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On The Subject of Web Hosting
Surviving Web Hosting
By Alan Cowderoy
Great, you've built your site. It's the best thing since Slashdot. The search engines rank it in the top ten hits for just about every keyword on the planet, even Yahoo lists it. The javascript rocks in any browser you care to name and the graphics go ascii for Lynx.
Then your hosting service takes you out because you've got too many hits, or toasts your email, or restores an old copy of the database or just plain simple goes down for days on end....
There's a problem and it's not one that's going to go away or at least not for the hundreds of thousands of sites who are necessarily dependant on hosting services.
Many in the newsgroups immediately reply that the answer is to rescue those linux cd's from under the bed and do it yourself.
For the majority of small sites doing it yourself is just not an option. It takes serious levels of expertise to run secure/resilient unix boxen not to mention the cost of the bandwidth. Given this, and assuming you don't have the cash or expertise to run your own, third party commercial hosting is the only real option. (Ok i would love somebody to come up with an alternative here. Community hosting? Special interest group hosting? Dunno you tell me.)
Meantimes, how should we build some sort of resilience into our sites and not get wiped off the net when the provider screws up?
The immediate reaction to this question tends to be "choose a good hosting package". Unfortunately that is easier said than done.
If the recent CiHost problems have taught us anything it's that choosing a hosting company recommended by the web hosting comparison sites is no guarantee that you are not going to have big problems. And if you can't trust them you've not got a lot of other criteria to fall back on.
Some warn against buying from 'resellers' rather than direct from hosting companies who have their own server farms. I may be missing something here but I admit that I can't see what is *necessarily* better about buying direct from the company owning the kit. What is so bad about reselling?
Apart from that other reliable criteria for choosing a hosting service are very thin on the ground.
Now there's free hosting packages, cheapo hosting packages and expensive hosting packages all touting for your traffic. In any case they are all commercial packages from commercial operations who have agendas that may or may not coincide with yours.
The fact of the matter is that keeping your site on the air depends on some third party not screwing up.
That means we need to look at damage limitation and what we can do to survive hosting problems. Like any damage limitation exercise its all about 'graceful degradation'. Lovely phrase. The idea is that when put under pressure you don't just die you sort of wither slowly. ie you hold out as long as you can not by accident but by design. You also hopefully hold out long enough to flower again somewhere else another day.
Now the bad news.
If the truth be known there's not a lot you can do.
Here's what I've been able to glean from the usenet and from my own experience.
The first bit is too basic to be true but has to be said... If you've not already done so (why ever not?) then the get your own domain name. Without your own domain you are wedded to your hosting service. In the worst case if you are not satisfied with your hosting package you will have to move. If you don't have your own domain all the work you have done to get listed on search engines and publicise your site will be wasted and you must start again. Once you have your own domain you simply have to move the files, change the domain details to point to the new host and after a few days the problem is solved. You may have suffered in the mean time but the damage is normally contained.
Even if you do have your own domain then make sure that you have backup copies of your site. This is easily said and done for static sites but much less obvious for sites running programmed backends and/or databases. That however is a whole other discussion. At any rate the comment stands.
Email.
I discovered this one by accident but it's fairly obvious, really.
If you put an email address on your site so people can contact you then make sure it's not on the same server as the website. Preferably make sure it's not even with the same hosting company.
Visitors to your site may well have noted your email and if your site is having problems will mail to find out what is going on. If the mail is in the same domain as the site then probably it's down as well. Similarly make sure that you have backup email addresses of your own you can use to contact people.
This sounds banal but it is in fact rather irritating. If you've just bought a domain name then presumably it's not just to have www.mydomain.com but me@mydomain.com as well. Now I'm telling you not to use the email address on your website. Sorry. Don't.
At the cheap end you can just use your normal ISP mail or one of the free addresses. For anything more serious you might want to invest in another domain and host it somewhere entirely different. This would allow you to generate another branded email name and get round the problem described in the last paragraph.
If you do keep your mail in a seperate domain then of course the opposite also works, your site can cover for you and keep people informed if your email suddenly explodes.
In my view this is also a very good reason for not using html forms for mail. If you do then when the website gets toasted so does your incoming mail.
Multiple domains/multiple hosts.
It may be a good idea to split your site up into multiple domains handling different sections of the site and hosted with different providers. Whether this is realistic or usefull obviousely depends on the structure of the site. The downside is that it will probably be more expensive. It may not be much more expensive though and it could be a good way of limiting exposure to server failure.
It might also be interesting to split mydomain.com, mydomain.net and mydomain.org domaines to different suppliers. Two of them could be extremely minimal 'limited service' packages designed normally to route to the main domain but to provide limited back up in case of problems. This leaves the problem of how people are supposed to know to go to .net when .com is up the shat. Even so a set up like that would give you some chance of maintaining some traffic.
Mirrors.
Mirror your site on another server - perhaps in another geographic region as well. Downside is cost again and if you're using databases you need serious technical expertise. Upside is that this has performance benefits as well. Probably only for the big boys.
DNS issues.
DNS contact on a different server. Your email contact address for your DNS details should *not* be in the same domain as your site. If you wish to change your DNS details the email request **must** come from the address registered for that domain. If your domain is down and the registered email contact is in that domain then you can find yourself in the situation of neither being able to access your site nor being able to move it!
It is also recommended that you not use your personal email address for this registration as this database gets trawled by spammers.
DNS on a different server.
Normally hosting packages propose DNS services 'in the bundle'. You are not obliged to do this though. You might want to have additional DNS servers hosted elsewhere. There is a free public DNS at http://soa.granitecanyon.com/. There may also be commercial DNS-only hosting services. In this case the aim would not just be to host DNS at another site but to use the extra servers as backups to the normal ones. This from a post by Kent W.England to alt.www.webmaster. "Here's a radical thought. Ask your ISP to set up their two name servers as secondaries to yours. Put them both in the zone file, along with your server as primary and then register your name server as primary and one of theirs as secondary in the domain records at Network Solutions. Then you'll have three name servers, but total control of the zone file through your primary. Another option is to list both their secondaries in the Network Solutions database and leave your primary in the zone file. Almost same effect."
Thou shalt know thy ip addresses.
DNS resolution converts between names and ip addresses. If the DNS servers take a dive you should still be able to get to your sites via ip addresses. The fact that the DNS servers are down does not necessarily mean that the http, ftp, mail and telnet servers are out. (indeed they definitely should not be). This is no help at all to your visitors but does at least allow you to get at your sites.
I hope other people have some ideas as well because this all looks pretty thin to me!
And remember web hosting companies are now big business. When they screw up there's a deathly hush.
You don't have to result to using blah@yahoo.com to keep email running on a different server. Part of your domain is the MX (Mail eXchanger)record. What this record does is tell your outgoing mail server where to send mail. Example: stuff.com points to 192.168.323.864 Your MX record points to 324.53.6.211 That means that when a browser goes to www.stuff.com, it goes to 192.168.323.864 When an email is sent to you@stuff.com, the smtp server (outgoing mail server) sends the mail to 324.53.6.211, on a completely different server. This way you can have the safety of email on a different server, and the convience of me@stuff.com
------- Assumption is the mother of all f$#@ ups.
This lets you at least take control of your own backup and recovery, and system administration, which can be important for a database-driven site. You do need to have a professional level of skill to keep the crackers out, but if you're a business and you have internal servers, or you're building a site with a big database, chances are you need someone like that anyway.
The most important thing about making ANY decision involving getting a service that your business relies on, web-based or otherwise is research!
Research the company that you are considering using. Find out who their clients are. Talk to them. Reputations exist for a reason and they do not appear out of thin air.
Find out something about their technical setup. Do they run their servers on PCs or Sparcs or what? Software quality aside, the quality of the hardware they're running DOES make a difference. Then, obviously, are they using a reliable OS?
Do they recieve all of their bandwidth from the same providor, or do they maintain multiple routes in case one of them goes down?
Here's a big one: What's their backup policy? Do they maintain daily backups or weekly? Are backups extra or standard?
What happens when your bandwidth is exceeded? Are you simply cut off, or are you given fair warning and time to buy more?
The list goes on and on: logging, cgi's, do they support servlets?
My point: You can NEVER know enough about a service providor before making a decision.
I am very concerned with uptime as my domain gets all my mail from my clients. I've tried three different hosting sites in the lower price range and have earned these lessons:
;)
-Call them before you sign up. If nobody answers (in office ours in their timezone), they're not worth it. You need to be confident that someone will pick up the phone and answer your questions when your site is down.
-Mail them about some tech issue before you sign up. If they respond after a day or two, forget it.
-Examine their site for uptime-guarantees. If it's worse than 99% or better than 99.999% they're not serious about it. One site advertised '100% uptime guarantee' but said that outages under 10 mins didn't count. These guys are clueless and just not worth your business. An uptime-guarantee usually only means that you don't pay for the months where it's not fulfilled, but it at least shows they know what uptime is all about.
-Examine their site for bandwidth-pricing. If it's 'unlimited' they're just not serious and will kick you when traffic increases (or at least throttle your site down to the point of turning visitors away).
-Examine their site for diskspace or bandwith overuse policy. If they just give your visitors a page with 'this site has spent its monthly bandwith quota' then stay away. What you want is to be billed for the extra usage (maybe including mild slowdowns), not turn visitors away.
-Check out their references. Are they having a lot of customers? What kind of customers? Any kind of high-volume sites? Relevant reference sites means experience which in turn shows they know what they are doing. It also assures you that they have room for your growth.
-Check out the company's start-up date. The longer they have been in business, the better.
And last, but certainly not least: when trouble comes knocking on your door in the form of excessive downtime, lost mail or heavily delayed mail: don't hesitate, go somewhere else within 24 hours.
Personal experience:
www.pair.com - technically very good, but their lower priced accounts only serve static pages (no PHP or DB). They also take some time answering questions by mail. Have been in the business for some time.
www.digitalspace.net - very reasonable pricing, but they are not always picking up their phone and they are quite slow answering technical issues. Fairly recent start-up.
www.webquarry.com - ok pricing, quick support and have been in the business for some time. Maybe 'rock solid', but not very sophisticated (although this is seen as a plus for many). If you sign up with them, please mention user 'feg' as your referral as it'll earn me a free month
"There is no substitute for thinking" - Bjarne Stroustrup
The major points to web hosting is the DNS and http hosting side of it.
/. discussion...
You must have several dns servers. This means you must have three working at all times on at least two diffeent networks so when one dies, you've still got at least one left. This should have different MX records to stash your mail on a nice mailq somewhere till you get back on line.
Telsta lost a major router that the main reverse dns for all of 203.*.*.* was on. Guess what that did to email all over oz-- telstra's bigpond internet service was deleteing messages because it couldn't reverse lookup addresses and assumed it was spam. Its nice when all your dns servers are on the same side of one router.
The next is the http hosts....
Web hosting compaines are everywhere but I run my own box. It may be on a slow modem link but I'm going to run my own server. If I need (or want) the speed, I'll mirror it on one or two other servers near MAE-(east|west). Its easy to build a cgi on a server to basicly webcopy an entire site so the main site only needs to very little hosting.
So you've got the worlds best site and need to up no matter what so what do you do?
1) set up your source site
2) set up your development/stage site (you don't work on the live one do you)
3) set up your dns servers (at least two plus your main site which is the "master" and you don't tell the nic about it)
4)get an account on one of the big players. Don't let them dns for you. Don't let them do email. They are only there for hosting.
5) copy your site to big site and wait for the hits.
6) have a plan in place to deal with your big site going away.
So what about databases?
Run them on the big server and have it send you changes every 15 minutes (or what ever you can afford to lose) to your source site. That way your "offical site" is someplace safe under your full control but a very good copy is off somewhere running fast with a big pipe.
Then there are all the security issues but I think thats a different
For thouse that care...
web.abnormal.com is a sparc 1 with 24m on a T1 somewhere in KCMO. www.abnormal.com usualy points to three servers including the main server and mirrors at jumpline.com and cqhost.com. Jumpline is running some sort of smp beast that has lots of bandwidth which I pay $15/mo for. I've been having problems with cqhost so they are out of the loop for now. Dns is done by the main server, an isp in Oklahoma, and one in the bay area. I've got current zone backups on two other servers ready to roll should I need it as well as a backup of the complete site here in oz. And this is only a personal site.
So I switched to one of the big companies. They kept the servers running, but customer service was abysmal. They were overwhelmed by their tens of thousands of customers and couldn't provide actual answers to questions of the sort that they couldn't post on the FAQ site to start with. The had an 800 number and a big phone room, but the customer was of the scripted type (i.e. all about things I might be doing wrong, and no clue about what actually goes on in the server and no idea how to recognize a description of something that was actually wrong with the server). If I convinced the "customer service" people to actually pass me on to "tech support" (which seemed to be the extension in the server room), I got someone who knew their stuff and something about it but who, um, was not skilled in customer service. The last straw was one occaision when my site was down for 24 hours -- but the outage wasn't the problem. I called when the site first went down to ask what was up and once we established that it wasn't my fault, the phone rep called the server room and told me that Unix Server #10 (where my site was) was down and would be up again soon. After a few hours I called again to ask how things were progressing. This phone rep started taking me through all the things that I could be doing wrong, so I asked didn't she know that Unix server #10 was down and had been down four hours? She didn't and didn't believe me but patronizingly said she'd check it out. There were a few keyboard tapping sounds and then "Whoah!... It is down!" On subsequent calls I had to start all over. Once they actually passed me on to the techs, who weren't real keen on discussing their troubles with some pesky customer.
So now I'm with a "reseller" -- a guy who has his own servers on the networks of large companies. He provides the great one-on-one customer service, and the large companies provide the technical reliablity.
While I'm plugging him anyway, he's at thewebhost.net. His name is Mike (and yes, he'll give me a referral bonus if you say I sent you, but so would the places that sucked).
<sig>Guvf vf abg n frperg zrffntr
Of course at least you should have different DNS servers, preferably also in different geographical regions. Then the data can't expire, if there is still at least one of your DNS servers around the world up and running.
And with the MX records: as somebody stated before, you don't have to have different domains for your email and your web server, as long as the A record for web server points to a completely different server than the MX record for your email.
And, another important thing, you should also have at least two MX records with completely different servers behind them, perhaps also in different geographical regions. This way you still get email (at least with some delay) when the first MX server is down.
--
See you at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo!
This assumes the DNS server is working. If it goes down, then nobody can get the MX records to find your mail service. That's why your site contact should be in some other domain: If you DNS service fails, you can still be mailed.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I had a *really* bad experience about 2 months ago. It made me angry enough to write a report and post it on my site. Basically my hosting provider killed my site without explantion, they "lost" the back ups and all my scripts, and their customer service sucked completely. My site was down for three days. Argh! If you're interest in the full "report", here it is...
How ProWebSite Stuck it to Me
John S. Rhodes
Web Design and Usability Guru Interviews
How to Download YouTube Videos
Something else to look at is security.
For example: With the success of Linux there are all sorts of "We'll build a Linux server for you AND host it" places.
Well, that's a neat idea until you find that by Linux they mean stock Red Hat 6.0 and no updates.
Recently, one of these firms built a "new" box for another tech news type of site and even though we're talking LAST WEEK, it was Red Hat 6.0 and no updates. Not only that, all the stock (and unnecessary) services were running and open.
The security implications are stunning. A quick scan of the same subnet found over 50 similarly setup machines that the average script kiddie could have down in a matter of minutes.
So do some security checking on the company that hosts you as well. If they don't know what they're doing... you'll pay for it later.
As the article points out there is a FREE backup DNS server available at soa.granitecity.com
My journal has hot
Enormous ISPs have enough resources to handle things properly - basically, enough spare cash, which hopefully translates to enough servers, enough bandwidth, enough staff. They're also usually dirt cheap. On the other hand, that very fact that they're so damn cheap means that 90% of their customers are morons. It certainly does make a difference if you're on the same physical server as some college student with tons of pr0n on his site, with the added effect of inviting script kiddies to break into the server. (Of course, if the pr0n is good, and the server disk crashes, your data might be among the first to be recovered :) Customer support usually sucks, after all, too many cooks spoil the broth, esp. if all but one of the cooks don't have a clue what they're doing.
Then there are ISPs consisting of a 486 in someone's bedroom. These people (in general) work their asses off to offer good customer support, you can call their mobile phone at 3am on a Saturday, they are usually very competent, and your virtual server neighbours are a friendly bunch. Who care's if they're a bit more expensive? However, infrastructure costs money and these outfits don't have too much of that.
So, which one to choose? It's a hard question, and one without easy answers. I've found the best bet is someone in between the two: Some company with 4 years experience, 20 staff, refused several takeover bids from Netcom,... basically, not small, not huge.
What do you guys think? Experiences?
Any technology which is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
Our goal with the Web Host Guild is to make web host certification a part of doing business on the Internet. Our mission statement is to protect consumers from unscrupulous hosts, and to help identify the honest, legitimate host companies that exist. We have always been focused on aiding the Internet community, and it is with great pride and pleasure that we present the Internet with the world's first and only web host association, the WHG. It is our hope that the Web Host Guild will become one of the most-used resources on the web for both web hosts and consumers.
See their members: click here (the one I use was approved recently :-))
StarTrek.org Free Webmail
Not quite, the correct address is GraniteCanyon.Com
I'm seeing a lot of posts here along the lines of "well, they might not be huge, and they don't offer much bandwidth, but they have all these features...". That's cool- I'm with my current hosts for exactly those reasons. However, there's another sector of hosting requirements that I've never seen mentioned anywhere, and being that I just moved into it, that's a problem.
The sector? Simple site (static pages, no CGI, blah), HUGE bandwidth.
A bit of background: I'm the editor and maintainer of http://www.machinima.com, which has just launched and is getting a huge amount of traffic. We've got, or rather we had, a large file archive, which I prefer to host seperately from the site to avoid massive slowdowns when I lot of people are downloading files (and given that we hit over 30Gb traffic in one day last week, that's a real concern). However, I've had to move the archive (remember that 30 Gb traffic? My former hosts do.), and I've been shopping around for somewhere to put it. With very little success.
I can't believe I'm the only one in this situation, but it does seem to be pretty much insoluble without spending vast quantities of money. So, does anyone have any suggestions for people in this fix?
(Oh, yeah- quick plug for good webhosting company. I'm currently with DSVR- all the services I need (shell account, access to root, access to httpd.conf and all the rest, PHP, MySQL, PERL...) and superb technical support. If you're in the UK I'd currently highly recommend them.)
David Manifold (aka Tril) offers free hosting for open source projects at Bespin.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
I think sites like yours are going to be the absolute wave of the future. I'm a director for a consulting firm and Net incubator down south, and probably 20-30 percent of the dot-com ideas that come across my desk are related to broadband access and rich media (video in particular).
The thing about these guys is that their bandwidth requirements are enormous although their applications are not all that big a deal. I spent all week helping out one company in figuring out their architectures and partnerships, because we're forecasting their bandwidth growth rate at somewhere around 2.5 TERAbytes per month.
The mid-tier ISPs had better get on the stick and realize that this is coming, or the big guys (MCI, Qwest, Intel, etc.) are going to take all business in the next big landgrab on the Net--the reinvention of the Web as a video tool.
I truly believe that we'll be laughing at the Net we have today in five years, kinda like we chuckle about TRS-80s and Apple ]['s today...
- Crash
"The difference between theory and practice is small in theory and large in practice..."
I've set up a few major commercial sites, and so far I've hosted them all at AT&T Cerf Net.
:)
It aint cheap, but the addage is true that you get what you pay for.
Which isn't to say that AT&T is without critisism, for one their sales people are completely clueless, and by and large it's their sales people that you have to start with whenever you want something done.
Cerfnet is physically located in San Diego, which means I get to have regular jaunts to lotusland. This is a good thing, I live in Cleveland.
On a more serious note, They offer 24/7 access to the hardware, have 24/7 security services on site, to the point that when you need access to your box, a security guard will be there to open the cabinet. Ring their door-bell at 3:30 am on a sunday night, and you have access.
As for security, they seem to have enough policies in place to avoid being socially engineered, but you have to take responsability for the software-level security - this is despite what they advertise.
They offer complate hosting packages to the point where they'll order the hardware, install the OS, install the server (IIS, apache, etc), and just leave you a place to drop your content. Despite what they advertise, they leave these boxes in increadibly unsecured states. Any competent person hosting with them would be a fool not to tighten the security on the boxes after Cerf'net is done with it.
Advantages are near %100 uptime, complete fail-safe systems including diesel generators, UPS, tape and redundant net connections. On top of this, they'll set up a second box in New York in the case of a catestrophic failure of the California location.
These are the "big boys", and the advantages and draw-backs are what you'd expect.
I wrote this little diddy detailing how the Web Host directory/idexes "actually work". It can be found here http://www.csis.gvsu.edu/~lowea/webhosting.htm
Wht dose everyone know about off shore hosting? i.e. I expect to be sued so I'm puting this in another country. It would be interesting if there were hjosting services which were in the US but had a deal with a hosting service in Russia to handle any sites which drew legal fire. If this was not too much more expencive it would be a good idea for some people (contraversal artists like Mike Z.). Dose anyone know anything about the legality of moving your site to another country when you have been issued a restraning order?
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
p.s. I know there are other registrars now (yay!), but NSI still has over 90% of the market, so this should be relevant to most.
<sig>Guvf vf abg n frperg zrffntr
*Warning* Not for the sharks in the sea, for the tunas */Warning*/
./ers is , How does the company pull it off ?? In the beginning I wasn't sure whether it was just another fraud, but many months into the hosting, they still stand tall as ever and I havent paid a single cent more than the initial $200/-.
I heard about this site NoMonthlyFees some time ago and didn't believe what they were offering! One time payment of $200/- u get 200 MB space for lifetime ! No monthly fees at all. My site is hosted there for some time now and they have not given me much to tell against. Good service, good uotime, good support. Some days ago they changed their offer a bit. Check website for more details.
What I would like to hear from fellow
Is this the way things will be in the future ?
... "follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind
> Example: stuff.com points to 192.168.323.864 Your MX record points to 324.53.6.211
:)
Look! He's solved the 32-bit limitation on IPv4! Gazillions of IP numbers are ours! Hooray!
-Lars
I've been hosting my own and client sites since 1995. You can do it without paying a ton of money, although some start-up costs are inevitable. Here are a few suggestions.
1) Bandwidth is expensive. Be realistic. You can get an ISDN Centrex installation with 32 or more IP addresses for $300/mo. An ISDN router like an Ascend Pipeline is probably less than $600. It's not a T1, but chances are your site is NOT going to get 600K hits per day. If it's just you or you and a few friends, you'll find the bandwidth quite adequate for the majority of users which are still hitting with 33 or 56k modems. Of course if your 5 friends all want to run streaming video, forget it.
2) You don't need the fastest machine in the world as a server. You will want a lot of memory, but a 200 or 300 Mhz PC is fine for many situations. For heavy database use you'll want faster.
3) Backup to tape, backup to CD-RW, and backup to another hard drive if you can. A typical PC may run for a couple or three years w/o a hardware failure, but you'll be happy to have backups when it happens. If possible have a second machine with the same server s/w. You can swap them over anywhere between a few minutes and an hour depending on your prep work, and it makes a $20k high-availability system unnecessary.
3) Setup a firewall. Setup a firewall. Setup a firewall. Look into one of the new "firewall appliances" if it intimidates you. A Sonic Wall with 10 IPs is about $400. You will be amazed at the number of idiots that will try to hack your little web site. I've been able to use the logs to get 2 French, 2 Germans, and 2 Californians warned or suspended by their ISPs. If they're coming in via cable modem, they know one more complaint and their nice fast line gets turned off and they're back to a lousy dial-up. Also, I blocked their IPs specifically. This is the best money I've ever spent on a pice of equipment.
4) One of the major points of having your own domain is having me@mydomain.com on the website. I disagree with the article about this. Where you might want to have a different address is on the Internic admin record for the site. You want to make sure you can always update the DNS servers to a new ISP if your current one goes bad. If possible run the mail server on a different machine than the web server. That way if the web server goes down you still have email, and people can notify you there's a problem. Also, you can still get to tech support, usenet, friends, whatever to get help.
5) Don't bother to do your own DNS unless you have a T1. The ISP will do it for you, often for free. DNS is critical. This removes the requirement for another machine, more backup, etc.
There's nothing like being in control of your own universe. You're free to use whatever OS, database, and hardware you like. Have fun.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
If you want NT cheap, take M6 Technologies. www.m6.net Mediahouse site stats 5 are outstanding, a nice control panel to add/delete/config your emails, database at no cost, more megs and bandwidth than you'd ever use, cgi-bin is there and runs perl scripts well (something have had problems with NT hosts elsewhere). Speed is good, support good (though they don't work weekends). $10 setup, $10 a month. Superb.
If want *nix cheap, Hurricane Electric www.he.net is the best in town. PHP over mySQL database tossed in. $9.95 a month, $19.95 setup. Support pretty good, though their $9.95 is advertised as "self-serve", and this philosophy pretty well holds. Noticed they have started running adverts (the 'groovy' banners) on Slashdot also lately.
All the best, Robert
---
"And the beast shall be made legion. Its numbers shall be increased a thousand thousand fold."
-----
Cast a Cold Eye
On Life, on Death
Horseman, pass by
--W.B. Yeats' gravestone
I'm saddened by the slow evaporaiton of sites that give you shell access. I can't code a page worth crap if I'm not in the ditches using pico (emacs flames directed to /dev/nul), reloading, fixing, reloading, etc. FTP'ing a page back and forth is a royal pain in the ass, and replicating a directory structure locally is as well, especially if you're working across platforms...
When I ask a hoster if they give shell access, they tend to have one of two responses, either, 'huh?' (...but these folks support frontpage extensions!) or 'Why, you a hacker?' [sic].
I recently had to find a home for GriffJon.com and settled on a small outfit called TranSonicNet. Linux and BSD servers (they're pretty security-conscious) with not-that-great uptime, but clued tech support with reasonable email reply-times. The price was right ($10/month), and the feature set is good. They claim unlimited bandwidth allowance, but I can't say for sure what really happens when you start chugging gigs through their servers.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
DNS Hosting is indeed a sticky business when not handled correctly. If you need to host both primary and secondary DNS entries at the same location, here is a tip for moving servers that will assist in the change-over...
:)
Some background...
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DNS entries are held by the primary and secondary DNS servers. These entries list the IP address of the server, and the domain name. Additionally, they contain a "TIME TO LIVE", which will tell other DNS servers (like your ISP's) how long to retain the IP address before refreshing. The TTL ensures that the DNS information will only be requested by a server after a specified period, preventing volume problems on the DNS server.
Before the move:
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At least 48 hours before you intend to move a server, check the TTL on your DNS entry... if you do a 'dig' from a unix box, you can determine the TTL of the DNS entry. If it's set to a day, it will take a full 24 hours between DNS refreshes.
If your box is going to change IP address, have the sysadmin change the TTL to something short, like 5 minutes. This will cause all external DNS servers to refresh (also called obtaining an 'authoritative response) from the primary/secondary DNS server.
Once the full TTL time has passed (since changed) all global servers should be seeing a 5 minute TTL.
Now - move the box (or more appropriately, after moving the box and getting it ready to go live, move the DNS entry on the primary DNS server from the old IP address to the new IP address).
After the move:
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Now that the new box is being seen when servers do DNS refreshes, you will want to have the sysadmin change the TTL on the DNS entry, back to 1 day. This will again take the load off the DNS Server, and all traffic will see the new box.
BUT SLASHDOTTERS KNOW THIS YOU SAY!
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Not true... Some of us didn't. Until we had to deal with the problem...
Consider yourselves INFORMED.
// Hunter, Angler, Photographer, Dad. (In no particular order.)
With cable modems and some RBOCS there is that restriction, but with most CLECs, like Covad, you can indeed get an SDSL (or other DSL) and host your own servers.
Part of the problem is when your telco bundles the DSL with ISP services, they can't handle it. What you have to do, is get your DSL as a curcuit only, then sign up with an ISP that will allow hosted servers. You can't do that in every city, but you can in several.
Even with my USWorst DSL at home, I'm able to host servers, because our upstream provides the pipes on the other side of the DSLAM. I have a 2GB/month limit imposed by the ISP, and only a single IP address, but I'm able to purchase more of either, if I desire.
In this case, it's just like a regular data curcuit, where the telco provides the curcuit, and the ISP determines the extent of the usage.
Dave
For security reasons, most name servers won't allow zone transfers to slave servers in non trusted domains. If your host has a problem allowing custom DNS configuration, chances are they aren't going to allow a zone transfer to another domain, let alone one that is not trusted.
I suppose you could hand seed your slave name servers, but a key ingredient of DNS is dynamic updates between the primary and slave name server. If for some reason your host was to change IP addresses for your site, or the email server, then those changes wouldn't be reflected in the slave name servers record. If your primary name server went down, your slave wouldn't have the right data in the zone file.
Dave
to have the bandwidth available to run our own small server at home? A T1 would be fine for a small personal website, even half of a T1 would be nice. My problem while looking for a web host is to find a site that has the features I want while still being affordable. I've yet to find a decent web host with personal websites in mind. They either don't offer enough space or don't have extras like a telnet account or ssh.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
What do you expect? Most low-budget hosting operations are run on minimal (if not nonexistent) margins, staffed by unhappy people, and managed by slavedrivers. The hosting business sucks ass until you get into the revenue-generating parts (like offering e-commerce features) because there is so much competition that any non-essential service gets reduced to come in under the competition.
;) ....
Competition is good, but you guys have _got_ to stop using hosting services that shaft you, otherwise you're proving that price is more important than service.
Kee-rist, it's _not hard_ to run a hosting service, as long as you get your technology and TOS right (don't handle porn unless you have a pipe big enough, force CGI protections thru cgiwrap or suexec, don't use M$
Your Working Boy,
Yes, but this assumes that the path to the domain works.
/.'ing some poor shmuck). The server for .foo gets mis-configured, and no longer points to your name servers for narf.foo (this happens with distressing frequency). Yes, your name servers are OK, and if I could point my machine at your servers all would be well, but since the link from the .foo servers to your server is hosed, you cannot get from here to there.
Example: Your domain is narf.foo (I'm deliberatly picking an invalid domain to avoid
The simple fact of the matter is that in good system design of any sort, you don't want to have a single point of failure. If, for what ever reason, your domain cannot be resolved, you want to be able to be notified about it.
www.eFax.com are spammers