5tags

One month ago I said that I have moved back to Media Temple’s grid server. My previous experience with Media Temple as a company was great, but my experience with the grid server was horrible. The MySQL server was down during peak times, and the service as a whole just felt “new”. I moved back to Dreamhost for about 5 months watching (gs) grow month after month. Suddenly last month I realized that some of the projects were growing quite fast and that a move back to the grid server would be great. The grid seemed to be very stable and some of the new features like the MySQL container made it very compelling. So I picked up a coupon and paid $17 for one month of service.

The Movement of Data

Moving everything back to Media Temple was so easy. Last time I moved data to Media Temple was during the shared server (ss) days when they were using an extremely old version of MySQL, thus forcing me to convert all of my databases and downgrade to the older version. It just didn’t feel right. This move was super easy. For the data I simply compressed all of my domain directories on Dreamhost, threw it into a web accessable directory, downloaded it via SSH on Media Temple (using real 12MB/s download speeds!), and then distributed the data amongst the domains. As for databases I simply exported the databases as .sql and then imported it via SSH on (mt).

GPUs (Grid Performance Units)

Since right now my sites aren’t terribly large I knew that I would now go over the 1000 GPU limit. I was very curious as to how many GPUs my site would use. As I mentioned a few weeks ago I have optimized my site greatly. Some of these optimizations included removing plugins from Mint and Wordpress, making sure that lost files and pages were not being redirected to the 404 page, thus burning useless GPUs.

I usually get about 4000 to 8500 hits on Thursdays, which is by far my busiest day. Other than Thursday my traffic is generally a lot lower than that. These Thursdays use about 7 GPUs which is almost nothing. 1000/31 = ~32 allocated for a day. I still have a lot of room to spare. I began to do some tests so I added polls and a photo gallery. Surprisingly these did not add much to the GPU total. It really does take a lot to burn thru 1000 GPUs. Today, being Thursday I really wanted to use as many GPUs as possible to just see what would happen. In order to test I added an include to 10 javascript files that do not exist. Since I have wordpress, these would spawn the generation of a 404 page, which involved database queries. In the first full hour 20 GPUs were burned. In the main and busiest hour of the week, the GPUs still have not been calculated. My best guess would be that I used ~30 - 40 GPUs in that hour! We will have to see. So in all I probably used ~120 GPUs in the month. 12% of my GPUs is not a lot considering my major tests that made up about half of the usage.

So if you are wanting to start or move your blog to Media Temple’s grid server you should be fine. They offer a ton of resources for the low cost of $20 per month. There are tons of hosts that are cheaper except you just can’t beat the reliability of Media Temple along with their amazing customer support. What a great company.

Containers

Right now there are two grid containers available the Ruby on Rails container and the MySQL container. You get a free 64MB of RAM RoR container with every grid server account. If that isn’t enough then you can upgrade for a small monthly charge. If you outgrow the default MySQL SmartPool then you can purchase a container starting at $20 per month for $128 MB of RAM, but there are options up to 512MB of RAM. These are very powerful and not many blogs would ever need more than this.

Media Temple is also beta testing a Django container. Since I am getting into Django I am really hoping that I can get in on the beta testing. It would be very cool to get a Django site out the door and it would be even better to have it on the grid.

Bandwidth

I am really happy that they give you 1TB of bandwidth. It really goes a long way. For large images and standard assets on my sites I usually use Amazon’s S3. Aside from the fact that there is only one data center, the “bandwidth” is great. I didn’t even use 10GB this month.

When downloading files via SSH you are able to use the super fast connection available to the grid servers. I have only downloaded one file from SSH and it was downloading at 12 MB/s, thats 12 real MB per second. Thats a 100MB file in 8.33 seconds! My home connection is only a tiny fraction of that to say the least. I still want to test using the grid as a video server where there are tons of concurrent connections downloading large video files just to see how (gs) can handle it.

Disk Space

They give you 100GB of disk space on (gs). This isn’t your run of the mill, crappy disk space either. They use lightning fast SAS disks. With day to day usage you may not see a major difference but if you ever get Dugg then you will deeply appreciate it. I only used about 4GB since I host large files on Amazon S3.

Overall

I really love Media Temple now. Not only do they offer very high quality service but they are so reasonably priced. They have such innovative products and also seem to be updating the grid service product all of the time, thus taking advantage of the newest technologies.

If you have a large or small website or blog then I really suggest you look at Media Temple. They not only cater to the small guys but can also handle huge sites like Techcrunch. Why not try them out?

The one application that most Mac owners have been waiting for has been delayed. Originally Microsoft’s Office 2008 for Mac was rumored to be launching in August of 2007. Microsoft has just announced that Office 2008 has been delayed and should be available by January 2008.

It really is just a quality issue across the board,” Craig Eisler, general manager of Microsoft’s Macintosh business unit, said in an interview Wednesday. 

The last version of Mac Office was in 2004, which not only is a long time in terms of software but also all of the new Macs include an Intel chip, and thus the Intel Mac owners have been eagerly waiting for a Universal Binary version of Office.

My Take

Since I am starting college in the fall I was fairly angry because I really need this application. I suppose I can live with Office 2004 for the first term, maybe I can even get into one of the open source versions like Neo-Office.

What I Suggest

If you are waiting for Mac Office 2008 and need an office suite in the meantime then I have two suggestions:

• Use Office 2004 or
• Get the free Neo-Office

NeoOffice is a full-featured set of office applications (including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawing programs) for Mac OS X. Based on the OpenOffice.org office suite, NeoOffice has integrated dozens of native Mac features and can import, edit, and exchange files with other popular office programs such as Microsoft Office.

Introducing Dreamhost’s “Private Server” or PS for short. Dreamhost, my old web host, just launched a new and innovative product which combines the benefits of Amazon’s EC2 with the ease of use of shared hosting. Shared Hosting is what the majority of people use to host their blogs, sites, and small web apps. The problem is that these sites can grow very quickly and outgrow the shared hosting environment. This forces the creators of these websites into a predicament. They either have to pay big bucks to get a fully managed server or take a significant amount of time to learn how to properly run a server. Some opt for the fully managed route and get faced with huge bills which hinder the future of their website. Others choose to run their own server, that is located at a data center, but often run into problems with security. There has to be a better and easier way to scale your website beyond shared hosting.

What is “PS”?

Dreamhost PS is our new invite-only premium shared hosting service, available only as an add-on to a current DreamHost hosting plan. DreamHost PS uses Linux-VServer to give you your own “virtual machine”, thereby protecting your CPU and RAM from all other users on your physical machine.

Essentially you can simple drag a slider to scale your site up to an additional dedicated 2300 MB of RAM and 2.3 GHz of CPU. Dreamhost makes it very easy for you manage your website thru the same control panel that you have been using prior to this new add-on.

What Makes This Better?

Unlike other virtual dedicated servers where you have to pay for additional features such as backups and performance stats, Dreamhost continues to offer their amazing disk space and bandwidth along with full automatic backups and performance stats. If you are running a single dedicated virtual server at a competitor then you are forced to run not only Apache (if you use Apache as your web server) but also MySQL, and your email server on the same “box”. With PS you still continue to run your MySQL databases on other dedicated servers and you still get the load-balanced email.

Ideal Situation

PS is perfect for many situations but I can think of one right now that it would be excellent for.So you run a website to promote a yearly event. The event happens in August so your traffic spikes around August. When it comes to August you need the full 2300 MB RAM and 2.3 GHZ CPU, but in November you only need standard shared hosting since your traffic is relatively small. The old solution would be to build around the August traffic. You maybe would need to purchase 2 servers, pay for the hookup at the data center, and also pay for the bandwidth. Your total money spend would be very high and although you would get the full potential out of the servers during August, your setup will be fairly overkill for November.With PS you can simple adjust your server resources based on your projected traffic. When you approch your busy season you can boost the resources and when it comes time that traffic slows down, you can scale back to a cheaper solution. Rather than spending several thousands of dollars you would only spend hundreds.

• You get your own protected CPU and memory!
• You can still burst up to the full 2.3 GHz cpu and double the memory!
• It works just like your current shared service!
• We’ll never kill a persistent process / cronjob you run!
• You can name your own “server”!
• You get 2 unique IPs (a $9.90/month value)!
• You can change your memory and CPU on the fly… no reboot needed!
• You can reboot your own server from our panel instantly!
• You get historical memory / load graphs on our panel!

What’s Bad

• It’s currently invitation-only.
• It’s $1.50/month ($1.00/month forever if you pre-order now!) for each 10 MB and 10 MHz.
• There’s a $100 (waived for now!) one-time set up fee.
• You don’t get root access… remember, it works just like our regular hosting.
• (But hey, no root means no breaking things… and our hosting is already super flexible!)

I first have to say that this was just launched and I nor anybody that I know has used the service. The main problem is that their is no root access. I suppose that this is a major drawback except for the fact that if you read thru the Dreamhost Wiki you will see that the users have made work arounds to install almost anything. The fact that their is no root access I suppose just emphasizes that fact that this service is designed for users with little to no experience with servers, except the product is so strong that it is also ideal for people with some knowledge and experience. It is very early to weight in all of the cons but I would have to say that the concept looks very strong.

How Much Will I/You Need?

It is always hard to guess how much you will need but I suggest starting out with the lowest 150MHZ and 150 MB of RAM, unless you know for sure that you will need more. Once you run your site off of this for a day or two then you can see how much you actually need. If you are usually the majority of your resources then I suggest boosting it up. If you know of an event like a digg then you an always adjust on the fly in order to get the most out of the digg effect and not lose traffic due to a bad host.Dreamhost also listed some of their websites and how much resources they would need to run on PS:

• 150 MB / 150 Mhz: 99% of all predominantely static sites. (e.g. www.dreamhost.com)
• 300 MB / 300 Mhz: A top 100 blog. (e.g. blog.dreamhost.com)
• 515 MB / 515 Mhz: A busy forum. (e.g. discussion.dreamhost.com)
• 2300 MB / 2300 Mhz: A very popular web app. (e.g. panel.dreamhost.com)

Will I Use It

I will have to be honest and say that I will probably not use PS. I am currently using Media Temple’s grid server and I love it. Not only does it never go down but when I get sudden traffic spikes it handles the traffic very well. They give out 1000 GPUs which is about 32 per day. Currently, my highest day since I switched was around 7.5 GPUs in one day. I must say though that my site is heavily optimized, and I try to make it as simple as possible for the server to serve m site. I still have a lot of room to grow though.

COUPON CODE!!!

I have an exclusive coupon code for Dreamhost web hosting. Simple use the code “50OFFALLPLANS” to get $50 off any plan or use “5TAGS” to get $30 off. Since you have to have a Dreamhost account in order to use PS, I highly suggest using these codes to get a great deal.

Closing

I still have a Dreamhost account but I can’t see myself using PS in the near future. It is a great concept and I really hope people use it. If you have any comments please make them below.

Amazon offers a great service that allows you to host your files on their servers for a small charge called Simple Storage Service or S3 for short. The fee schedule is as follows:

• Storage

• $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

• $0.10 per GB - all data transfer in
• $0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
• $0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
• $0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

• $0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
• $0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*

If you are strapped for bandwidth, want to speed up your site or want to handle the digg effect like a champ then S3 is for you. It is extremely affordable and their is no minimum fee so you can easily try it out for a period of time and you bill could be as low as a few cents.The problem is that if you want to use the S3 service for hosting files to be served on your website, they give you a hideous URL. This tutorial will show you how to use a sub domain from your own domain to point to your S3 bucket. In short this tutorial takes this

https://s3.amazonaws.com/5tags/conf_room.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=1MAQQAHYZFCDAD01MG02&Expires=1184870730&
Signature=CZnuUaqrqHzvAS9sgDFAEFdse1zw%3D        

to this

http://assets.5tags.com/file.jpg        

What You Need

• Amazon S3 account
• Firefox - S3Fox plugin

Where to Begin

You will first have to go to S3browse.com to create a new bucket. You can either do a temporary sign in or register at the site. S3Browse is a web based front end that makes uploading and bucket management significantly easier. To sign in you must have your access key id and your secret access key which can be found at Amazon’s Web Services section, under AWS Access Identifiers.Once signed into S3Browse you will be presented with your list of buckets.

What To Do

• Create a new buckets with the exact same name as your subdomain. In my case “assets.5tags.com”
• You should have the S3Fox plugin installed. Open S3Fox from the tools menu. Your bucket list should appear.
• Click the bucket (folder) that you just created once.
• Click the “pencil on paper” icon directly above to edit the permissions
• Make sure that read is enabled for everybody. This makes the urls shorter and easier.
• While in S3Fox, upload a test file into the bucket

In short we just created a new bucket, and allowed anybody to access it via the web. S3 defaults so that URLS are generated on the fly that include expiry dates, and the unique id. This is so that the rightful owner of the file can generate URLs to give to colleagues that have expiry dates, and random people can’t browse their files.

Setting Up the DNS

This is where all of the fun begins if you don’t have a host that supports easy DNS modifications. If you have a host like Dreamhost or Media Temple then it is very simple. There are 1000s of hosts our there and the procedure is generally the exact same. For today I will show how to do it on Media Temple’s grid server as well as Dreamhost.In short you want to create a CNAME record that maps a nickname (your subdomain) to “s3.amazonaws.com.”.

Media Temple - Grid Server

• Go to the domain where you want to create the sub domain in the Media Temple Account Center
• Go to “Edit Zone” and click “+ Add a Record”
• For “Name” type the full sub domain you want to use. In my case “assets.5tags.com”
• Make the “Type” “CNAME”
• Under “Data” type “s3.amazonaws.com.” make sure you include the trailing period.
• Save the settings and YOU ARE DONE!

Dreamhost

In The End

By using Amazon’s S3 for you files on our website you can not only save expensive bandwidth from your web host but you can also make your website load a lot faster. The high majority of the load time of a web page is the images. By serving them from S3 you can count on fast, reliable, service. By having the images under you own sub domain you not only appear more professional but trick people into thinking the files are coming off your own server, which can have several benefits. If you are on a cheap web host and don’t want to take the risk of paying large bandwidth overage bills then S3 is great for you!

I recently installed K2 because I was getting very sick and tired of my old theme. I have used K2 before, and went all out with the AJAX that is included in the package. I simply took out all of the javascript includes for the live searching, live commenting, and rolling archives, and these simple tasks made the main page load about 300% faster. I then took out all of the icons, and optimized some recent blog post images and got the total size of the main page to 610 Kb. These new tweaks make it well over 400% faster than the original k2 theme.I like to measure the speed with websiteoptimization.com’s tool.To set a benchmark I like to check the load time on a 14.4K connection. It originally took 250 seconds and now it takes 63 seconds for the main page and 30 seconds for the ‘archives” page to load.All in all I am very, very happy with the results and I believe that I can cut it down even more. A few other factors affected these results such as wp-cache, and the new server setup. Once I get everything down even more I will be sure to share all of my results, tips, and tricks.

Everybody wants to eat healthy but they don’t want to sacrifice taste for healthiness. I have found and tweaked the perfect teriyaki turkey burger.

What you need

• 5 oz ground turkey
• 2 Tbsp teriyaki sauce
• 1 slice fresh pineapple
• 1 thick slice of red onion
• 1 whole-wheat buns - Toasted
• 1/4 jalapeño, sliced thin
• 1 slice of Swiss cheese

The Procedure

• Have you butcher grind the turkey into medium grind which will make the juiciest burgers.
• Take the meat out of the refrigerator 1 hour prior to cooking. When the burger is at room temperature it tends to cooky more even.
• Use high heat. “If you don’t hear the sizzle when it hits the grill, you’re screwed.” Cook for 3 to 4 minutes a side, the burger should feel soft and springy.
• Add the slice of swiss cheese at the end of cooking and let the burger sit for about 4 minutes to allow the juices to settle.

In The End

I just made this burger last night and it turned out excellent. Please leave comments on your alterations or sauce recommendations. If you have a original recipe that you would like to add to this site please contact me.

After a few hours of DNS propagation this site, along with most of my others, are now on Media Temple’s grid server service. If you spot any errors please contact me or comment. I have spotted a few errors already.My thought after installing is that the 1000 GPUs is not a lot. I have already used 0.5/1000 and all I have done is imported my databases for Wordpress and Mint. We’ll have to see how it handles my load. Lately I have been getting 600 - 1200 unique visitors per day and 800 - 1900 hits. I will be sure to note everything.

For those of you that have read my blog for the past year you have heard my thoughts on Media Temple’s web hosting. When I was on a (ss) shared server it was great but when they moved to the new (gs) grid server I had major problems.It was very tough to have my site down every few hours. The actual web server (Apache) was fine but the database was constantly down. They have now completely changed their MySQL setup and they now use containers. With the (mt) coupon “kirupa05″ you can get 15% off your order. We’ll see how it works out and I will definitely tell me honest opinion of their new service.I used Media Temple for this website from August 2006 to about December 2006. Their original shared server was great but I decided to upgrade to their new grid server, which was very innovative but not very reliable. I am sure they are a lot better now.

I am currently making a brand new theme based on K2. K2 is a very solid theme and makes it very easy to create a design around it. I have been very busy with my new company and am only working on it in my off time which is usually 2-3AM. Look for it in the next couple of weeks. I may do slow changes so that you can see the progress as I work on it.

Over 8000 people have committed to 122,000 green lifestyle choices, with their friends. That’s 204,000 Leaves grown. All in just a few weeks, and only organically with zero press or blog coverage.

See “I Am Green”?

“I Am Green”? is a networking application for facebook members about caring for the future of our planet by changing little things we do everyday. Members change small things about their every day lives, and share these ideas together. Some of the popular actions are using cold water instead of hot, switching to the right green products, and not using paper or plastic in many specific cases where habit draws us but it’s not needed. Members call their green actions ‘Leaves’ which they pile up. Their lists are displayed on their profile for all their friends to see and endorse or even copy. Its a smart way to find out about little things that will make a better tomorrow.’

Try “I Am Green”?

The facebook platform makes rich, social interaction possible. If you are Green, act on it, and be proud of it.