful would be if anyone could point to a forum or site with user reviews of such a service.

Thanks!

HostingFilter: Help me move my web presence(s)

micawber — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 13:13:43 -0800

HostingFilter: I need to move two web properties, two active domains, and some parked domains, and I'd like to it to be as economical as possible. I'm on Dreamhost, and besides the billing debacle (for me the issue wasn't that there was a debacle, it's the attitude - it's just not what I consider to be acceptable), there have been other issues - and it isn't the presence of issues I have a problem with, it's the attitude and tone of the response to the issues I can't accept.

I have two sites
Two domains with active email
Four domains that are parked or redirects
and a partridge in a pear tree.

One of the sites is Expression Engine and that's moving to Engine Hosting, because the Ellis Labs folks were completely stand-up when I had a problem with the site and DH was pointing fingers at my CMS. But it's going to mean I incur a more significant cost than just moving it to Whatever Webhost. I'm fine with that because of the support and the importance of this site to my career.

2) I have a MT site on its own domain. I got this domain years ago with the intention of it being 'my' domain, but with DH mail issues, I had to give that up. I'd like to reclaim that again.

However, I don't want to have to worry about care and feeding of the site, and care less about playing around with code to configure it like I used to. So I'd like it to live somewhere like Wordpress or Squarespace, but 1) with WP I can't have email*, and 2) with Squarespace I still have to find an email solution.

*I considered Google Apps for Your Domain to handle email but the horror stories and lack of support are a risk I consider to be unacceptable at this point.

I also need to get domains off GoDaddy.

To summarize:
1) Thoughts on hosting on WP or Squarespace with your own domain.
1a) I am platform agnostic, as long as I can import from MT with small loss of functionality, so any other platforms recommendations would be welcomed. That said, I haven't enjoyed MT and think TypePad is overpriced, and I Drupal and Mambo are NOT options because they will require too much work from me.

2) Email hosting options that are reputable and economical.

2a) Any thoughts on email hosting with Google Apps (not the free version, the commercial version).

3) I need to get my domains OFF GoDaddy and DH. Would like recommends on that, someone economical and reputable and whose control panel doesn't give you a migraine.

Thanks if you read through this and have anything to offer. Enjoy the day.

I'm an idiot about uploading stuff to the web

sully75 — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 06:59:50 -0800

Why do I suck so bad at uploading stuff to hosting sites? I'll say that I'm pretty good at the ol' computer thing. People ask me how to do stuff. I have a magic touch with applications. But I suck at this web stuff. I know little bits of HTML and all. But uploading stuff to web hosting accounts seems insanely complicated to me. I have been trying to get a handle on this for years, but never get very far.

Right now I'm trying to upload a slideshow I did in a program called Soundslides to a webhosting account I have with Godaddy.com. It's a folder with a bunch of files in it. Should I zip it and then upload it and then can I unzip it afterwards? I just tried that and the site did its uploading thing, and then...poof. No file in the file manager.

Is there a tutorial somewhere that is very basic and could explain to me how to deal with uploading to a server? I've never been better than mediocre at this. I have tons of cool ideas for slideshows (I'm a photographer and also do audio recording) but I'm stymied by this seemingly simple problem).

AND is there a web hosting service that is good for people who for whatever reason can't figure this stuff out? Something that makes things totally obvious?

I have this Logitech just festering in my desk drawer; pls help.

dorothy humbird — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 23:43:13 -0800

I'm in the market for a non-skeezy, community-oriented webcam hosting site. I'm pretty sure I came across such a thing several weeks ago but have no idea how to go about tracking it down again. Bear with me, this might be a little vague:

What I recall of the site I stumbled across is browsing through several pages with thumbnail views of webcams, all featuring people - no backyard monitoring systems, no street views documenting traffic patterns, no chicken coops - but none evidently adult oriented. Clicking on a thumbnail brought you to that webcam's main page, which featured a video (on or offline) and a chat box (this may have been optional, but was part of at least two or three of the webcam pages I found), and also possibly a comments/guestbook field. There was no apparent requirement to register in order to use the chat boxes, and there was certainly no need to sign up to view the webcams, as I was browsing without taking any action to identify myself.

I seem to also recall that the default color scheme for the cam pages was black (this may just have been for one webcam though), and it looked pretty slick - kind of social networking site oriented. The main feel that I got from this website was that it was there to connect people to people, much like Facebook or MySpace, but with webcams.

Please help me track this, or a similar site, down! Here are a few specs I'm looking for in a webcam hosting site, even if no one can track down the exact one I dug up the other week:

- no registration required for viewers
- some attention paid to design appeal
- the more web 2.0, the better
- nobody taking their pants off. I have no interest in being a cam girl, or being treated like a potential cam girl, so the less this is a pervasive theme on the site, the better.
- it'd also be great if I had the ability to somehow make it password-protected, but I realize I may just be dreaming now.

So... I'm not dreaming this ALL up, am I?

Seeking alternative to box.net

namith — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 14:40:39 -0800

I'm looking for some type of alternative to box.net. I do web development and I'd like to move all my project assets off my local machine. I've got about 100 projects totaling about 50GB. Read more about managing access... Box.net seems to be the ideal solution, but for 50 GB of storage it's going to cost me almost $50 per month. I was wondering if I could make something work with either a standard website hosting account (most have tons of space) or something like Amazon's S3 service.

Here are my requirements:
1. Offsite (non-public/protected) storage of about 50MB - mainly we'll be storing, photoshop files, images, documents, etc.
2. The ability to share certain directories with other users (10 max) as needed (meaning I would turn access on and off)
3. An easy way to connect (i.e. FTP, SFTP) - I don't think a web front end would work as it is a pain to download and then upload - I'd prefer to 'mount a remote drive'

Here is what I'm not sure about: versioning and simultaneous access. Is there a way to avoid more than one person accessing the files at once.

Note I've also looked into Basecamp and Backpack. Not exactly what I need.

Any ideas? Thanks.

Help solve my DNS woes

puffin — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 10:57:01 -0800

Help me figure out this DNS problem with my website... My friend has a VPS, and has very kindly offered to host my website. So far I have copied over my entire home folder from my old host (through Cpanel) to his server. I can successfully access it when point my browser to the new server's IP address (http://208.79.232.248/~crumb). I also changed the name servers over, and this change is reflected when I do a whois search for my domain. But something seems to be amiss, because when I go to my domain (crumb.cc), nothing loads. When I use Cpanel's Network Tools to check the domain, I get an "Host crumb.cc not found: 2(SERVFAIL)" error message. It seems like the name is just not connecting with the new IP address, despite the fact that I have changed the name servers and that Cpanel even lists "crumb.cc" as the main domain.

Is there something obvious that we should check? What could be the problem? Neither my friend know much about how DNS and name servers work. Also, my registrar is GoDaddy, if it makes any difference.

Help with Podcast hosting, uploading and creating a iTunes podcast?

caveat empress — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 09:25:06 -0800

Any free Podcast hosting out there? I need help with Podcast hosting, uploading and creating a iTunes podcast! While many of the Profs at my University podcast their lectures, I have one that does not.

He allows me to record his lectures and share them with any student that wants - as long as I handle the details. I have been recording them on my iPod and then burning them onto CD's - and the pool is getting tooooo large.

So, I would like to create a podcast, and I want free hosting. I signed up for Switchpod, which seemed to be a great deal (450mb free!) as our lectures are 1 hour and 15 minutes a go, problem is I cannot upload wav files to their site.

I could use some help!

How can I change the format of these files - or where can I find good Podcast hosting so that I can upload the Podcast to iTunes?

Any other advice is also appreciated!

What's up with http://www.dnn4free.com?

caroljean63 — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 21:45:34 -0800

Does anyone know what's up with http://www.dnn4free.com? (Or how to get back the data for son's History Day project???) DS is working on a project (web site) for National History Day. They created and stored their site at http://www.dnn4free.com so everyone in the group could work on it at their convenience. However, they didn't make a backup - they were getting ready to burn it onto a CD to turn in for the competition (Due Monday!) and now dnn4free has been offline since this afternoon. Besides chalking this up to experience - save or perish - any ideas of what to do if it doesn't come back willingly?

fast, solid, non-lame name

allterrainbrain — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 04:21:46 -0800

Reliable paid file-hosting service that allows hotlinking and has a neutral, professional domain name? I'm switching to a new web hosting company because its policies are clearly right for me. This company bills according to bandwidth usage rather than on a monthly flat-fee basis. So I'll want to host my large media files with a different company, and hotlink to them from my sites.

- I want to pay in the $10/mo neighborhood if possible, to host maybe 600MB to 800MB total of mp3s and large images (all of which I own the rights to);

- I anticipate under 10GB of downloads per month total, (occasionally spiking higher, in which case I'd like non-crazy overage fees);

- I want ftp access for myself and for two or three other people (but I don't need any public ftp access, just regular http hotlinking);

- I'll go for the most neutral and professional-sounding name I can find (I don't want these files getting served from, like, myfilebuddy.com or easywebhost123.com).

This could be a dedicated file-storage company, a web hosting company, an online backup service (that allows hotlinking and the amounts of bandwidth I'm expecting) or anything else.