Category Archives: Hosting

Automatic Amazon S3 Backups on Ubuntu/Debian

If you manage your own web server, as you do with a VPS, one thing you need to look into is a backup strategy. It wouldn’t be pleasant for your files to vanish into the ether in the event of some sort of catastrophic server meltdown, would it? Optimally you want to, on a daily basis, offload a copy of everything important to a separate geographical location. One excellent way to do that is to follow Pro Blog Design’s new tutorial on how to automatically back up your files and databases to Amazon S3.

S3, or Simple Storage Service, is Amazon’s cheap cloud data storage system. Michael Martin, the author of the tutorial, says that his bill from last month was $2.60. ($0.15 per month per GB for stored, $0.15 per GB transferred.) Using a backup script on your server, you can automatically archive and encrypt your files and MySQL dumps, then send them off to Amazon’s servers for safekeeping.

I should start by saying that while s3 is not a free service, it’s incredibly inexpensive! My bill for the last month was $2.60, and that was with backing up a lot more than just this site! It’s the cheapest peace-of-mind ever.

Automatic Amazon S3 Backups on Ubuntu/Debian [Pro Blog Design]

VPS.net Increases RAM and CPU Allocations

VPS.net, the web host that I have been with since September, is celebrating their first birthday by increasing the RAM and CPU allocation for every node, for existing and new customers. Over the past few months we’ve been preparing for this celebration by sliding…

Blogger to End FTP Publishing Support

Blogger has announced that they will be discontinuing support for FTP publishing of their users’ blogs. They say that a mere 0.5% of Blogger users opt to have the static HTML files hosted on their own servers, as opposed to the Blog*Spot servers. The…

Page.ly: WordPress Web Hosting

I was listening to an interesting WordPress Weekly interview recently, which brought to my attention an intriguing web hosting service called Page.ly. Page.ly aims to be “Easy like WordPress.com with the Freedom of WordPress.org.” The general idea is to provide a basic web hosting…

VPS.net Review

I signed up for an account with VPS.net at the beginning of September, installed Ubuntu, and I’ve been slowly migrating my various websites over since. What exactly is VPS.net? They are a provider of Cloud Virtual Private Servers. You can affordably purchase as much…

Put Your Website in Maintenance Mode With .htaccess

Sooner or later you’ll probably run into a case where you need to put up a “maintenance mode” page while working on the site (e.g. while moving a site to a different server). What’s the best way of doing that? First you create a…

Get Live Access Logs With a Simple Linux Command

Here’s a neat little trick for those of you with SSH access to your Linux server. You can use a simple command to get a live-updated stream of your access log, so you can see hits as they come in. It’s sort of like…

Saving Bandwidth and Speeding Up Your Site With GZIP and Browser Caching

There are a couple of easy adjustments you can make to your web server in order to decrease page loading times, save bandwidth, and reduce load on the server. All you have to do is add a couple of code snippets to either your…

Turnkey Linux

Turnkey Linux is an interesting open source project I happened across fairly recently. They have several different specialized Ubuntu-based Linux distros tuned specifically to run certain scripts. The slim OSes run around 150MB in size, and have just the right packages installed for a…

It’s Time for PHP 4 to Be Retired

On December 31, 2007 the PHP Group discountinued support for PHP 4. Since then, there have been no updates to the branch, security or otherwise. PHP 5 is the currently supported branch, and it is far superior to its predecessor. Web hosts have, for…