David Russell

First, I must wish my lovely wife a happy anniversary! Three years ago today we were married and since then I’ve enjoyed the best three years of my life because of my wonderful, beautiful bride. She’s incredible! And she puts up with me. :) That alone is a testament to how awesome she is.

I love you baby.

Yesterday we visited a doctor. The first of many visits to the doctor. Two months ago we setup this appointment and we’ll be visiting quite a bit for the next seven months. For those of you who weren’t math majors, that makes nine months. For those of you who weren’t biology majors, that means Missy and I are having a baby!

We’re both thrilled beyond words for this blessing and it’s certainly an exciting time in the Russell house. Soon there will be the little patter of feet around. We can’t wait! And neither can the grandparents! My mom and dad will be new grandparents and it will be grandkid number three for my mom-and-dad-in-law. :) Needless to say, I think the grandparents are about as excited as we are. And on (or around) September 18, 2007, we’ll all be joyful for this new life entering the world.

This is going to be amazing! Now I’ve got to get to work on building the baby blog. :) I knew there was some way I’d get to geek out on this.

Missy’s Announcement

A few days ago, I was checking a domain’s availability and I noticed some new services being delivered by my web host, 1and1. VPS? I wasn’t familiar with the acronym, but once I clicked through, I certainly understood the big picture. 1and1 has launched virtual private servers!

Most of us here are at least somewhat familiar with virtualization, and if you’re not it’s quite alright. It’s only been a phenomenon for the last year or so. Zealots will say it’s been hot for much longer—but I’m talking mainstream. Either way, it’s fine. Just make sure and get on the bandwagon now if you have not. The VMware player is free. Parallels is killer for the Mac platform.

So what’s a web host doing with virtualization? Well, it’s really a fantastic idea for several reasons:

1. Economics - Virtualization keeps costs low by maximizing the use of hardware while minimizing the amount of hardware.
2. Speed - In this case, 1and1 is allowing their VPS customers to get a 100 MB per second pipe. Until now, that was only available on their high-end servers. Also, the server itself is allotted the horsepower to get the job done right.
3. Reliability - Virtual machines are a cinch to build and rebuild, even under highly volatile environments like the world’s number one web host encounters. I can count on 1and1’s ability to restore my VPS quickly because I know how quickly I can restore a VM—mere minutes.
4. Scalability -  If my needs as a customer change, modifying a virtual machine to allocate more RAM or even moving the VM to better hardware is very simple.

In fact, there are probably even more reasons why a virtual server would be beneficial. (Feel free to say it loud in the commentary.) But there are also a few drawbacks, at least in the way 1and1’s plans work. You are going to be tethered a bit more on your data quota. For $30 a month, you’ll get 500 GB transfer per month. That may seem like a lot to some folks, especially if you are paying too much for hosting somewhere else, but in reality I get six times that amount (yes, 3 TB) for $20 per month on my shared hosting developer plan. Wild, I know. But I don’t have that 100 MB per second pipe on my shared hosting either. Also, you’ll have much less storage space on the VPS as compared to the other hosting plans. 10 GB of storage on the base VPS plan while I get 300 GB on my developer plan. So you have to weigh those things for yourself.

I like these VPS plans a ton. I’m currently regretting a decision I made to launch an upcoming project with site5. They had a killer deal that I took hook, line and sinker, but in the first eighteen hours with them, our site was completely unavailable for nearly eight…

Sometimes I run across things I should have known a long time ago. Sometimes, when I find those things, I say to myself, “Man, I should have figured that out. It makes so much sense.”

Virtual hosts are one such thing.

A few weeks ago I was stumbling around the Godbit forums as I do at least once a day and I was intrigued by a post about virtual hosts. I was a bit misled, thinking the topic was a web host offering service delivered on a virtual machine (more on that later.) Instead, the post revolved around the idea of creating a set of locally resolving URLs for use in the test environment so that projects can be delivered in more of a ‘root’ location.

Allow me to explain a little further.

In a local test environment, a web server combined with a scripting language (or two) and even databases can produce the same kind of results that you would receive while working on a traditional web server, perhaps just like the one at your hosting company. So for all my projects, I create a folder that is ‘served’ to my own machine. The HTML documents and PHP scripts I produce can be examined and run in place allowing me to test and tweak these files very quickly and without the need to transfer files back and forth between a remote server. Of course, once a project is complete I do make exchanges between the remote server and push the content live on the w3.

But before those files ever see the light of day, they live for quite some time on my local server. When I load a project, I usually just throw the standard local machine URL and the project folder to view my work:

http://localhost/project

Now, this works quite well most of the time, but occasionally I’ve run into some small snags because the information is delivered from a subfolder. .htaccess files typically struggle a bit here. It would be best if we could run things from a root folder, but it’s certainly not ideal to run multiple projects from that root folder. It’d be impossible to manage.

Enter virtual hosts.

By editing some information in the hosts file of my machine and editing the conf file in the Apache web server, I can create any URL I want and associate that URL with any folder or subfolder of the webserver’s /htdocs directory (the directory responsible for storing the web content that is served.) So, theoretically I can create a URL for that same project that reads more like a standard URL. In fact, it can even be:

http://www.davidproject1.com/

Yep. Even though I don’t own that domain, and would never want to anyway, I can tie that URL to the project folder and have that information served from my local server into my browser of choice.

The first trick is editing the Windows hosts file. Grab your…

Take a look at the January 2007 results from Netcraft for the most reliable hosting companies. I subscribe to their newsletter which typically has some fascinating security-related tidbits and this month they highlighted the top 10 hosting companies by stability and uptime. There is a short writeup with the top 10 information and you can gather more detailed information over other ranges of time.

I found this information to be quite interesting. And it’s one of the things I look at most closely when shopping for web hosting. Of course, with 1and1 performing so well by these standards, I may not need to move anywhere at all.

Is your host on the list? :)

Digg This

Over the past few months, a group of church IT professionals have gathered intermittently for an interactive conversation about the world of technology. Jason Powell, the Technology Director at Granger Community Church, is responsible for organizing and guiding the discussions. He’s also the reason these meetings exist. After he pitched the idea to several folks on his blog, Church IT and Other Musings, the first interactive “talkcast” for church IT geeks was born. On the first and third Friday of each month, we gather our digital selves together for about an hour to discuss news, events, tools and resources, gadgets and gizmos, as well as high profile issues relating to security, technology management and senior pastors—I mean, budgeting.

If you are involved in technology at any level within a church, parachurch or nonprofit Christian organization, or even if you work elsewhere and are keen on the idea of gathering with some very, very, very, very cool dudes to talk shop, you are welcome to join the fray at our next discussion. We’re meeting again Friday, February 2nd at 2:00 p.m./1400 EST (1900 UTC/GMT) using the Talkshoe network and client. You’ll have to register at Talkshoe: create a username, password and PIN. Then, download the Talkshoe client. You might want to do this well before the event starts because you may need to update Java, depending on your setup. Once you have Talkshoe running, you’ll dial in to the Talkshoe number (724-444-7444) using any phone, enter your PIN and the show ID and you’ll be connected to the conversation.

Also, you don’t have to interact. You are welcome to just listen. But we do encourage participation. Trust me, I’m not even good enough to shine most of these guys shoes and I still chat it up. It’s the only way to learn. Plus, I’m often able to assist with web-related discussion that pops up. You never know when you might be the expert-on-hand when something is discussed. So jump in, if you would like to.

If you don’t have a PC, or if you simply don’t want to run the Talkshoe client, you can just call in to the Talkshoe number (724-444-7444) and enter your PIN and then the ID of the show and you’ll be connected. (You will have to be registered at Talkshoe.com for this, but you won’t need to download anything.) It’s just like a conference call.

For all participants, toll charges may apply, depending on your service agreement or phone system. It’s a standard U.S. number. Cell phones are fine, but be wary of “road noise” and other environmental oddities that can occur. The moderator, Jason, may mute your channel if there is too much happening on your line, especially if it is distracting. So mute yourself if you think it’s a problem, then unmute when you want to add to the discussion. Just be mindful. And remember that without the Talkshoe client, you…