Live from Vancouver Island

I’ve been using DreamHost since July 2004 to satisfy all my hosting needs, but last fall the problems began. It seemed that every time I went to work on one of my sites, the server would be down. Sometimes it would come up again in a few minutes - sometimes I had to issue a trouble ticket and wait. Then when it was up, it was slow. Sometimes dead slow. Turns out there are over 1300 users on my shared server, and load regularly shoots up above 150% available CPU. To top it off, I don’t like how their web panel queues up many of the actions you request of it - more waiting. Putting up with all this was causing a big motivation problem for me.

So over the Christmas break I started researching alternatives. I don’t need a high-end solution, but liked the idea of my own server instance. For some odd reason I actually like admin stuff, installing software, and just generally being in control. It reminds me of my old days running a BBS. Anyway, after looking at several options, I settled on a Slicehost VPS (virtual private server). It’s basically a Xen instance of your choice of Linux distribution, hosted on a high-end server. It doesn’t include a ton of storage, but what you do get is fast and mirrored using RAID level 1. It doesn’t include a lot of bandwidth, but you can actually use what you’re given and overage charges are reasonable.  And the guaranteed CPU and memory availability ensures it will never be slow unless the load is your own.

So far I’ve been very impressed. It took only about 2 minutes to sign up and receive login details for my new VPS. Their web panel is streamlined and light, performance is great, and everything has been exactly as advertised.

If you haven’t seen it yet, ASUS has released a sub-notebook with 4GB flash-based drive that ships with a custom variant of Linux.  NCIX now has them in stock priced at $400.  This machine has an SD slot so the storage is easily increased, and the solid-state drive means no worries about bumps and motion while in use. Combine that with good battery life, fast startup/shutdown, built-in wifi, 3 USB ports, and super light weight (<1KG).

In addition to FeedBurner, I have now setup Google Analytics on the site to get a better idea of traffic sources. It’s not too surprising traffic has fallen off since I didn’t post anything for like a year and a half! For some reason it did kind of drop abruptly though - I suspect Google re-ranked the site lower because it was getting stale. Most of what remains are hits for the Ghost Video I posted about 3 years ago. Online video has sure come a long way since then. At the time when this video went popular I was worried about going over my hosting bandwidth limitations, but since then they’ve increased a couple of orders of magnitude so even those levels wouldn’t come close.

In this Google TechTalk Goranka Bjedov presents on using open source tools for performance testing at Google. A good introduction to the subject, encouraging regular, repeatable and realistic tests. Tips include monitoring the performance on your supporting infrastructure (eg. data generators) and keeping the network simple. I particularly like the concept of storing results in a database for future reference - would have been nice to see the schema they use for this. References to JMeter, Grinder, and OpenSTA.

Having completed the WordPress upgrade, I spent some time tonight integrating FeedBurner’s features into the site. The RSS feed is now redirected through their system, and the stats scripts are embedded into the WordPress templates.

WordPress integrates so nicely with these third-party systems it’s an unexpected benefit from the upgrade. Not to mention the more contemporary look has inspired me to try and start posting regularly again.

After much, much procrastination and a week off from work, I’ve upgraded the site from MoveableType 3 to use WordPress 2.3. Bruce@warpedvisions suggested using the subversion method which was really easy to implement at DreamHost. The coolest feature of the new WordPress is the native tagging support, so I’ll be dropping the category system in favour of that. The old RSS link should be forwarding now thanks to some .htaccess magic.

Feeling a bit stuck myself lately, I came across this great post which reminded me of the value, or blessing, of stuckness. Evelyn Rodriguez quotes from one of my favourite books, Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Speaking of self-monitoring systems, Amazon has opened up their new S3 “Simple Storage Service”, targetted at web developers. The costs are a low $0.15/GB/month and $0.20/GB transferred.

The system uses standard SOAP and REST interfaces, and individual objects can by of virtually any size: 1 byte through 5 GB. No minimums, no constraints, just pure raw storage.

What makes this even more interesting is that, like Google, the system is built from cheap off-the-shelf hardware and is fully hotswappable and self-repairing. If a node fails, it can be removed and replaced by a technician with zero downtime.

Such a system permits development of large-scale web services with greater ease than a traditional hosting package. Dreamhost, for example, charges $1/month for 10MB of storage, and $0.50/GB for bandwidth on their high end vhost accounts. And moving to a dedicated server brings in the constraints of the hardware.

I think the trick with developing for S3 will be in indexing the data so that the queries between the web server and the raw storage don’t use up a huge amount of bandwidth. This would be great for a site like Flickr, but many services would require running reports or doing data mining on the raw data. Perhaps if Amazon offers hosting packages that can access the S3 data pool at a greatly reduced transfer rate, this will open up even more possibilities.

This had me ROFL over the SCO/Linux battle. (Be sure to click “begin” to start the story.)

I recently bought a copy of Quicken and painstakingly entered all of my investment transactions for the past several years in order to run some analysis on them. What I found was that the default reporting screens that come setup with Quicken are pretty much useless, but the necessary features are there if you are willing to dig a bit.

The Portfolio Performance tab is largely setup to show results based on Gain/Loss, which is a very simplistic share price to cost basis comparison. For investments that re-invest income, such as money market or income funds, the cost basis will include the re-investment amount and skew the results. I was seeing zero returns on a money market fund with a constant share price, and negative returns on an income fund where the share value slipped slightly. This despite both funds paying interest income every month and my net balance obviously rising.

Much better is to go to one of several Custom screens in the Portfolio tab, right-click, and use the Customize option to add the various ROI columns to the report. These are net of re-investments and much more useful to look at.