Slashdot Mirror

$6,000 to join $3,000 pa and they only have a .info domain? Nothing says "exclusive" and "accomplished" like a .info domain...

I can't think of a single TLD other than .com for Facebook that I've ever heard of anyone using, and yet 1.3 billion people still manage to find the website every damn day.

With a list as long as my arm of things to tease and nitpick this site over, this ain't one of them. Let's not act like morons and pretend every search engine suddenly disappeared.

TLDs stopped meaning anything more than a bullshit marketing ploy when we found a "need" for more than com/net/org.

As long as URL:s are visible to viewers .com and .org will remain as status markers. The fact that these people couldn't afford to acquire the .com is evidence that there isn't a lot of financial muscle behind the project.

Another piece of evidence is that the site is now down. I'm going to go ahead and guess that they are on this plan: http://mediatemple.net/webhost... with "unlimited bandwidth" for $29 a month, laws of physics be damned.

There is also this article from March 2 about a Wordpress vulnerability.

As a lot of previous posters have mentioned, 1000+ unique visitors even with each doing heavy traffic is still pretty low. 100,000+ would warrant load balancing... or if you are serving up media of some sort and then I'd recommend a media server to offload that portion of the traffic.

What you can do is performance tune your webserver and database server. BTW if you don't have your DB on a different server, that could be a first step.

So performance tuning... here are a few good articles on the MediaTemple site which deal with Apache and MySQL:

http://kb.mediatemple.net/questions/246/(dv)+HOWTO:+Basic+Apache+performance+tuning+(httpd)

http://kb.mediatemple.net/questions/258/(dv)+HOWTO%3A+Basic+MySQL+performance+tuning+(MySQLd)

Yes these are written for their customers but they apply to any server running Apache and/or MySQL.

This next article I'm posting as an example only:

http://kb.mediatemple.net/questions/770/(dv)+HOWTO%3A+Misc.+performance+tuning

The idea with this is to turn off services you're not using. It mentions specific services known to be running on MTs DV servers... DNS, SpamAssassin, etc. YMMV but the idea is sound.

If you need a variety of services to work, consider running multiple servers dedicated to individual tasks. This will also help when it's time to troubleshoot, upgrade, etc.

I suggest using Virtual Machines for everything, especially since there are available VM Images for just about any base configuration you can think of (regardless of vendor) and it makes backups, swapping out upgrades, etc. very efficient. The process is such: copy existing VM image to a new machine (or new container) upgrade everything, test, test, test, then swap the new image out for the old when you're ready. Voila. If you've used a different machine for your DB for instance, you can upgrade your webserver machine w/ all scripts, etc. with no downtime - and have a backup sitting there seconds away from re-deployment if anything goes wrong.

As a lot of previous posters have mentioned, 1000+ unique visitors even with each doing heavy traffic is still pretty low. 100,000+ would warrant load balancing... or if you are serving up media of some sort and then I'd recommend a media server to offload that portion of the traffic.

What you can do is performance tune your webserver and database server. BTW if you don't have your DB on a different server, that could be a first step.

So performance tuning... here are a few good articles on the MediaTemple site which deal with Apache and MySQL:

http://kb.mediatemple.net/questions/246/(dv)+HOWTO:+Basic+Apache+performance+tuning+(httpd)

http://kb.mediatemple.net/questions/258/(dv)+HOWTO%3A+Basic+MySQL+performance+tuning+(MySQLd)

Yes these are written for their customers but they apply to any server running Apache and/or MySQL.

This next article I'm posting as an example only:

http://kb.mediatemple.net/questions/770/(dv)+HOWTO%3A+Misc.+performance+tuning

The idea with this is to turn off services you're not using. It mentions specific services known to be running on MTs DV servers... DNS, SpamAssassin, etc. YMMV but the idea is sound.

If you need a variety of services to work, consider running multiple servers dedicated to individual tasks. This will also help when it's time to troubleshoot, upgrade, etc.

I suggest using Virtual Machines for everything, especially since there are available VM Images for just about any base configuration you can think of (regardless of vendor) and it makes backups, swapping out upgrades, etc. very efficient. The process is such: copy existing VM image to a new machine (or new container) upgrade everything, test, test, test, then swap the new image out for the old when you're ready. Voila. If you've used a different machine for your DB for instance, you can upgrade your webserver machine w/ all scripts, etc. with no downtime - and have a backup sitting there seconds away from re-deployment if anything goes wrong.

As a lot of previous posters have mentioned, 1000+ unique visitors even with each doing heavy traffic is still pretty low. 100,000+ would warrant load balancing... or if you are serving up media of some sort and then I'd recommend a media server to offload that portion of the traffic.

What you can do is performance tune your webserver and database server. BTW if you don't have your DB on a different server, that could be a first step.

So performance tuning... here are a few good articles on the MediaTemple site which deal with Apache and MySQL:

http://kb.mediatemple.net/questions/246/(dv)+HOWTO:+Basic+Apache+performance+tuning+(httpd)

http://kb.mediatemple.net/questions/258/(dv)+HOWTO%3A+Basic+MySQL+performance+tuning+(MySQLd)

Yes these are written for their customers but they apply to any server running Apache and/or MySQL.

This next article I'm posting as an example only:

http://kb.mediatemple.net/questions/770/(dv)+HOWTO%3A+Misc.+performance+tuning

The idea with this is to turn off services you're not using. It mentions specific services known to be running on MTs DV servers... DNS, SpamAssassin, etc. YMMV but the idea is sound.

If you need a variety of services to work, consider running multiple servers dedicated to individual tasks. This will also help when it's time to troubleshoot, upgrade, etc.

I suggest using Virtual Machines for everything, especially since there are available VM Images for just about any base configuration you can think of (regardless of vendor) and it makes backups, swapping out upgrades, etc. very efficient. The process is such: copy existing VM image to a new machine (or new container) upgrade everything, test, test, test, then swap the new image out for the old when you're ready. Voila. If you've used a different machine for your DB for instance, you can upgrade your webserver machine w/ all scripts, etc. with no downtime - and have a backup sitting there seconds away from re-deployment if anything goes wrong.

http://www.mediatemple.net/labs/xv/ Yep.

There are, in fact, several web hosting companies who have already launched their own clouds with a fuller range of supporting services. For instance:

US: GoGrid, MediaTemple, Mosso

UK: ElasticHosts, FlexiScale

Absolutely agree that cloud hosting services offer significant economies over traditional hosting. While we're naming vendors, a more complete list of cloud vendors includes the following (and most offer a much fuller range of web hosting services than EC2!):

US: Amazon EC2, MediaTemple, GoGrid, Mosso, Linode, Joyent

UK: ElasticHosts, FlexiScale

Some hosting providers already do this. See for example, MediaTemple's Grid Servers

Try a host that doesn't suck. I've got a site with Media Temple and when transferring data from that site to other well-connected hosts, I've seen transfer rates upwards of 8 MB/s. That's megabytes, not megabits. This is with a dedicated virtual hosting package that only costs $50/month (though admittedly there's a rather long commitment required to get that price) -- anyone operating anything beyond the level of a hobby site could afford that.

A good choice might be Media Temple http://www.mediatemple.net. They offer plenty of goodies including MySQL, PHP, Flash, e-mail & aliasing, SSH login, and web-based control of all services, even page editing. Service has been reliable and quick with me. Check it out.

I actually keep a bookmark of some sites that I think are well-designed/inspirational. Here are a few:

Mediatemple
Neostream Interactive
Become Interactive
Slashdot: Games (I'm sorry, I'm just kidding, but who designed this??)

...oh, and just about anything Ceonex designed (not everything, but they are very good).

MT is all you will ever need.

Media Temple.

k10k uses MT, by the way.

Media Temple.

i use an "appliance server" at mediatemple.net that uses the same sort of thing. just a small, isolated linux os on a shared box. works great! i'm fairly sure they use technology developed by ensim. read up on it here. nice to see this made available elsewhere though...