Building Blocks - Hosting

Blue Dragon To The Rescue

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 18:15:00 -0000

As I explained in my last post, I started to run into issues with my Railo installation as it was getting hit too hard by requests. In all fairness, Railo is beta software and I was a bit weary of putting beta software into a production environment anyway. With all of the hype about Railo nowadays, I had forgotten about Open BlueDragon which has been available for over a year now. The nice thing about BlueDragon is that is was a fork of the commercial version of the product, so it is very robust and mature. Plus it is licensed under the GNU GPL (v3) so there are not many restrictions on its use. [More]

Choosing A Slice And A CF Server

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:12:00 -0000

The slice server, or VPS, market is getting bigger and bigger. I pointed out a few hosts in the last post, and some other users commented with their own. They all seem to be in the same ballpark of $40-$60 for a 1GB memory slice with 20-40GB of storage. Some are as cheap as $20, but most people recommend at least 512K for a Railo server. I was shopping for a slice of about 1GB as I want to host a number of sites of the box. [More]

In Search Of A New Webhost

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:54:00 -0000

I look back on my days when I used to run all of my own servers and cringe. I had 2 Windows 2000 Server machines and 2 running RedHat Linux, plus some development machines. Then there were the RAID arrays - 2 big Dell Poweredge boxes that held a bunch of SCSI drives which could barely be lifted when everything was in there and barely provided any storage by today's standards. And then there was the administrative headache of managing all of those servers; keeping them patched, secure, and running smoothly. It was a big task, to say the least, and something that kept me on-call 24/7 for way too long. The worst of all, though, was the bill I received every month for bandwidth and co-location of my equipment at a local ISP. [More]