It’s been a while since I wrote about HostMonk. In a world of paid-for and affiliate marketing driven hosting review websites, HostMonk was a breath of fresh air. I wrote that “If HostMonk would add a good rating system (…) it might just be the website we’ve been waiting for”. Well they have. So now it is?

What’s really clever is that HostMonk uses other factors, like uptime, to rate hosts as well. Even the number of Twitter followers is factored in to give you the best possible indication of a host’s popularity. Clever stuff. And they’ve added cloud and shared hosting packages too. Now all we need to do is fill HostMonk’s review database. The web needed a good independent service like this, so let’s use it.

I’ve blogged in the past about how hard it is to find decent hosting. Many of the companies that friends have recommended have failed miserably for me, and to make things worse, 99% of web hosting review websites can’t be trusted. HostMonk seemed like a good initiative when it was launched, but it still doesn’t have a quality metric. In comes whoishostingthis.com’s hosting review feature.

Where other websites forget to mention that they get a substantial fee for every hosting sale resulting from their recommendations, HIHT is completely open about this. The about page reminded me of Google’s “Don’t be evil” mantra, which, considering they are in the same type of situation, is a good thing. Much like Google they’re in a market where everyone is willing to pay for the top spot, and HIHT too should resist that temptation. The true potential lies in unbiased information.

Extensive search options

The website has an extensive set of search filters that let you search for specific features (like a 1-click WordPress install) and allow you to specify things like bandwidth and disc space. There’s even an option to limit the search to ‘green’ hosting plans only. The idea is that you tell it what you need, and it’ll recommend based on your needs only.

Currently, HIHT’s database lists 300+ plans, which quite frankly isn’t enough. But still, being able to find user comments for 300 of the biggest hosting providers already makes it a valuable resource. And I’m sure that number will increase rapidly. I really hope it does. It’s about time there was a better alternative to forums like webhostingtalk. If only because searching forums is such pain.

Spread the word

I’ve been in contact with Quality Nonsense, who operate the website, and I’m convinced they’re 100% legit. They’re tryign to build something truly useful, and I think we should support them. So, if you’re looking for a new host, give Hosting Reviews a try, and make sure you fill out a review for the old one. And the new one once you’re settled. Others will thank you.

Ever since this blog started picking up momentum, I get a lot of email from companies launching new products or features. Most of them aren’t very interesting to me (like iPhone apps when I don’t have an iPhone), solve problems I don’t have or are simply hoping to be the next Twitter. I discard most of them. But sometimes one of these projects actually looks like it’s going to fix an important issue, like with HostMonk.

Monkey business

HostMonk is new website that aims to impartially compare hosting packages. This might be something you’d expect to already exist. There are tons of sites out there comparing other sorts of products. But with web hosting, there’s a catch. Many hosting companies have adopted a marketing strategy where they pay out very large referral fees. If you refer someone to Amazon and they buy the book, you get a few bucks. Tops. Web hosting providers will gladly pay upwards from $50. This has spawned a whole genre of so-called review websites, most of which simply rank the companies based on the payout.

This is where our little Zen friend comes in. HostMonk bases its advice on raw numbers, like the amount of storage you get, how much bandwidth you’re allowed to use and how much a certain package costs. They make money from referrals, but they make it very clear that this does not affect the rankings.

The path to enlightenment

My main concern is that HostMonk does not (yet) factor in the most important factor in web hosting. Quality. I’ve, on average, switched hosting provider every two years since I started running my own websites. And in many cases I left before the end of my contract. Not because I wanted to, but because I needed to get the hell out of there. My current host on the other hand has relatively modest specs and certainly isn’t very cheap, but they’ve consistently provided top notch service and support. On HostMonk however, they’d probably compare poorly to other cheaper hosts.

If HostMonk would add a good rating system, which is simple to use yet tough to abuse, it might just be the website we’ve been waiting for. The site is still in early development, and they’ve assured me that they plan to add a lot more features, including customer satisfaction and things like uptime.

When I first heard about Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) in 2006, I wasn’t sure what anyone was ever going to use it for. It was not quite a web hosting service, because there were no extra services like PHP or MySQL. Or even FTP access. This was clearly aimed at developers, but most of those would probably have their own dedicated server boxes with tons of storage, right? Until I stumbled across a ‘use case’ for it this week. I signed up and found it to be a very flexible and useful service.

Preparing to serve millions of widgets

As you may have noticed, I created a little Flickr widget that uses a Flash movie to display the most recent images you posted to Flickr. I originally considered making it a WordPress plugin, but there wasn’t really a reason to do that. The images were already on Flickr, there was no WordPress data being used, nor was there any need for PHP. I decided to create a form that would generate code snippets, and host the Flash movie myself.

I estimate that my WP-Cumulus plugin is used by at least ten thousand blogs right now. If those get an average of a hundred pageviews each day, that would mean that WP-Cumulus gets served a million times a day. Because it is a WP plugin, each blog hosts the file, so this is not an issue for me. But with the Flickr widget, I was going to be hosting the movie myself. This one is a lot smaller (under 5k), but times one million that’s still 5 GB of bandwidth per day. This tiny little movie could potentially cause more data traffic than I was set up to handle.

In comes S3

What I remembered about S3 is that you only pay for what you actually use. With no monthly minimum. So if my project would fail to capture the imagination of the Flickr crowd, it wouldn’t cost me anything. On the other hand, Amazon’s infrastructure would allow almost unlimited growth. Their servers can handle pretty much anything, so the movie would be online all the time. Even a regular web host’s 99.9% uptime guarantee means your website can be down for nearly 45 minutes each month. If a lot of people depend on you to host something, that’s not cool.

Here’s what my activity overview looked like yesterday. So far, I think I can afford this

S3 for mere mortals

Because the service is primarily aimed at developers, you need to communicate with it using an API (Application Programming Interface). If you’re fluent in Java that is probably very convenient, but if you only drink the stuff you’ll need help. Luckily, there are a lot of cool tools out there to help mere mortals get their stuff onto S3.

The best place to start is probably “Amazon S3 Simple Storage Service – Everything You Wanted to Know” by Amit Agarwal. It lists the most important tools and explains how S3 works in layman’s terms. I’ve tried the S3fox extension for Firefox, and used it to upload my files. On my Windows box I think I’ll switch to CloudBerry Explorer, which does not need Firefox (but does need the .NET framework). Both use a familiar FTP-style interface that makes it very easy to upload an download files to and from S3.

Other uses

But the best thing about S3 is that it can be used for a great many things. A program that caught my attention JungleDisk. It uses S3 to store backups of local files. Reliable off-site backups can be quite expensive, but with S3′s relatively low prices you probably won’t have to sell your car.

What Amazon has done is create a very flexible storage platform. It’s great if you need to store a tiny file that you want to be able to serve to millions of users, but the flexible pricing scheme makes it equally suitable for off-site backups of large files. Or anything in between. I wouldn’t be surprised if more clever uses for the system continue to pop up.

I changed themes mid December, and according to googlebot’s stats, pages have been taking twice as long to load since then. This got me thinking. What was it I added that caused this? Surely I didn’t make the pages twice as heavy?

• The new theme was coded from scratch, but the average page isn’t much heavier.
• I haven’t moved to a new host or server.
• I’m still using WP-Super-cache, no change there either.
• The “get recent comments” plugin adds a few database queries, but I didn’t add that until a few days after the jump in the graph above.
• Although one of my reasons for the redesign was to be able to fit more widgets, I’m currently still using the same ones.

The only other major addition is that this blog now supports gravatars. That means a whole lot of extra images to load, but does Googlebot even load images? For anything but the image search, it wouldn’t have to, right? Another clue is that WP-Super-cache reports page generation times of around half a second. Pretty speedy, and that’s only if the page needs to be generated at all. Most of the time it won’t need to.

For now I’m going to blame it on the gravatars. Load times of around 1000ms aren’t bad, so I’m not considering any changes to the theme, but I guess I need to watch this to see if things get worse.

UPDATE: I came across a great tool today that let me analyse this issue in great depths. Yahoo’s YSlow is an add-on for Firebug that gives you detailed statistics about every element of your page.

UPDATE2: As it turns out, it was hosting related. Apparently the server where this blog is located became slow on the very same day I made my changes. See the very last bit of the graph? It was already starting to return to normal when I took that screenshot.

I’ve written before about how hard it is to find a good hosting provider, and how Ipowerweb and Hosting Zoom didn’t quite work for me. It’s hard to get good advice with all the lucrative referral programs, which seem to have spawned a whole genre of fake hosting review websites. That’s why I thought I’d share my experiences with Pair Networks. If you’re looking for a good, reliable host and are willing to spend a bit more, I suggest you read on.

Setup

I moved my personal sites from Hosting Zoom to Pair four and a half months ago, and setup was about as easy as it gets. Pair does not use CPanel, so I had to move the sites manually, but it really only took me a couple of hours, and was no trouble at all.

my.pair.com

It took me a while before I felt at home in Pair’s own control panel, but it’s really very well designed, and incorporates ticket support and billing. All explanatory text are also very clear, unlike in CPanel. I actually prefer my.pair.com over CPanel, even though I’ve used the latter for quite a while and had gotten used to its layout and quirks.

Domain names

One thing I love about Pair is that the hosting packages do not include a domain name. This allows me to register them elsewhere, which is necessary anyway for international domains. I haven’t used Pair’s own PairNIC service, so I can’t comment on their service. It’s very easy to add domains registered elsewhere to your account and make them point to a specific folder. There is a $5 one time setup fee per domain however.

Reliability

This is really why I’m writing this. I have and account at one of those free website uptime tracking services, and I logged in last week to see if my account was still active. I was beginning to doubt this because I’ve not received a single warning email since I joined Pair. I used to get a couple each week at HZ, but now my websites are simply up. All the time.

Support

I have limited experiences with Pair tech support, but so far they’ve been great. It’s never taken them more than an hour to reply to tickets, and the answers were always very informative. One issue I had was essentially caused by me (a WordPress plugin I installed to be precise), but they nevertheless took the time to write a short Perl script that I could run to fix the situation.

WordPress on Pair Networks

As I wrote earlier, Pair actually recommended using Movable Type instead of WordPress because of the higher server load that a completely dynamic system like WordPress would cause. Like I thought at the time, they were being modest (a good sign). WordPress runs like a dream on their servers, serving pages at double the speed compared to my account at Hosting Zoom. I’ve not encountered a single timeout error in over four months.

Value for money

This really depends on what you’re looking for. There are hosts that offer more storage, more allowed bandwidth usage and such at lower prices. I personally have tried two of them. Ipowerweb had great uptime, but their tech support had obviously been outsourced to a low wages country, and tickets were usually responded to with meaningless sequences of words. Hosting Zoom’s failover hosting plan, despite it’s name, was very unreliable. Their tech support was good, but I found myself needing it all too often.

I guess you get what you pay for when it comes to hosting. I personally quite enjoy the luxury of not having to worry about hosting, and don’t mind paying a little extra. My websites are worth it.

Imagine renting a big-ass car, with pretty much unlimited mileage. But when you get in the engine turns out to be too weak to actually move you forward. That’s how this feels. This site too has been hosted with Hosting Zoom for a while now, as are some of my other sites. Recently however, I’ve been getting 500 errors (internal server error). So was a friend of mine, and she eventually got HZ’s support department to fess up. WP is exceeding their memory limit for PHP scripts.

“…your hosting plan does not provide you with sufficient resources to allow WordPress to perform perfectly. Don’t get me wrong, it’s capable of running it – but not to an extent that you’re able to serve multiple user’s with.”

What you have to know is that she had set up a fresh new WP blog for testing purposes only, and wasn’t serving any users at all. Nevertheless it took the sole user only a few clicks to have the blog come to a grinding halt, especially if those clicks were of the ‘submit’ kind.

What makes this extra painful is the fact that Hosting Zoom actually provides a one-click install script for WordPress. Why would they do that if you can’t actually run the single most popular ‘publishing platform’ on their shared hosting accounts? What good are 20 GB of storage and 400 GB of transfer if you can’t even host a small personal weblog on it?

If Hosting Zoom doesn’t revise it’s PHP memory resource strategy, I think it’s time to look for another host. So far I’ve been hosted by two large, US-based companies, and both have been a dissappointment. Perhaps I should see if a small local firm will provide a better service…

I had to prepare this post in a text editor btw, my blog was ’404′ (page not found)…

When I need a new web host, I tend to go by other people’s recommendations. People I know in real life that is, because online hosting review sites tend to be fake, with everything geared towards making money from affiliate programs. Some hosts pay more than $50 per sale, so many hosting review websites just recommend the highest paying company.

Suzero recommended Hosting Zoom to me and I thought I’d write about my experiences with them so far.

The movie review website I run with several other movie nuts used to be hosted at Ipowerweb. They used to be OK, but a few years ago their tech support went from pretty good to appallingly bad. Not that I had much trouble with them. Great uptimes and all, but when things did go wrong I found myself lucky if the replies I got were even in understandable English. About half a year ago I decided to move away from them.

Like Ipowerweb, Hosting Zoom offers loads of space and bandwidth, the usual PHP / MySQL stuff and Cpanel control panel. I prefer Cpanel over Ipowerweb’s rather awkward vDeck solution. Cpanel also allows you to move to other hosts that use their software relatively easily, which is nice as a kind of exit strategy. For eight bucks a month this is a pretty good deal.

Suzanna’s own website is running off an older server at Hosting Zoom, but new customers like me get the ‘failover hosting’ plan. From what I gather, this means the websites are served by a cluster of machines, which should minimize downtimes. If a single computer breaks down the cluster will redistribute the workload and continue running. At least in theory.

Hosting Zoom appears to be having some startup troubles with this new service. Choking on Popcorn has been down quite a few times since I signed up, but never for long and each time I got quick and informative responses from their tech support department. There’s also a forum with more info on each server as well as talk about things like scheduled maintenance. Where Ipowerweb’s support seemed to be either a chat bot or an Indian outsourcing company, at HZ you get real human techies who know what’s going on.

The ‘failover hosting’ seems to be improving lately and I’ve moved both this blog and my freelance portfolio to the same account. You can host 20 sites on one account, which is pretty nice for me. There haven’t been many outages lately and if they do occur at least I know I’m going to get info and issues will be resolved asap. No way I’m going back to Ipowerweb. All hosts have occasional downtime. It’s how they deal with it that matters. That’s why I still feel that Hosting Zoom is a pretty good host.

UPDATE

As soon as I posted this message my site went offline for a couple of hours. I thought the troubles on the C1 cluster were over, but apparently not. When it came back up there was no MySQL service, so none of my sites actually worked. From what I gather from the forums, when the primary server fails a RAID sync is needed. This takes 20+ hours, during which service basically sucks due to high server loads. With this recent downtime I’ve pretty much lost confidence in HZ. And mon.itor.us alerts keep rolling in…

Slashdot is de meest populaire site ter wereld voor techies. “News for nerds, stuff that matters” zeggen ze zelf. Naast erg veel computergerelateerd nieuws komt er ook veel ander nieuws voorbij. In een opwelling dacht ik er gisteren over om mijn TIME/SPACE experiment aan te melden bij Slashdot. Lijkt me echt iets voor hen. Maar als jouw site op Slashdot genoemd wordt kan dat ook heel erg fout gaan…

Er komen namelijk vrij veel mensen. Erg veel. Miljoenen. En als laten we zeggen 10% daarvan doorklikt naar jouw site, dan heb je een probleem. De meeste servers gaan dan plat. Het “Slashdot effect“. Nu is dat bij mijn site nog ietsje extra erg. Om het TIME/SPACE effect te demonstreren moet je minimaal een filmpje van 900K ophalen. Stel dat een miljoen mensen dat doen. Dan veroorzaakt de site dus 900 GB aan dataverkeer. Mijn hosting provider vindt 50GB wel genoeg(*), en als ik daar overheen ga mag ik bijbetalen. Dat zou een nogal forse rekening worden ben ik bang (een dollar per GB is redelijk normaal…). En dan heb ik het nog niet eens over het feit dat die miljoen mensen waarschijnlijk allemaal binnen een uurtje of twee langskomen.

Blij dat ik nog niet op de de “submit story” knop had gedruk…

*= Is onder normale omstandigheden ook best ruim.