The sTate of Things - Technology

Web Site Hosting Advice

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 04:52:34 +0000

Occasionally friends, relatives, and clients ask me what they should do about creating and hosting a web site. When this happens, I find myself repeating, well, myself; so I thought I would put my thoughts on virtual paper for future reference. I will post a notice on this entry if my recommendations change at some future date. If you would like to consult with me about your particular setup, please contact me for consulting rates and availability.

Ok, you want a web site, good. First, get an idea of what your website will contain, how big it will be, what kind of content you will serve, and how much traffic it will receive. Will it DO something or SHOW something. If you're just starting out, or have no idea, any of the recommended plans will let you scale size and traffic for additional monthly fees, so don't worry too much about it.

If your goal is an informational, mostly text, but low volume, web site, just get a BlogSpot.com or other blog hosting account. They are free, minimally annoying, and with free image galleries and video hosting sites, can link to or embed video and photo content too. My Ward (a congregation in the LDS church) has a few of these sites for various extra activities, for example the youth group is presenting a "Fancy Dance" and Dessert Auction on Saturday Feb 19, 2011 to raise money for camp and activities this year, and uses BlogSpot to advertise. By the way, everyone is invited to the dance, and babysitting is provided, see the site for more information.

If your goal is to sell something, sell through the Amazon marketplace or Etsy.com if the products are crafty. Piggyback on top of an existing marketplace to jump start sales. If you're too big for that, I don't really have any advice. I don't have any experience in that space. I think that I would look for a host that provided merchant services (credit card processing for example) as part of the package.

If your goal is to host a medium volume dynamic application, use WebFaction. WebFaction is probably the best Shared Hosting service there is. They're one of the very few hosting providers that embraces Python application hosting, and I've run Pylons, TurboGears and CherryPy applications there. The hosting is cheap, fast, and it stays out of your way if you want it to. I host this blog, my personal e-mail and my business website on the base level account. I also host demo sites for clients when needed. The email service isn't spectacular, but it's functional as long as you have client side spam filtering like what is provided by Thunderbird. I like it because there are no set CPU limitations, the memory allotment is generous (email, OS, and even Database memory usage doesn't count against your quota, though the disk usage does), and the base disk space/bandwidth allocation is substantial. It also helps that WebFaction takes care of all data backups and operating system and hardware maintenance for you. WebFaction has one click installers for a large number of applications, so you don't have to know very much about Linux to get started, but if you do know what you're doing, you have SSH access, and everything that comes standard with a Linux shell account.

If you are planning on building a new application, take a look at Google App Engine. It lets you get going and host up to a certain threshold for free. Scaling up can be done fairly reasonably. Applications developed for App Engine can be run independently of Google, so you are not necessarily locked to Google as your hosting vendor.

I do not recommend any kind of Virtual Private Server hosting that isn't bundled as a Cloud offering. I've used three different VPS services, and two have all been slow and had high network latency (the third, Slice Host was bought and extended into Rackspace's cloud services, which I recommend below). Higher volume sites may do OK, but if the CPU, IO or Memory usage is too high for too long, your VPS can be rebooted or shut off. What this translates to is that you would have to hit a very small sweet spot to get good performance out of a VPS without getting shut down. Better hosting options exist.

If you do need system level access to a server of your own for some reason -- if for example you have an email processing system as part of your application -- or if you have requirements that extend beyond a single host, like high availability, then using a Cloud based VPS is desirable. Cloud computing nodes are designed for high performance application hosting. The overhead of virtualization is minimized by the use of advanced virtualization techniques (paravirtualization, CPU instruction sets, etc.) and by dedicating virtual resources to physical hardware. The management tools are typically excellent and, in the case of my two favorite cloud providers, there is an inherent benefit of a content delivery network (CDN) and Storage Attached to Network (SAN) which can serve as a scalable long term application storage or system backups. These two tools are used by very large websites to deliver content faster and more efficiently, and they're available on the Cloud for even the lowest rate plans. The intro level computing node at Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) starts at 3¢/hour. Rackspace however has a node that start as low as $10.95/month (that's about 1.5¢/hour). There aren't as many third party software developers, and no external image providers (as far as I know) for Rackspace, but they have pretty good management tools, and a pretty good selection of base images to get you up and running pretty quickly.

EC2 was built for running short-lived computing (i.e., processor intensive) tasks, and it's pricing model and instance sizes reflect that. The instances and costs are very competitive to people looking at dedicated hosting. Rackspace's cloud is similarly designed, but has smaller instances, so it is cheap enough to use as a substitute for VPS or even shared hosting.

A former coworker of mine recently signed up for EC2 to host his blog using a promotional deal offered by Amazon's EC2. This deal lets you use the Micro instance for up to 750 hours per month for a whole year. Thereafter he's looking at a starting monthly rate of $21.60 plus storage and bandwidth charges. Of course using a Cloud node to host a blog is seriously overkill (as evidenced by his load average) unles he is doing much more with his site than visible at first glance. If he is uncomfortable with a free or even a paid blog hosting account, either WebFaction or Rackspace Cloud would be sufficient to host his site at about half the cost of EC2.

There is also dedicated hosting, but with the price point and performance of EC2 and Rackspace Cloud, you'd have to be very big indeed, or have special criteria not available for cloud nodes for the benefits to outweigh the costs.

Here's what I use for myself and my clients, and why I don't recommend VPS hosting:

As I mentioned above, I currently host my blog, email and business website on a WebFaction Shared Hosting plan. Shared Hosting starts at less than $10/month, with steep discounts for prepayment. I moved all the services off my VPS at Linode and shut it down since WebFaction was working so well. I found Linode to be sluggish and and network traffic to be high latency, but haven't felt that way about Webfaction.

With InMotionHosting's VPS offerings, performance was similar to or worse than Linode's. I had a client on the fully managed VPS plan costing $90/month. The VPS would bog down during traffic peaks and InMotion's system administrators would reboot the box (without any advance warning, without notice after the fact and without explanation of why). When things were peaceful, trying to log in to SSH could take 30-45 seconds, page loads for the main site or core application could take several seconds in spite of caching and being rather lightweight. InMotion always seemed to want to upsell to dedicated hosting when I mentioned the problems to their customer service representatives.

This site/application just passed through its busiest season on a Rackspace Cloud Server instance, and the it never even hiccuped. Final cost for hosting for the month? $24, and plenty of room to scale up if volume increases. I recommended the Rackspace Cloud Server because the application has an email processing system and the client has clients that could have been squeamish if their customers' names and email addresses were available on a shared host's shared database server (even though the database itself was not shared and was password protected).

As Promised to TriZPUG: EPDB

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 06:36:37 +0000

So I did some digging around after giving my off-the-cuff lightning talk at TriZPUG tonight and it looks like some other ex-rpathers (Thanks Dugan and Gafton!) have forked epdb. There's also the the rPath tree synchronized from here but this tree is missing some of the latest changes. The dugan tree is "python setup.py installable" now, instead of using make, and some shortcut documentation has been created, so I don't have to make this post as long as I thought I was going to have to.

For those who didn't see my little demo, epdb is like pdb (the standard Python debugger), but it adds multi-line text input, history and tab completion, nested debugging from the debug prompt, shortcuts to introspecting code, and a very nice post mortem debugger. Last, but not least, it also contains a server and client for remote debugging. The docs are still pretty sparse, but hopefully more attention can help fix that. I'd also be happy to answer questions about it.

An Exercise in Python planet link recursion

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 19:16:43 +0000

Thanks to Chris Calloway, TriZPUG has a planet now. I don't know why it's taken me so long to connect with this group of people (I've been working with Python for 5 years now), but it's a pretty cool group from what I've seen so far. Thanks for making me (a TurboGears guy) feel welcome among all you Zope/Plone/Django developers.

Better E-mail validation

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:05:30 +0000

Due to several shortcomings of the stock formencode email validator, I forked it and extended the test suite. This fixes the two most glaring issues I know of, namely the inability to handle unicode strings (international domains), and several problems with input checking (e.g., allowing commas) where invalid e-mail addresses make it through.

I did not write most of the code, I just refined it and added tests to exercise it. Let me know if it's useful to you, and if you find problems with it.

New Biofuel System

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:01:49 +0000

This technology is probably the only biofuel technology I'm really excited about. Unlike E85, it doesn't use food crops, and although algae based programs don't compete directly with food crops, they still require fermentation of cellulose, or refining of algae produced oil to create fuel. More links here and here. Joule Biotechnologies website here. I've been thinking for a while that we should be able to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and produce fuel. Now Joule has gone and built something that might be able to do that.

Usability and "Linuxification"

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 05:23:00 +0000

This week, Neil McAllister at InfoWorld wrote about User Interface (UI) design in applications (whether for in house or general use). He argues that the UI should be left to professionals, that the professional UI designers should be given final say in UI design, and that software suffers because developers are building the UI or the usability expert's concerns are dismissed or overruled by developer interests. I certainly have seen the "damage" that software developers can do when left in charge of user interaction; terse messages, techno-babble, pointless configuration options, arcane defaults, etcetera. I'm guilty of such damage myself, but I make no claims to expert status, though I'm a bit more motivated to acquire that status to improve my consulting business.

Continue reading "Usability and "Linuxification""

Working around KDE bug 162485

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:39:25 +0000

If you want to add support for third party certificates in your KDE 4 desktop, you'll have to work around this languishing bug. KDE for some arrogant reason includes its own certificate authority bundle located in /usr/share/kde*/apps/kssl/ca-bundle.crt, but doesn't provide the tools needed to modify the collection as a normal user. Therefore, as root, move this file out of the way, and link to your distribution's certificate bundle (typically in /etc/ssl/certs). This will let you use your distribution's SSL tools for managing SSL, rather than waiting for KDE to implement these important features. Changes to the distro's CA bundle will require restarting the applications using SSL/TLS before they can see the new root certificate authorities, but that's better than having to click through nag screens for certificates that should be trusted. We still have the security problem of not being able to verify certificates in any app but Konqueror, but the above fix removes the need to do that if you have a Root CA.

Web Browser Posers

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Sun, 10 May 2009 03:27:46 +0000

Ok, I'm not a novice when it comes to developing websites: I've been building web pages for close on 15 years. But within the last week, I've come across two browser behaviors (or perhaps they're browser addon behaviors) that make me scratch my head.

First, a request coming from something sending the User-Agent "Mozilla/4.0"-- yes, that's all, no clarifiers or parentheticals-- is lopping off the GET parameters when a popup is launched through a button click via an onclick handler. This site states that this is a Yahoo! search something, but the links are not something that a Bot would come across. On the other hand, there is no referrer sent, whick makes me think it could be some kind of link preloader or some other browser add on. Also, I saw a very similar error today coming from Firefox 3.0, though I'm not sure it's related.

Second, and this is really baffling: Sometimes I'm getting requests from a browser identifying itself as IE 6.x that has the entire URL made lowercase. I'm use nice REST-ful URLs for my application, so when a identifier comes across as lowercase, it throws off the lookup. Of course my own copy of IE 6 doesn't exhibit the behavior. For this particular case, I'm using JavaScript to build a URL, and then sticking it as the src attribute of an embedded iframe that is also being created by JavaScript. I'm seeing other errors in my logs though of IE6 and IE7 browsers going to different links (links that would typically be clicked or pasted from an e-mail) that are all lower case as well. Again, not sure if that's related, or if people are just typing them in (lazily) or if it's a browser bug. The only thing I can seem to find about this is this forum (news?) post from 2005 with no replies.

Of course my Google searching is revealing nothing to help me keep my hair, so I turn to the Lazy Web. Any ideas?

In search of good [flash] help

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 17:47:24 +0000

I'm working on some freelance work to rebuild a website that has a whole bunch of flash v4 movies that need to be moved forward to flash v9 or higher. I received a reference of a guy who does good work on the flash programming side of things, but finding a flash animator who isn't afraid of a little action scripting has proven extremely challenging. Anyone know of someone who is free for a project immediately?

Sort Tabular Data

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 21:25:42 +0000

I hate the way that tabular sorting is typically done in web apps (make links on every column with sort_order="columnname" or similar). It is tedious to code, and requires a lot of bandwidth and round trips from the server, not to mention additional load on the database.

Well, today I Googled a bit, and found SortTable.js. Add the script, and add a "sortable" class to the table you wish to sort, and you're done. It automatically detects string, numeric and date columns and sorts them using a very quick (though non-stable) sort.

I only had a very small problem (some of the CSS styles in FF3 stopped working) with the mechanism used to set the table up to be sortable (window.onload replacement), so I switched it to use jquery(document).ready, which happens later in the page loading process. Works nicely.

Check out the documentation for additional features.

KDE in Foresight

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 01:48:28 +0000

I get asked a couple of times a week what's going on with the Foresight KDE edition, what is the status of KDE 4.x, and when is the KDE edition going to be released. I thought I'd blog so that something exists in Internet-firma that can be referred to and even "Googled".

First the status of KDE 4.1: I have no plans to build KDE 4.1 into Foresight. While a giant leap forward from what KDE 4.0 was, KDE 4.1 is still disappointing. Part of what happens when you rewrite rather than make incremental improvements is that functionality gets left behind, and some core functionality that I feel is essential to making a decent desktop experience for the end user is missing or buggy. Also, two of KDE 4.x's killer apps are less usable in 4.1 than they are in KDE 3.5.9: Amarok 2.0 lacks basic wholesale tag editing, dynamic playlists, and is a very buggy Alpha; and Kmail 4.2, part of Kontact is significantly slower than it's 3.5.x counterpart. Kontact itself doesn't yet feel cohesive when it comes to user interface interactions. There are a few KDE 4 apps that I would prefer over kde 3 though: kopete, konversation, potatoguy and many others show marked improvement.

Even though we won't be shipping KDE 4.1 in Foresight's KDE edition, it will be available to install side by side with 3.5.x in kde.rpath.org@fl:2-kde4.1-devel so long as someone is willing to maintain it.

For the KDE edition, there remain a few cosmetic issues with the theme, but mostly what we're missing is new ISOs on the release label and testing. If you'd like to help, jump in #foresight-kde on Freenode. I'm hoping that I'll be able to free up some time in the next few weeks to get us over the final hump.

Icon View Style Grid Layout?

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 18:28:16 +0000

For a couple of projects now, I've wanted a grid layout engine that is similar to how desktops display lists of icons: nearly fixed width items, but varying slightly in height, displayed on a variable width page, so your layout could end up with 1 column or 8 depending on the width of the browser window. Tables are no good because they're always a fixed number of columns. Div elements using float works, so long as you make all the elements a fixed width, but they also have to be the same height, or you'll end up with gaps. I'm thinking it's going to have to be javascript driven including redrawing when the page size changes, and to manually size all items to the tallest item in the row, but I can't seem to find an example on the web anywhere (or my Google foo is weak).

Dear lazy web, can you point me in the right direction?

WRT54GL, now more useful

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:48:35 +0000

I've had an OpenWRT compatible wireless router for almost 5 years now, starting with a Belkin FD7230-4, and then getting a Linksys WRT54GL about a year ago. When I first got the 54GL, I tried to load a few third party firmwares on the Belkin, and after much consternation, went back to the original. I was not interested in compiling my own firmware, but it seemed that I would have had to. Over the past month or two, I've tried three times to get openwrt or xwrt to work on my 54GL. I was attempting to use Kamikaze 7.09 based images, and after flashing several different times, was never able to get the Wide Area Network connection to load (Actully, when I tried DD-WRT I did get it to load, but I couldn't figure out how to do some of the things I needed it to do). Command line attempts to bring up the WAN connection yielded "invalid substitution" errors on the OpenWRT based images. Google didn't show anyone else with this problem, and I didn't have time to dig into it (minutes that my router are down are minutes that my website is down). So I always reloaded the linksys firmware, (via TFTP) and reloaded my settings from the backup I'd made.

Enter Tomato Firmware: An "it just works" firmware for WRT54GL and similar. No building your own from the ground up, no busted start scripts, and it includes all of the features that I need from my router right now. It runs DNSmasq, so it is a full featured DHCP, DNS and TFTP server (which takes three jobs away from my main server). I installed it, the web interface worked, it actually kept most of the settings from my linksys setup, so I didn't have to reload wireless settings. I just had to add my static IP clients, re-add my port forwarding rules, and set up the DNS records. I'll have to see if I can get it to run OpenVPN server and NTP, but if not, that's not a deal breaker (I may even do without NTP for my small network). Then I can really start migrating off my old Athlon XP hardware.

Services, libraries, and consumers "Oh my!"

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Mon, 19 May 2008 18:52:20 +0000

I've been working on a project for a month or so now where we were told to create a piece of software that did a few tasks, and were instructed to "...make it run as a service". We've been struggling with the idea of creating a remote service that could also be used as a library in some cases (like for our first use case), and we still haven't got it right. We argue about rich objects vs marshalable simple object data structures, and premature optimization vs. marshalling times. Finally I said today, "It's easier to produce a service for a library than it is to consume a service as a library". Write the library, rich objects and all, and while you're doing that, create a sample service and client layers that marshall and unmarshall those rich objects, hopefully with some off the shelf object marshalling utilities. With this you get the added benefit, that if the service/client layers you chose don't work for the consumer, you can create a different set.

I guess in languages where the service layer comes free, or cheap, or where serialization is innate, it's not important to make the distinction, but in Python where service layers are built from scratch, and serialization (cPickle) only works in highly controlled environments it's important to distinguish between libraries that work like import foo; foo.frobinate() and services that work like proxyObject = Proxy(serviceURL); proxyObject.frobinate().

Layers, it's not just good on cakes.

Slice Host and rBuilder Online Images

nospam@example.com (Joseph S. Tate) — Fri, 09 May 2008 06:28:51 +0000

I host this blog, as well as e-mail for dragonstrider.com and a host of other services on an old PC behind my cable modem at home. This has served me well for the most part, but it requires onsite maintenance when it goes down. This is bad when I'm at work, or vacation, as happened this week. So, I bit the bullet and researched some Virtual Priate Server (VPS) hosting providers.

I ended up choosing Slice Host as a no-frills, just the tech if you please, Linux/Xen-based VPS host. Their entry level plan (slice) gives you 256 MB RAM, 10GB storage, and 100GB of bandwidth for $20/month, and you can scale it with a reboot up to 4GB/160GB/1600GB for $280. /proc/cpuinfo shows that the host for my entry level slice is a two way "Dual-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2212" operating at 2.0 GHz. There's a separate swap partition (so swap doesn't count against the 10GB limit), as well as web based management tools for rudimentary Name Services, starting, stopping and rebuilding your slice, a web console (in case ssh isn't working for some reason), some statistics and reporting, and my favorite part, a rescue mode.

Rescue mode lets you boot your slice in a rescue environment, mount your root file system in an alternate location, and do what you want (or need) with it. This makes it pretty easy to run your appliance from rBuilder Online on a hosted slice. Here are the steps to get this working. Choose a Xen Appliance Image (32 or 64 bit, though 64 bit is preferred) that is a single file system image.

Create a slice (doesn't matter what kind, we're going to blow it away anyway).

Reboot your slice into rescue mode

SSH or console in using the password mailed to you (yes, rescue mode gets started with a randomized password)

wget -O - <link to the rBO image> | tar -xz # This downloads and extracts the filesystem image

dd if=<path to filesystem image file> of=/dev/sda1

e2fs.ext3 -f /dev/sda1 # This forces a file system check, without this check the next step will fail.

resize2fs /dev/sda1 # Resize the file system image to match the available size

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

copy the following networking configuration files from your rescue image to your new slice image mounted in /mnt
- /etc/sysconfig/network /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 /etc/resolv.conf

Edit /etc/sysconfig/network to fix the hostname to the desired value

chroot /mnt

passwd # changes the root password since the rBO images ship with root's password blanked

At this point you can do any additional configuration you wish, such as adding additional users, making sure that openssh-server is installed and configured to start on boot, etc.

When that's done, shutdown, exit rescue mode from the Slice Host panel, and log in to your new appliance.

There is quite a bit of noise when the slice boots up with an rPath Linux based appliance because the kernel in the image isn't used for booting, and modules.dep isn't located for the booting kernel, but that seems harmless.

Now to build an appliance to run on the thing... I used the rPL 2 beta 3 text devel image as my image while developing this HOWTO.