Tagged: powweb

This time last year


At around this time last year (to be precise, one year and 2 days earlier), floatingsun was born. I [[http://floatingsun.net/blog/2005/07/11/6/|had decided]] to move all my personal content off from lab machines and onto my own hosted space. At the time, not knowing any better, I had started off with [[http://powweb.com|PowWeb]]. But after about a month there, I [[http://floatingsun.net/blog/2005/08/05/91/|decided to move]] [[http://floatingsun.net/blog/2005/08/08/92/|to Textdrive]].

I really don’t know what convinced me then. I mean, Textdrive was not big and it certainly wasn’t famous. I didn’t personally know of anyone else who was hosted there, and yet, something told me that this would be a good choice. I can proudly say that the service has been incredible the past year. I got to hang out with the CTO of Textdrive (and now Joyent), I [[http://floatingsun.net/blog/2005/10/07/218/|got my picture taken with davie]], I witnessed the merger with Joyent, I got sucked into the life long hosting plan, and then later the life long Mixed-Grill offer.

So in another 2 weeks I would have burnt out my one year long plan with Textdrive. Technically speaking, my lifetime hosting plan will start only after that. So far things are looking great and I have nothing to complain about (except that I’m really not using my strongspace and joyent accounts — hopefully they will see some use in due course of time). So long as things keep up the way they have been, I can say that this was probably one of the best investments (value-for-money wise) I’ve ever made.

Moved!


Yes, I have finally made the move. Feel kinda stupid, and lost some money too. But well, I’m new to web hosting so….

Anyways, the reasons for changing hosts will probably not amuse most of you. Its just one of those [[http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=2&q=idiosyncrasies|idiosyncrasies]] :-) For those of you who really //are// interested, read on.

PowWeb is a good hosting provider, one of the best value for money out there. But they’re not serving a niche market. There’s a lot of competition, and [[http://site5.com|some of it]] is really good. In the one month that I was with PowWeb, they had atleast one major hiccup (usually [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDoS#Distributed_denial-of-service_attacks|DDoS]] attacks) every week. In addition, there were small little problems every other day.

But these were not the major issues that bothered me. They’re cheap, so I wasn’t expected world class quality in the first place. But some things just annoy me. For instance, PowWeb is just adamant on FTP. Despite the fact that [[http://www.raditha.com/php/ftp/security.php|FTP is insecure]], PowWeb admins just turn a blind eye to that fact. Customers have repeated demanded that atleast SFTP or SCP should be provided as an alternative, but PowWeb doesn’t budge.

To be fair, they //do// have a web interface to FTP which runs over secure HTTP (https). However, its cludgy and extremely cumbersome if you have to do any kind of bulk transfers.

PowWeb doesn’t provide shell access, rsync/unison support, secure SMTP/IMAP/POP. I’m not saying that they should. All I’m saying is that they didn’t hvae services that I was looking for.

But still, the cost of changing providers is non-trivial. I lost about $20 in the process, and I had to waste some time transferring the blog and setting everything up.

Oh shoots, I still haven’t said where I moved to! :-) Well I’m now **proudly** hosted at [[http://textdrive.com|Textdrive]]. Its awesome. The plans are slightly pricey, but I wasn’t using all that bandwidth and disk at PowWeb in the first place. On the plus side, I get shell access, rsync/unison support, secure POP/IMAP/SCP. FTP is **not** supported.

In the end, Textdrive won because it primarily caters to //geeky// people :-D Well thats not by design, it just evolved that way. //With great power, comes great responsibility//

Heh heh.

Now no matter what, I’m sticking around here for a while. Can’t spend too much time on the website any more. Can’t spend too much more money either. But I’m happy to be at Textdrive. They’re the same folks who did [[http://www.textism.com/|Textism]], [[http://www.textpattern.com/|Textpattern]], they’re always at the cutting edge (Apache 2, Ruby on Rails etc), and they support open source projects such as WordPress through their earnings!

Slow nooooo!


For the first time I experienced inexplicable slowness in my website. And I mean terrible, //terrible// slowness. The databases weren’t responsive, PHP was slow. FTP was working fine though. Probably something wrong with the PowWeb servers, need to check up the forums.

Some changes — updated gallery2 to beta4, and so WPG2 as well. Also installed wp-cache to alleviate some of the performance issues. The old pages should definitely load faster.

If you experience slowness with this blog in particular, do let me know!

New home


Over the last year or so, I have often felt guilty (the feeling used to come and go) for hosting personal content such as my blog and the photo gallery on my lab machine. Hosting them on the departmental web server wouldn’t have been any different. Besides, nowadays hosting is so cheap and convinient, there really wasn’t any good reason for me to continue //using// school resources in such a manner. I mean, there was nothing //wrong//, strictly speaking, I just didn’t feel very comfortable.

During the move, my machine was down for a few days and this acted as a catalyst — I finally decided to take the plunge. So I got myself a domain name, registered with a hosting service ([[http://powweb.com | PowWeb]]) and setup the blog and gallery there. Of course I moved all of the static content as well.

I’m still tweaking and tuning the website, so let me know if you see something broken. Also, it’ll be great to get some feedback on the response time — if you see things slowing down, let me know and I can bug the folks at PowWeb.

**Why floatingsun.net?** you ask?

Well, __sun__ because that’s what my name means in Hindi. And __floating__ because I think thats how human lives are (see Forrest Gump for more on this) — atleast I’m still floating towards my destiny :-) Finally, I chose the __.net__ domain because I didn’t want to use .com (I’m not a commercial entity) or .org (neither am I an organization). I did get interested in the __.name__ TLD (infact, I also have a domain diwaker.gupta.name registered there, but there are still some pending issues there), but decided that floatingsun.net was simpler, shorter and sounded cooler B-) !