Latest offering from Amazon Web Services? A Content Delivery Network! Got this from email a few minutes ago:

Many of you have asked us to let you know ahead of time about features and services that are currently under development so that you can better plan for how that functionality might integrate with your applications. To that end, we are excited to share some early details with you about a new offering we have under development here at AWS — a content delivery service.

Nice.

First of all, I did admit that I used DreamHost web space for personal backups. It’s fast, much more scriptable than Amazon S3, and have lots of space in my $10/month web hosting package — why not?! Except it is against their ToS and they have been cracking down on users using their allocated space for backup rather than for public websites. While you could put your files in “web accessible” directories and then guard it with a .htaccess file, at the end of day the message is clear — DreamHost doesn’t welcome their servers being used for backups.

However DreamHost is now changing the game. In their August 2008 newsletter, Josh Jones has announced their new feature — 50GB personal backup space for all web hosting users.

When I first saw NCL Hosting’s end of financial year sale back in June (Australia’s financial year starts from July), I just could not resist it. From their VPS hosting plan page, they are offering 100GB of data transfer for $36.75 (ex GST) per month, and 500GB of data transfer for only $66.75 (ex GST) per month! Bandwidth at this price level might be common place with servers in US, but for NCL Hosting, a Sydney based private company having their servers in Equinix DC (Mascot, Sydney), providing this much Australian bandwidth would be insane!

So basically I asked a few questions in the forums (I am “scotty” on WHT.au) —

• Q: Virtualisation? A: Combination of MSFT and Xen
• Q: Debian or Ubuntu? A: Yes
• Q: Data Centre? A: Sydney (later I found out it’s Equinix)
• Q: You insane? A: (1) Limited offer (2) Bandwidth is subsidised (I guess subsidised == oversold)

Well. It’s only around 40 bucks so a few days later I signed up to give it a test. Almost 2 months later I am now writing this review.

I was interviewed by Stefano Bellasio from HostingTalk.it. Big thanks to them for interviewing me on blogging about the web hosting industry. It was a bit unexpected as I am not even in the hosting industry and am just writing reviews (and rants) on my attempts trying to host some of my own projects. But I guess as an outsider I can provide a different point of view than those in the industry.

Stefano actually asked a few good questions that I still not have put much thoughts in. For example DreamHost delegates some email hosting to Google — which I think is actually a good thing (although many in the industry don’t agree). It also reminded me that I need to spend a bit more time on this blog. However with wife, 2 kids, full-time dev job + a few websites to manage, HostingFu has unfortunately been stalling at the back of run-queue for a while. :(

Here is the Italian translation of the interview for those who are privileged to know the language.

Sorry about lack of updates on this site. This is something that I’ve done last week — trying out CacheFly, the Content Delivery Network, to host some of my static files.

What is Content Delivery Network, and Why?

Why Content Delivery Network (CDN)? In layman’s term, it makes your website appears faster to your visitors with minimum change on your site. There are many reasons why a website appears to be slow. It could be a slow server that takes ages to generate that dynamic page. It could be a slow network or throttling on server’s outbound port. Or it might just be the connectivity between the server and its visitors. When you have high latency due to geographical separation, and have many Javascript, CSS or other media files on the page — a slow link between your visitor and your server can really slow down the website.

Steve Frank’s article on Don’t Use FTP has been posted on various social news sites, and I think it is an excellent piece how this 20+ year old protocol should have retired from being the stock standard of transferring files at many web hosting companies. It is not secure (not guaranteed even when FTPS is used), it is a PITA for those setting up firewalls, and it is definitely not the best protocol for developers to automate file transfer. Why many shared hosting companies provide only FTP for file upload is beyond me.

VPS Media, a relatively young provider in the virtual private server scene — yet have years of experience in application hosting, is marketing itself as “for Designers and Developers”. Thanks to Carlos T. who has provided me a testing VPS over the last two weeks, and here is my review on Xen VPS at VPS Media.

Generally speaking, there is nothing — nothing faster than c. Obviously I am talking about the alphabet the symbolise the speed of light, rather than this ancient imperative programming language from the 70’s. Whether C, the programming language, is the fastest is truly debatable. However most network engineers would agree that you simply cannot transmit any information faster than light (unless you live in the science fiction world with Hyperspace or Warp drive).

Who said the “old media” is dead and the “new media” has already won the race?! By no means! A PR stunt at A Current Affair (a TV programme in Australia, but don’t ask me about it as I don’t even have a TV at home) this evening featured a few shopping related websites, which sent a huge surge of traffic to one of my sites.

Check out this graph taken from Cacti:

People usually associate spams with unsolicited commercial emails that try to either sell you the “little blue pill”, or Nigerians phishing for your bank account details. There are many techniques fighting email spams, either at the server side or at your email client. However if you run a blog or a forum on the Internet, you would also have experienced fighting comment spams (unless, of course, that you run a spam blog yourself :). I have been blogging since 2001 and have employed various techniques to keep the spams at bay. Some of them worked well — at the beginning — but sooner or later spammers got smartened up and they can almost slip in a few spammy comments.

When I launched this blog 2 years ago, it was running Akismet for Drupal, and recently changed to Mollom, one of Dries’ startup company/project. It has been effective (except for the last few days). Mollom is sort-of similar to Akismet that it (1) uses a classifier to determine the likeliness of incoming comment being a spam (2) acts as a centralised database to collaboratively identify spams. Mollom does a few extra things when the comment is in a “not-so-sure” state, but discussing this would be beyond the scope of this blog post.