I know, I know... I should really change the name of the blog to "What I've been up to this year".

In any case, I'll sum up the last couple months as well as the last week. I'd go back further than that but I'd have trouble matching up the "what's" to the "when's".


A storm is coming.... (a nice little Warcraft III quote)

August 13th, big storm, big lightning, internet and computers all fried here. That really sums up August quite nicely, and it took a while to recover. The websites didn't get any updates during this time - I only had periodic internet access, so as long as they stayed up and running I was happy, and they did.

The downtime here gave me the opportunity to simply sit and brainstorm a little, and I came up with a few ideas for the sites. The most major was the implementation of videos. If a picture's worth a thousand words, a video must be worth a thousand pictures, right? Digital camcorders have dropped continuously in price, and YouTube hosts videos for free, so I picked up a basic camcorder and used it for a couple basic reviews, a how-to, and a couple glasses purchase reviews.


Videos

The first video was created with Windows Movie Maker. Pretty simple program, and pretty easy to use. I wanted a little more flexibility for the next video though, and after testing just about every single program out there that has a trial, I plunked money down on CyberLink PowerDirector. It's a decent-ish program, but looking back on everything I probably should have looked at them all again.

The problem is I was looking for something that would be easy to use, allow for nice transitions, and spit out H.264/x264 MP4's in the 720p format. It's the recommended format for YouTube, and what I wanted to use. Yes, just about every program has an "Upload to YouTube" option, but half seem to throw WMV files at it, and most seem to decide for themselves what quality/filesize to use. This is bad - YouTube already re-encodes content to an incredibly small file-size, so you definitely want to throw as high quality an original as you can at it (within reasonable file-sizes) when you upload.

For some reason I was under the (mistaken) impression that CyberLink PowerDirector would let me configure and spit out an h.264 MP4 however I pleased. It didn't. In the end I ended up generating massive MPEG2's (which were very configurable) and then using Handbrake to re-encode them to rather large, nice-quality x264 MP4's. Not to say that PowerDirector isn't good - I do like the way it works, although it has a tendency to freeze up periodically for a few seconds at a time. It's also crashed on me once (right near the end of the editing and I hadn't saved!). Looking back, I really should have tried all the trials again and simply chosen a video editing program solely on the merit of it's funcitonality and ease of use. Just about everything will let you spit out configurable MPEG2's, and if I'm using Handbrake for the final encode anyway, the lack of 720p x264 output isn't a big deal.

Handbrake is awesome btw.


Scrunching down the websites

I'm past the notion that every idea should have it's own website. I had between 15-20 domains registered, and as it turns out it's not worth it. To fully develop them all takes too much time. Since most ran on Joomla, I also had a pile of MySQL databases. Updating each site every time a patch came out was annoying, and renewing a domain every month is yet another hassle I can do without. When 10% of your sites generate 90% of your revenue, it's better to focus on that 10%.

It also turns out that Google doesn't put much added weight to a site if it's on it's own domain - I've tested this with a static page that did well by moving it to it's own site. It's performing exactly the same after a year.

In any case, I converted just about all of those Joomla sites to static pages, threw up some redirects, and they're all under the umbrella of one site now. I can now get back to focusing on the 10%.


The web-host moving truck has come by yet again

Here's the deal, and a bit of a recap:

The websites all started out back in 2006 on ASmallOrange.com (technically they were on GoDaddy for a couple days first, but we won't count that). Great little shared webhost, and for $25 (may have been $30), I got a full year of webhosting. Not a lot of space, not a lot of bandwidth, but unlimited domains, and when I started out it was all I needed.

As time went by, the sites started growing. Actually it didn't take much time at all - a benefit when you hit a niche destined to be popular and you're the only one in it. I jumped up to a $5/month plan, then a $10/month plan, then a $20/month plan with an extra $5 tacked on for reselling (mainly to keep other sites separate). At that point, the sites started to get noticably slow, and went down somewhat often - the price you pay for being on a shared host. The sites were big enough, and it was time to move.

Enter early 2009, and I hopped to a VPS at VPSLink.com . Learning all the Linux admin stuff needed to set up an unmanaged VPS was daunting - particularly because it was all learned over a short time period. It was certainly worth it though - not only did I learn a lot, but the VPS was speedy.

Fast forward to August and the lightning, and I had a very real concern... what if the VPS hung, what if the websites got hacked, or what if I needed to do a full re-install for some reason. Not only might I not find out for a few days, but I'd have to head somewhere and borrow a computer and internet connection to reset the VPS and frantically re-upload everything from the backups here. This itself didn't spark the end result, but it contributed to it.

Move up a little further to the middle of September, and while browsing through WebHostingTalk.com, I came across the notion of "Cloud" web-services. In particular, VPS.net came up quite a few times. I took a look, and for about the same price as my VPS, I could get one on the "cloud", and could back up a provisioned VPS at any time as a template, then restore it after.

Not bad I thought. If a VPS hosted on VPS.net were ever rendered inoperable, I could simply restore from a template. It would also allow me to scale up the VPS as time goes on (and the sites grow). They also let you scale up the VPS for a short time period if you need - a couple of days for example if you're hit with a large traffic spike.

They mentioned that they'd be opening a datacenter in Chicago soon, which is arguably a good location. Chicago doesn't get hit by hurricanes or earthquakes and is relatively safe from the "potential natural disaster" standpoint. It's also got great connectivity as a central hub - well positioned for Canada/US traffic, and not as far away from Europe as my current west-coast datacenter.

VPS.net was to be up in the new datacenter at "the end of the week". The end of the week came by, and nothing. I asked about a time-frame, and was told 2-3 days. Again, it didn't happen. Not that I'd fault them - it's better to make sure things are working smoothly than to rush an opening.

The delays probably turned out to be for the best anyway. During the waiting period, I came across a lot of comments for a managed host called "WiredTree". I'd seen the site before, but the site looked a little plain and I didn't think much of it. There were a lot of outstanding comments about them though, so I did a little research, found out the datacenter was in Chicago hooked up to a bunch of Tier-1 providers, and decided that "managed" might not be such a bad idea.

WiredTree is no cloud host, but they use server-grade hardware, they do their own daily backups, and they set up your VPS entirely. They offer WHM/CPanel for free, and Litespeed at a slightly discounted price. They then monitor your VPS - if it stops responding for some reason, they fix it.

Eventually, I decided to bite. They had a coupon up on WHT, so I used it for a VPS. I have to say, so far it seems to be the right decision. It did take a couple days before it started getting set-up, but that's likely because I ordered it late Friday afternoon (sales are closed over the weekend). Regardless I had sent an inquiry over the weekend and they set it up on Sunday. Everything was installed and configured. I checked out the MySQL my.cnf file, and it was already tuned to 95% of the way I would have set it up. They installed and configured Litespeed. I received friendly e-mails along the way informing me of what was happening and when it was completed.

One issue I had was getting myself blocked by the firewall. Evidently, having a pile of FireFox tabs open pointed at various pages/ports on the VPS (a few WHM, few CPanel, few MyPHP, and then a lot of sites hosted on the server), then closing/reopening Firefox (opening all those tabs at the same time), then bombarding the server with a bunch of browser-based tests gets you blocked by the firewall :p A ticket quickly got a friendly response, and the block removed.

The WiredTree support is incredibly friendly/helpful, and quick too. I have to say, having the server all set-up, hardened, and pre-configured saved me a bunch of time. Sure, they use scripts to set everything up, but it's complete and has all been well thought-out. I can configure which services they'll montior, and if the VPS ever hangs, crashes, or goes down, I have the peace-of-mind in that they'll be there to get things working again. No, the server hasn't become an impenetrable fortress, but they apparently run critical updates on their own, and in short, I can spend less time working on the server, and more time on the websites.

I'll still be keeping backups though... just in case.


And finally... the other web stuff

So, what else have I been up to? Since much of my traffic is spread out across the world, I went with a CDN for the website images, and a paid DNS service for the DNS. The DNS stuff didn't take much time (although it was fun finding a provider that's had years without downtime, but at a low cost). The CDN stuff did take a while. Rewriting templates and hunting down/moving images wasn't a quick process, but it's finally done.

I also grabbed shared hosting from HostGator for some of the smaller stuff, and downloads that I offer/provide. The big reason for using HostGator was the "unlimited bandwidth". Often-times, "unlimited" really means "we just don't tell you how much you're allowed", but an old blog post by the HostGator owner mentions that because of the sheer number of servers they have, they pretty much get unlimited bandwidth. If people get out of hand with resources they're all thrown on the same server as other high-resource users. Presumably if my bandwidth usage spirals out of control I'll be thrown with some high-resource users, which is fine for the 90% static stuff I'm serving from the HostGator site anyway.

Why use HostGator if I already get a lot of bandwidth? Well in the unlikely event that I unknowingly get an insance traffic spike, bandwidth overages are always expensive. Yes, I've heard of people getting bills in the thousands of dollars. With HostGator, if things really do get out of control, at most I'll end up with a suspended site - so the downloads (and a couple small sites) will be down for a day or two... not the end of the world.

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So, that pretty much sums up the last couple months. The last 2 weeks in particular have been very busy, but once I finalize the minor remaining parts of the transition tomorrow, hopefully I can take a break for a few days before getting back to work - next up is adding a couple more retailer reviews to EGRR, placing the October EGRR order, and hopefully updating or adding some maps to the Warcraft-Maps.com website.