Rinsefirst

The more I am in this business, the more I realize how easy it is to be taken advantage of by anyone who knows you outside of the business environment (see: friends).

Now, I have to be careful how I say this, because I do believe that there are some people out there that I both enjoy hosting and enjoy helping.
These people understand that this is how I make my living and often find ways of contributing back to me in some way that is useful (not always money).

There are others though that because you have servers, and because they are your “friends”, they think they deserve the world. No matter how much it costs you.
This can cause strain on friendships, strain on pocketbooks, and strain on servers that were intended for other things.

The question is how to handle it. The simple solution would be to create a list of rules that define when someone gets free hosting and when they don’t. Or at what point it converts from free hosting to the normal hosting accounts.
You have to make it clear what you will and won’t do, and what the punishment is if they start trying to do things they shouldn’t do.

I’ve never been good at that. Someday soon, I will have to learn that: “It’s not personal, it’s just business”

As my life get’s faster and faster, I’m beginning to wonder how I will be able to continue to do anything for free. The amount the free stuff takes away from the paid stuff likes to get out of proportion in my life. It’s good to be giving, and most of you know I would probably give the shirt off my back if I thought it would help you, but with the potential of a wife sometime soon, and then kids… At what point does my giving mean taking from others.

At what point… do I need a new car?

So Yesterday, we talked a lot about the nightmares that come from not keeping control of your domain name. Today, I want to talk about how you must be careful about picking where to actually host your site, as well as the different types of hosts.

The first thing I look for is a host that has been around for awhile. It used to be that hosts came and went with the wind (especially during the .com boom). It’s settled down a bit, but it still pays to know that the place your putting your website is going to stay around. There’s nothing like finding out a month after you go live, that you have to move to a new server.

The second thing I look for of course is price. Now this is a funny thing because most hosts out there are always offering more than you could ever possibly use. This bothers me, partially because I don’t know if they are telling the truth. For example, a terabyte of bandwidth is a LOT of bandwidth. Doing the math on that, you would have to be transmitting roughly 3.3Mbps for an entire month to get that kind of traffic.
So these groups that are giving out 5-10 Terabytes of bandwidth of a single hosting account… We’re talking over 10Mbps per second for an entire month… Now the question in my mind is: are they actually providing a network connection that could support that much traffic… If so, when you download a file from your OWN server, you should be able to max out at 6mbps (which is where most people’s cable line maxes out).

But even if they give you the pipe to support that much bandwidth, realize now how much of a load on a processor that is going to be. Assuming those are hits to dynamically generated php webpages… your going to be basically saturating the computers processor(s) so fast it’s not even funny. So what are they doing then? My bet: overselling.

And you can see this with hosts who do colocation as well. Why is it that a T1 (1.5mbps) costs $200/month in most places you colocate? Simple: bandwidth that actually makes use of that, is not cheap. If bandwidth really was that cheap, do you think Comcast would be finding so hard against net neutrality? They want to find a way to foot as much of the cost to people like me and Google.

So yeah, I slightly wandered off onto a tangent there that I didn’t mean to go down. Let’s talk about the types of hosting briefly and what the pros and cons are of each:

• Virtual Hosting/Sharing Hosting - This is the situation where multiple websites are hosted on the same box. It’s not a bad thing to do because most servers can handle the traffic of multiple sites. It’s a great solution for people who are getting started in the business. It’s biggest downsides are that it tends to limit what you can do on the server (installing things is next to impossible in most cases). It also tends to mean more downtime (caused by your neighbors). Lastly, depending on the host, I’ve found that it means you tend to not get upgrades. Why? Because if they upgrade they risk breaking other people’s websites. It’s rare that you will find a shared host that will keep up with the latest versions of PHP for example. At the moment, I’m fairly happy with west-hosts shared hosting plans for clients who don’t host with me. Their rates also seem to make sense to me: $6.95 VPS Web Hosting
• Virtual Dedicated Hosting - This is very similiar to virtual hosting, except they put your website in a “sandbox” to isolate your site from others a little more than usual. I’ve never actually made use of this service, but it’s actually very similiar to how westhost does their normal hosting anyway.
• Dedicate Hosting - This is where you basically get your own box at the host. They normally configure it for easy management, but you should be the ONLY one on the box. This tends to give the flexibility need to install and update your own applications. The downside is that it costs more than shared hosting. In some cases it also makes you resonsible for your own backups and upgrades. If you plan on hosting multiple sites, this often is the best way to go.
• Colocated - This is the ultimate in customizability. Basically you buy your own box, and put it in a safe location connected to a high speed line. This is what JR does. It’s great for situations where you are hosting a lot of websites, or need access to multiple servers in the same location. The best part is, it’s your equipment… So if your down, it’s most likely your own fault. The biggest downside is cost, as you have to buy your own equipment, and it often costs 3-4 times more than dedicated hosting.
• Internal - Ok, so this is actually the ultimate, but I ruled it out because it’s a big bigger than most people would ever need. Basically, you would have to get your own lines run to your own location… We’re talking 10,000’s per month to get the speeds that most people want, with the redundacy most people can’t live without.

One word of caution: If your buying a Virtual Hosting plan… watch out for resellers. Most virtual host places offer reseller accounts that allow other people to resell their services. There are two big problems with this:

• You don’t have direct access to customer support in most cases, meaning longer downtime in the event that something is wrong.
• It tends to cost more because Resellers are trying to make a buck off of you.

Just to give you the horror story of me on Virtual Hosting… There was a period of roughly 2 days where my websites were down. 4 phone calls to tech support and all they could tell me was they had a server failure and were trying to restore from backup. I can understand server failures, but restoring from backup should be DANG quick in my mind. In any case, it’s part of the reason we are on our own boxes now… So that I can make sure that the site gets back up and running as fast as humanly possible should something go wrong.

It’s like location… location… location… When it comes to websites, it really pays to know where and how to host.

At present, I am in the process of helping a client recover 3 domain names from their previous webmaster/service provider. The nightmare it has been for them to get anything going with their site is a tail of caution I feel is worth sharing.

The client hired a developer sometime 3 years ago. The guy was local, and I’m assuming affordable. The developer made use of other systems of code (in this particular case os commerce) and a template engine, most likely to save both time and money. From the clients perspective, this was a good thing, for it meant that the client was not locked into a single developer. Normally, I would agree, but the client missed the bigger issue.

See the developer setup EVERYTHING for them. He purchased the domain name. He attached it to his hosting account. Now in some cases, this is acceptable. For example, at JR, we are both host and developer (meaning we use our own servers). There can’t be a separate of parties when this is the case. However, we make every effort to provide the clients with access to their code, and access to their account information.

This developer didn’t do that.

A year or two passes, and the developer both moves out of state and grows with new business. So much so, that it doesn’t seem he has the time for the little guy anymore. The client wishes to have some changes made, and the developer is unwilling to make them.. So naturally, they want to switch developers. Nothing wrong with that.

Hmm, but wait… There were no passwords to the code. No access to the name servers on the domain. In fact, no access to the domain at all.

Here’s where it gets fun. Normally, even if worse comes to worse… You can easily take control of your site back if you can simply get control of the domain name. In most cases, that simply means a phone call to the registrar stating your identity and offering some sort of proof that you are the one who “owns” the domain (normally done via fax). This works with groups like Godaddy in most cases.

In this particular case, the domains were with 1and1.com. A company that has a rather disappointing record with the bbb (http://www.dc.bbb.org/report.html?national=Y&compid=1040770) not to mention quite a few blog posts about it that aren’t so nice (http://www.brainfuel.tv/1and1-hosting-cancellation). I have also had trouble with them in the past transferring a domain that I had purchased through them.

So this is where it has become such an annoying game… 1and1 not being responsive about who “owns” the domain, and not being willing to answer our replies, force legal action against the original provider to get the needed data with 1and1. You can guess how long that took. Then once we had the data, we still had to arrange for the transfer to take place, and that alone has taken roughly a week with 1and1, following the exact procedure were supposed to.

There’s a lot more to this story as well, in fact, much of it is still going on. As it turns out, this client isn’t the only one that is aggravated both with 1and1 as well as this developer, and because of how these people are finding me, I keep getting wrapped up in it. It’s not so much a problem as much as it is a minor inconvenience.

In any case, I wanted to suggest a few recommendations regarding developers and hosting:

• If at all possible, own your domain yourself. - It’s not difficult to open a domain account with someone like Godaddy. In fact it’s gotten so simple, that I can generally get through the domain purchase process in less than 5 minutes. Owning your domain means that you pay cost (saving you money), and it also means you have FULL CONTROL over your name servers.

  In an effort of full disclosure: JR has not enforce this suggestion on it’s own clients, but we are working towards it, as we become our own registrar (which would then allow them to transfer away from us all they want without needing to talk to me).

• If your developer ISN’T running their own machines, get your own hosting - I say this because of this: developers come and go. If they open up a reseller account (which many do) and then get out of the business, your account will be tied to there’s through this reseller. This can create havoc. Remove the middle man. It’s almost always worth just getting your own hosting account, even if it’s with the same provider they already are using.
• Know your host - I suggest reading Part 2 (coming tomorrow)
• Get a copy of your site - Make sure you get a copy of your site in working order. This is good practice just for backup reasons, but can also come in handy if a developer leaves and you can’t get access to your code.
• Get your usernames and passwords, and save them! - So many people lose this information and it’s a pain to recover. Make sure you keep (and get) your FTP information, Control Panel Information, and any other information your host may provide.

That’s just some of my advice I guess from doing this awhile. JR is always working towards protecting or customers more and more, and I want to get into that more in our next post. Until then, enjoy the post.

Although this site has only been back online for less than a week now, I’m already feeling better about its content than I have in a very very long time. So far, I’ve done a decent job of staying on topic, and providing what I think is useful insite into the brain of this designer. Of course, useful is relative I suppose.

Which brings me to some rather less useful information. This is in fact, Rinsefirst’s 1100 post. Maybe that doesn’t matter, given that we’ve hit the 100 mark, 500 mark, and the 1000 mark. I still think 100 posts is quite a few to make, so to some degree, it is some sort of accomplishment.

I normally mark these accomplishments with a posting of site stats, but because most of those stats are not presently available to me without a lot of additional work, I regret that I won’t be able to share them with you. I would like to mention something though.

Blogging takes a certain level of patience and dedication if you wish it to be done “right”. If you give it that, any blog, no matter how off topic, will develop consistant readership. Failing to give it any sort of dedication, will cause the site to die so fast, it isn’t even funny.

The stats over the years of Rinsefirst demonstrate this time and time again. Any sort of downtime, or lack of new posts, results in an immediant loss in traffic. For every day it is down, it seems like it takes 2 days to get any sort of recovery from it. If your wondering why your personal blog is not generating traffic, I recommend switching to a very regular update schedule. Even if it’s once a week, that’s enough to let people know they should come back weekly.

For those of you who are daring enough to try to do daily updates, I STRONGLY recommend pre-updating. I’ve already mentioned this once, but I can’t believe how much it has already helped me. In fact, I’m almost to the point where I’m writing these posts 3 to 4 days ahead of when they get released. That means I can take a day off if I get busy and don’t have time to write one. That is an AMAZINGLY helpful to me.

Well that’s all I have to say for this particular post. 1100 down, so many more to go.

I realized while creating the RSS feeds for the site yesterday (which by the way are not live yet), that I needed to also finish the archives for the RSS feeds to make any sort of sense. Out of all the things that I’m unsure of how to implement, it’s this.

The primary purpose of the archives is to provide simple, and easy access to all past data. It needs to be well organized to allow users to quickly, and seemlessly find what they are looking for.

In the past, I’ve always done this organization by date. This seems to be a common method amoung blogs… One that I’m finding less and less useful the more I see it. It seems to me, that I can’t remember when I read anything once it gets 2-3 weeks out. I can remember reading it, and where I read it, but not always when. It would seem to me, that the primary form of organization then would NOT be by date.

So what would be more useful? A search engine is one method, but it is not a good method for people just looking to browse, IE: people who don’t know what to search for. It will be something I include, but not something I rely on.

The only other method I can think of then is by category. The only problem there is the past 1000+ posts don’t have any sort of tagging or categorization. That could be a really long process to put it all together the way it would need to be… A long process that I don’t really want to go through.

So what does that leave me with? I do not know yet. Come back soon for whatever it is I decide! (Or post a comment if the comment engine is in place.)

I’ve been trying to figure out if I want to change anything with the RSS feed(s) on this site. In the past, I’ve always had just 1 (known) RSS feed that listed the last 10 posts (full text) and gave a hint in the title to how many comments were attached to that post.
This method works just fine, but I think it could be improved on.

A few of the ideas I’ve had about what changes I would like to make:

• Providing RSS feeds for my daily links.
• Providing more posts per RSS feed (perhaps 20, or the last 2 weeks worth).
• Perhaps providing ATOM or some other type of RSS feed.
• Providing my sitemap to more than just Google (will talk about in just a second).

I’m not sure all of these are needed, useful, or worth putting together, but I thought I would put them out in the air in case I get the comments finished by the time you see this.

I mentioned making the Google sitemap a little more public. For those of you who don’t know, Google has created a way for webmasters to control what the spider sees and doesn’t see. It’s similiar to the Robots.txt file, but much more detailed, going into things like how often pages are updated, etc.
I believe sitemaps help increase pagerank, but I’ve never actually been able to prove it… I know though that it does help insure that certain pages DO get into the index without having to wait for the spider to stumble on them. If you want to learn more about sitemaps in general, be sure to check out http://www.google.com/sitemaps.html

So why would I want to make my sitemap public? Simple: I believe that it won’t be long until we start seeing more and more programs that can make use of sitemaps, as they provide very useful tools for browsing a website. In fact, I’m one of those people that actually look for a sitemap at the bottom of the page to see if there is a faster way for me to find what I’m looking for. Strange I know…

Off topic time: On a more personal note, congrats to Nikki on wherever she is going next year. By the time this post goes live, she should be just receiving exact word as to where she will be posted.