Varud

I’m not sure if anybody noticed, but the site was taken down for a few days because somebody defaced it.  I kind of liked the music that they put on my homepage, but after listening to the song, I had to go about fixing it.  What did I learn?

1. Don’t use shared hosts.  In this day and age, unless you are super poor, do not use a shared host.  If you are not technically savvy, use services for specific tasks (i.e. blogger.com for a blog) so you don’t have to think about the technology/maintenance.  If you are technically savvy and you have needs that are not basic, get a server where you have root access.  AWS ec2 is awesome for this.  The cost is $75 a month though so it may be too expensive for some people (although if you can set one up – I can probably find a gig for you to make enough money to pay that $75/month – just drop me a line).
2. Dreamhost.com, while pretty good and having good customer service, just isn’t what I need.  People have recommended gandi.net for name services and hosting if you need the cheap option for hosting.  I haven’t used it personally but knowledgeable people love them.

Oh, I don’t think I’ve done an update on platform choices either.  Here is where I stand now:

1. MySQL 5.0.45 (I’m still contemplating PostgreSQL)
2. Python 2.5.1
3. Apache 2.2.9
4. Fedora 8 (I like the Fedora/Red Hat series – Debian/Ubuntu was giving me grief).
5. Django 1.0
6. Pinax trunk

That was fun!  I feel very excited about the Python community.  It’s a smaller group but it’s growing fast and it has solid support out there.  In addition, it’s a rock solid language with full unicode support – I love that.

Tags: aws, colo, django, ec2, hosting, pinax, python

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 12:34 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.