Sail is a great and much more affordable alternative to traditional and managed WordPress hosting. It’s a free and open source CLI tool to provision and manage WordPress applications in the DigitalOcean cloud. Sail logo While the 1-click WordPress installer does the job for many DigitalOcean users, it’s very limited for power-users and developers. Sail CLI fills this gap, providing a...
Lesson Learned: Backup Before Upgrading
Friday started with off quite crazy with a surprise from my web hosting server. I don’t really know why but I decided to run an apt-get upgrade last night and everything seemed fine until this morning when I was unable to log back on via SSH. So what did I do? Reboot, obviously and it broke everything. Ping was lost, services are down, websites not working, oh my! I know my web hosting...
How To Deploy & Publish a .NET MVC Application
This is the second post in the series called .NET MVC From a PHP Developer’s Perspective where I discuss the pros and (mostly) cons of jumping onto the .NET bandwagon. Keep in mind that I’m a php/unix guy. I’m now at week 5 and I recently deployed my .NET MVC application to a web hosting provider. This was done for a testing and debugging purpose, since I had to become familiar...
Driving the (ve) Server at Media Temple
It’s been a few weeks now since Media Temple launched their new (ve) Server and I’ve been testing it out for a few days now. I’m actually hosting my blog there to experience some real traffic load and my first impressions are awesome! I started off with the simplest 512 MB server and transferred a few websites to the new platform. I’m not too used to the Ubuntu Linux...
Optimizing Your Amazon Web Services Costs
I’ve been with Amazon for quite a long time now and you must have heard that their web hosting services aren’t very cheap. The average total of one instance per month (including EBS, S3 and all the others) was around $120 at the start. That was back in July 2009 when I had no idea about how all this stuff works. With a lot of experimenting I managed to drop my instance per month costs...
Cloud Tips: Amazon EC2 Email & S3 CNAME Issues
So you moved your blog or website (or whatever) to Amazon EC2 and wondering why your e-mail notices have stopped working? Now I know there’s bunch of articles about the EC2 email issues, and most of them state that the letters are getting into the spam boxes or aren’t getting delivered at all, because Amazon’s IP pool has been blacklisted by most e-mail providers. Don’t...
Working With Amazon EC2: Tips & Tricks
It’s been a while now since I’ve been hosting on Amazon Web Services and I’d just like to point out some issues I had and quick ways of solving them. We’re gonna talk about setting up a server that would serve not only you, but your clients too, cause $100/mo is quite expensive, isn’t it? So let’s begin and keep this as straightforward as possible. If you...
Have You Tried the Amazon Web Services?
Amazon EC2, EBS, S3.. I’ve been looking for the perfect web hosting for over two years now. Is this it? A few months ago I really liked MediaTemple cause they offered pretty good US hosting starting from $20/mo, which was quite good for the Foller.me project, so at the starting point I chose them. Their service is cool, definitely worth the money, but. A few weeks have passed, along with...
Linux Dummy: Unscheduled Maintenance
If anyone of you have tried to access the blog yesterday night, you might have noticed that nothing was working. Sorry! I’ll say it straight, it’s completely my fault. Yesterday evening I decided to set up a cron job for automatic backups on my VPS – a full MySQL dump and a compressed archive of the www directory. So I got a couple of error messages stating that I don’t...
Benchmarking: Your Web Hosting is Not That Perfect
Today I realized that the VPS I’m renting for $20/mo is not as good as it seemed at first. Ever thought about high loads? Okay, this may sound like some DDoS hacking tools, but no! 100 requests with 10 simultaneous made my virtual private server think for ~ 1,5 minutes. Jeez! It took me quite some time to find good software for running some load tests on my webserver, linux has some good...