Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with web and Hosting

Technical/legal questions about a site that will parody a trademarked brand

Riki tiki — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 19:59:14 -0800

I'm thinking of creating a political parody website that may step on some toes and/or trademarks. I have a few technical and legal questions about how best to go about this. So I had an idea for lambasting a prominent political party in the United States. I was shocked to find that a really obvious domain name for that party was available, but it may infringe upon a trademark for that party.

I know YANAL and YANML, but a little guidance as to the prudent first steps here would be appreciated. I would assume (but correct me if I'm wrong) that free-speech protections of satire and parody may protect me from some of the trademark issues. But I also sense that those lines may become fuzzier if I ever appear to draw a profit from the site. Is there anything I can do to reasonably ensure that my site is on firm legal ground without the cost of consulting an actual attorney?

On more of a technical level, does anyone know of a good hosting company that could be relied upon to keep the site running even if they got big scary letters on legal stationery from that political party?

This idea is still in the brainstorming stages, so I'm probably imagining a bigger future for it than will realistically happen... but I'd rather be overprepared than underprepared.

GMP math friendly web host?

wmeredith — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:02:13 -0800

Sys Admin filter: I'm looking for cheap web hosting that is out of the box GMP math friendly. Does anyone have a good recommendation?

Researching website options

titanium_geek — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 07:03:04 -0800

Researching options for all things website: hosting, domain name registration and DNS. Can you help me narrow it down? Hello Mefites, this is my first ask.mefi question. I'm writing a report for a 'professional writing' course. We will be assessed on the quality of the writing, not the content.

Scenario: you say "I would like a website for my small company."
I say: "Well, you need content (I have this covered), a domain name, and hosting."

What do I say next? I know I can google web hosting providers, but there are lots! What are the good and/or popular companies out there?

I have on the list already: GoDaddy (my own domain bought through them, looking to change.)
nearlyfreespeech.net
mediatemple

These are companies I've seen mentioned on my journeys around the web, but I'd like more recommendations please.

Help me create an RSS feed from a site updated daily

Merlin144 — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 12:12:24 -0800

How can I create an RSS feed from a wordpress site that doesn't add new posts, only updates the SAME post every day? Please direct me to online tools I can utilize based on specifics below. Specifics:
1. The website I want to create the feed from is: www.serveraday.com, which is updated every morning with a great dedicated server deal.
2. They update the SAME wordpress post from 6/25/2008 with the NEW information in this post each and every day. This prevents most feed creation tools, including feedburner, from updating a feed, as they think it's the same post.
3. I need to be able to set the tool I end up using to refresh on a daily basis, to capture the update on the site as soon as possible after it's posted.
4. I am not the owner of this site, just a person that wants to find great deals and share them through an RSS feed!

Thank you!!

When registering a domain name, should I pay - annually - to hide these details from the Whois database?

Kirn — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 05:16:22 -0800

When registering a domain name, should I pay - annually - to hide these details from the Whois database? I'm in the process of registering 2 domain names (with fasthosts.co.uk/ukreg) and have been presented with the following option:

Hide your contact details for this domain
£4.99 pa per domain
Activate domain privacy to stop these contact details being displayed in the publically-accessible WhoIs database.

£10/year isn't a massive amount of money, but it isn't nothing. Should I tick this option? Do people, generally? Do you? What am I getting by doing it, and what am I risking if I don't? Is there a serious risk of identity fraud? (FWIW, the domain names I'm registering would both have my full name in them.)

Thanks!

What programming language should I use for a Digg-like web site?

jackson5 — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:37:41 -0800

What programming language should I use for a Digg-like web site? I'm no web developer, but I already have a high traffic picture gallery which I want to turn into a digg-like picture voting site.

I'm going to hire a developer and would like your recommendations on which programming language I should target for the site?

My site currently does about 2 million pageviews per month already, so I expect the traffic to go up. The programming language should easily handle a lot of traffic on 1 dedicated server.

I keep hearing a lot about Ruby on Rails. I'm familiar with PHP/MySQL, but not sure if that is the best programming language for this project.

I also keep hearing a lot about cloud hosting. This sounds like a good option as well.

Basically, to sum up my question: I want to post a "programmer wanted" ad for this project. What should I be looking for from a developer?

My application requests an XML file and I need to plan how to host that file so it's always available and zippy

Your Time Machine Sucks — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 05:17:36 -0800

Please give me some input on web hosting planning for a small XML file which might get a lot of requests. I'm working on an application which allows the user to load an XML file. The XML is less than 2K and will probably be loaded once per usage session, which could happen a few times a day. I can't speculate about how many users there will be, but the outcome that I need to (over)plan for is the one where there are metric fuckloads right out of the gate.

How would you host this file to make sure it is always reachable and zippy? Would you trust one single hosting company to host it? Which one/which plan? Which hosts would you avoid like the plague? Or would you put your eggs in multiple baskets and have a couple of hosts which the app can try in sequence to see if they are reachable? I'm willing to pay for bulletproof uptime and reliability, doesn't have to be a cheapass plan, but it might not be cost-effective to pay for a hosting plan oriented towards customers who need huge amounts of bandwidth or root access rather than the ability to handle lots of simultaneous low-bandwidth requests of one dinky file.

Thanks very much for your input!

What reseller tools should I use to keep track of my clients sites?

xanderbeedle — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 15:10:48 -0800

I'm a web developer who has to handle a couple of my clients websites. Mostly small, static sites without much traffic, but a couple of Ruby on Rails websites too. I don't particularly want to get a full-on reseller account as my clients don't really need to access their control panels and be billed through a separate system etc. At the moment I'm just using a decent hosting account with all of the sites running in their own domains. I'd like to know what reseller tools you guys use to help you keep track of your various websites / monitor their progress and uptime / bill your clients for the hosting?

How do I put an end to this reoccurring CMS/hosting security breach?

serial_consign — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 23:06:38 -0800

How do I put an end to this reoccurring CMS/hosting security breach? I am using Drupal as a CMS and all my sites are hosted through the same provider. On a few of my installs (version 6.8 - the latest of Drupal) mysterious directorys full of porn and prescription drug HTML pages keeps occuring. Said host said this was due to a security breach in my CMS, which I do believe. How do I stop it though? I delete these folders when I notice inbound traffic in analytics but I want to solve this problem once and for all. If anybody has any advice or experience with this kind of situation please clue me in.

Looking for web host that's hospitable.

aristan — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 02:18:10 -0800

I need an inexpensive ($20 or less a month) webhost that allows multiple domains and Movable Type installations and can handle OK & occasionally large traffic... I've gotten dugg 3 times! Any suggestions? I've had the same host for all my domains for several years now. I picked them because at the time they were cheap and offered better service than my previous host. But sadly, the service has gone down hill.

They revamped their help system about 2 years ago and I have never been able to log in. So, when I need help with anything, I have to submit thru their contact form and it gets flagged as "low priority". They've never been able to explain why it doesn't work nor have they ever bothered to fix it.

I had the previous experience where I found that my site and several others stored on the same server had been hacked and basically I had to repair it myself. No idea how long that had gone on. And now, I tried to log into movable type on a few of my domains and none of the installations work. I get 500 error codes for most of them, but on my main domain, I get "scgiwrap: Caller must be the nobody user" and I have no freaking clue what that means.

So, I'm finally tired of it all and I want a new webhost... but since it's been roughly 6 years since I've shopped for one... I don't know what is a good price or what I should be looking for... anyone want to help me out?

Here's what I want:

- Inexpensive, I currently pay $20 a month & want to keep there or lower
- Multiple Domains, I currently own 8 domains and host via a reseller account. I'd like to either get a reseller account (in case I want to rent out some hosting, as I have done before) or host all of them from one account (making it easier on my nerves!).
- The ability to install Movable Type, I currently host several blogs and have another one in the works. I enjoy movable type and would like to continue to use it. So I'll need to be able to install it... and have it work at least every once and awhile.
- The ability to install Vanilla. I use Vanilla for a forum site (ok... it's a WoW guild. I'm a nerd.)
- The ability to survive a Digg, a BoingBoing and a Mefi-ing all in one day. I have been dugg 3 times, boingboinged a couple, got a mention in the Advocate (from Elijah Wood no less) and one of these days I dream of getting a mention in the Blue... I can dream, can't I? I need a webhost who can survive it.
- Features at least similar to what I currently have: 2.5GB of storage, 45GB of monthly transfer, unlimited emails & ftp accounts, MySQL, PHP, etc etc. I'm looking for close, but I can survive with a bit less if need be.

Personal Web-Based Backup Interface

perrce — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 18:16:29 -0800

What would be a good web interface for a personal backup site? I recently read these articles which started making me a little paranoid about losing some files that I rely on frequently. I already have a backup, but I don't have an off-site backup, and I've decided the time has come for one.

My goals for the off-site backup are that they be easily accessible to me (and others I permit) from Linux/Win/Mac with no special software, and that they stay secure from the general public. (Reasonably secure -- we're not talking state secrets or personal information, just documents.) Although I already use and like Amazon S3 and JungleDisk for other purposes, I don't think they are the right tool for this job since I don't want to install JungleDisk everywhere I want to access my files. I also don't want to rely on commercial services like Mozy (et al.) for long-term reliability and privacy. (Call me paranoid.)

So I've pretty much decided that I want to serve these files from a page on my website (via commercial webhosting). The question is, what interface to use? I know I could dump the directory structure to the webserver, and protect it all with an .htaccess file, but in this day of Web 2.0, there's got to be a better interface for this kind of thing. I guess at this point, it would also be useful to know that I'm talking about ~1000 files at a total of ~150MB (yes, Mega). So it's a bunch of relatively small files. (Mostly ODF format from OpenOffice, as well as the occasional .doc or PDF file.)

Can you suggest a web-based CMS/blog/something that would serve as good interface? Bonus points for something that will do automagic backups or syncs from Linux.

(I already saw this similar question, but no one ever answered his question.)

How much should I expect to pay for someone to create me a simple two page website and where is the best/cheapest place to host it?

davidstandaford — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 10:03:50 -0800

How much should I expect to pay for someone to create me a simple two page website and where is the best/cheapest place to host it? I have an idea for one of those simple one word website and since I know just enough web stuff to end up messing it up I would rather pay someone to do it for me.

The url of the website will be a question and the first page of the site will be a one word answer (with a link to an external page) and at the bottom of the page it will say "more", with a link to the second page.

The second page will contain one or two sentences explaining the website and an archive of all of the pages that the one word answer on the front page has linked to.

There will also be a basic free tracking service that I would like them to set up on the front page.

How much should I expect to pay someone to create this website? I will provide them with a log-in for the site that I have hosting on and the text (html) for the two pages.

What is the best (cheapest) place that I can find to host this, assuming it is a tiny website that gets a small amount of traffic. Preferably, I would like a site that will also handle domain ownership, as I have not bought the domain yet, but it is still available.

I would like to update the website nearly daily, changing the site that the one word answer links to, and adding that new site to the second (archive) page. Basically, however the site is set up, if I have the html for the those two pages, will I just be able to make the changes on my local copy and then upload it/ftp it to the site?

This is a political site for the US election... should I be concerned at all about potentially hiring someone to make this website who has strong opposing political views. Would it be good to be upfront about the political aspect of the site and which side it is for?

I don't know anything about website security... is such a set-up (two pages) likely to be a secure set-up, or is there a bunch of other steps I should take to make sure this isn't hacked/corrupted by spammers or something.

Is there anything else I should be aware of when trying to hire someone for this type of project?

What's up with my website?

attercoppe — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 11:09:06 -0800

Why does my web page work with a www prefix and not so much without? I have a domain and hosting account with GoDaddy. My "site" currently consists of only one page with my Google calendar displayed. If I direct a browser to www.myaddress.info, it works fine; if I go to myaddress.info, sometimes it works, but sometimes I get a partial - just the frame from around the calendar and my name. It doesn't seem to be consistent, browser-specific, or have to do with changes to my GCal.

Any thoughts? Anything I can do, or is it a fluke on the hosting side - slow/bad DNS propagation or some such? Should I fiddle with DNS redirection via my GoDaddy account to simply redirect the sometimes-working address to the always-working one?

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.

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?

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?

Quality Dedicated Hosting that allows Bittorrent Tracker? Have Budget.

mrflip — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 18:01:41 -0800

I will soon be distributing a bunch of large scientific and research datasets, all entirely legal for redistribution, many as large as a few gigabytes. Bittorrent is the best solution for this. Many respectable webhosting sites don't allow Bittorrent trackers; too many of those that do seem fly-by-night. I have a budget for this and want something respectable and reliable. Recommendations? My current host (Bluehost) has 6000GB/transfer a month, but I hear that these large caps can often be illusory; I want to be prepared for one to ten TB of traffic per month. I also need to be able to receive similarly large datasets, which I think will be much easier over bittorrent than asking folks to POST >1GB over ADSL and have it crap out after 3 hrs transfer (not to mention hitting CPU limits).

Amazon S3, at $0.18/GB, would be ~ $1000/mo for 6000 GB. I've reviewed most of the previous hosting q'ns, including Dealing with spikes in website popularity, but none of those suggestions make this work financially.

This clearly calls for bittorrent, but I've had real trouble finding dedicated hosting that will allow me to install a tracker. Bitrot has happened to the last question along these lines, and too many of the directories for tracker sites seem populated by rug merchants and fly-by-night operations.

I'm willing to spend money -- preferably in the $100-$200/mo range -- and want something respectable and reliable. If you tell me it will cost more than that then so be it. I'm figuring that the bittorrent solution (combined with throttling, ratios and a cooperative userbase) will keep me in the 1 TB/month range.

Can you recommend dedicated hosting that will allow me to run a tracker?

Need Web Host with easy features

johnd101 — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 12:39:29 -0800

Were can I find another web hosting company that offers this type of hosting? Our church is the process of revamping our website and is wanting to use some a web host that offers this type of solution for hosting. http://www.discoversky.com/ We like that end users can edit their own content really easy and add different modules onto a page on the fly. We need easy!! What back end are they using to accomplish this? Is this like Dotnetnuke? What other platforms could we use that are easy to use? (No programing involved) Thanks for the help.

Where can I have a huge MySQL database hosted?

hatmandu — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 14:03:25 -0800

Where can I have a huge MySQL database hosted? My current host only allows databases of up to 100Mb in size, but I have one of just over 1Gb - anyone know a web host that will allow such a thing? (I'm in the UK if that matters.) Cheaply, of course!

easy setup email hosting

andrewzipp — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 13:36:16 -0800

I need to move a domain name, and set up email hosting for 200 addresses, with minimal downtime. I could do this through Dreamhost, but they're asking to have every single name entered in separately. Is there an email host that can set these up in bulk? I don't need web mail, just a new POP3 address.

Looking for simple, free, web forms

carterk — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 20:58:39 -0800

I'm looking for a web service that would host, for free, a web form that would allow kids to sign up for time slots for one-on-one conferences in my school library. I have a couple open periods in my week wherein kids come down to the library and talk about their current reading. It's a great opportunity, but if too many kids show then some end up sitting and waiting without ever having a conference. My idea is to have a web form that would show these open periods and allow kids to sign up. I could check the form to see who was coming, and what book they wanted to discuss. Other kids could check to see if all the slots were filled.

So- I know this is a simple piece of programming, but I have almost no web savvy. My district web person told me to use Dreamweaver to hook to a database. I'm thinking somebody must host a site that allows something like this. Any suggestions?

Last miniquestion. 6 months or a year ago, I heard about a novel system for doing web forms that avoided the use of databases entirely, embedding the content (that would normally drop into a database) into a script instead. I'm sure I'm butchering the concept, but does anyone recognize what I'm talking about? I may have heard about it on askme...

Free Wordpress hosting

daksya — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 07:30:52 -0800

Looking for customizable & free Wordpress (or other) hosting I've finally decided to restart my blog and have chosen Wordpress, given its pages facility and skinning.

I didn't find most themes at Wordpress.com very inviting and among the ones I did, there was at least some minor quirk. Now, it costs $15 annually to avail of 'Custom CSS' there and I'm just not ready to spend any money yet. So, I'm looking for either

1)free Wordpress hosting with ability to put up own skins and tweak the CSS
or
2)free webspace, where I can install Wordpress

I've searched this past week and can't seem to pin down this information. I don't require much storage (~50M) or much bandwidth, no MU capability. A subdomain would be nice. Lack of ads would be nice, but not required, as long as they don't scream or pop-up.

Also, if there's a free host with another blogging engine spotting similar features to Wordpress, I'd consider it, but no Blogger.

Finally, if there's a credible, updated directory or comparison of bloghosts and/or webspace, that would be helpful too.

Who do you recommend for website design in the Orlando, Tampa, Lakeland area?

the_binary_blues — Mon, 28 May 2007 09:58:59 -0800

Who do you recommend for website design in the Orlando, Tampa, Lakeland, FL area? I am looking for someone to design a solid site for my realestate business and I a want them to use a content management system so that I can edit it later. Who should I use? Pric doesnt matter if they will do an amazing job. I wish to deal with someone who is local or at least proximal to me

Dealing with spikes in website popularity

robbie01 — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 11:02:40 -0800

Web-hosting quandary: how to best prepare for the potential of a surge in high-bandwidth traffic? I'm launching a website that may have an initial large spike of traffic. Storage space and number of visitors doesn't concern me so much as that I will have a few large, high-definition videos available for download, perhaps in the neighborhood of 100MB each or more, as well as some lower-resolution versions.

I currently use AT&T/Yahoo! Small Business as a web host, with a 200GB data transfer usage rate per month, and I pay about $12/month for this basic plan. To deal with spikes in traffic that exceed your allowance, they allow you to either automatically be charged an additional $5/5GB, or to automatically shut down your website if your allowance is exceeded. I've heard horror stories of people getting stuck with insanely high hosting bills when a site gets slashdotted or otherwise picked up by the blogospshere, and I don't want that. Nor do I want the site to become unavailable at the peak of its popularity.

Although I'm probably overrating the site's potential, I want to plan for the worst case scenario and say that the content on the website will be wildly popular and far exceed my current allowance. After the initial spike (maybe a month or two) I expect traffic to die down to almost nill.

Should I opt for the extra $5/5GB (seems kind of high considering I pay $12/200GB) or consider moving to another host altogether that perhaps caters to high bandwidth sites or offers a no-limit package? I know Media Temple is a popular host and have a $20/month plan that allows 1TB of data transfer, and I've heard Dreamhost is another popular option.

What say you?

How do I manage two domains on the same hosting package?

rocketman — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 18:42:43 -0800

I'm new to editing .htaccess files, and I'd like some help managing multiple domains on one hosting package. I'm trying to setup a website for my wife - she's registered her own domain, and I offered to host it for her. But I can't for the life of me figure out how to get both of our domains to resolve on my hosting package.

As it is, my website (let's call it www.foo.com) is up and running. I want her domain (let's call this one www.bar.com) to resolve as that domain - all I can seem to figure out to do is set up bar.foo.com, which is not what I want.

I *think* this requires editing the .htaccess file, but I can't for the life of me figure out what I'd need to do. I can pay my web host to do this, but they're just going to put a frame around my wife's site and pull in content from a subdirectory, which seems unelegant and somehow backwards.

So - how do I get two domains running on one share of webspace? Thanks in advance