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Archive for the ‘Web Infrastructure’ Category

Goodbye Shared Hosting, Welcome to the Cloud

Thursday, October 15th, 2009
Cloud Computing

Back in 2007 I got a shared hosting account from Hostmonster which claimed to offer me “300GB of space” which was later upgraded to “Unlimited“, “3000GB monthly bandwidth” which was later upgraded to “Unlimited“, “Unlimited MySQL databases“,  “Unlimited mails“, etc. all for a meager amount of 5.95 USD/month. I felt as if I had all the power in the web but soon realized all the “Unlimiteds” were awfully limited. Although I had a shell access for the account, the best I could do with it was copy or move files. I couldn’t install anything onto it or modify anything I needed. What good was all the unlimited for when you had small limits on processor timings and memory usage. Especially when hundreds of shared hosted sites are hosted on the same server its only a matter of time when your site becomes listed as a malware website with Google and co just because some unscrupulous user setup a malware website on the same server as yours. Then I felt the need of having a dedicated server. Now we run Ajatus on a dedicated server which we got for a steal of a deal from Serverminds.

But, now times have changed, for a blogger of today what is the best option to host his websites along with the freedom of trying out his hands on the various components of his server? It can’t be shared hosting, and dedicated web servers are a tad bit too expensive for him. VPS (Virtual Private Servers) is another option where the hosting provider gives the user slices on servers shared over a visualization layer like that of XEN or VMWare. But, VPS are also not very recommended if you have a hunch that your site might need scaling because of a rise in traffic, as it limits the users scope for scaling without moving entire data and setup and their price are also not as reasonable. So what other option are we left with, Cloud Servers, for most of us it might sound something which would be extremely expensive and an enterprise solution. But the fact is its not at all expensive when it comes for a starting user with minimalistic requirements, provided that you choose the right hosting provider. I will provide a small price comparison of the most popular Cloud Server hosts later in this post. So, what is Cloud computing all about? Cloud Computing can be considered as an extended VPS which can be seamlessly scaled dynamically over the Internet. Amazon is one of the largest providers of Cloud computing infrastructures. But except for Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) all others seemed pretty much expensive to me especially the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). So, what can you do with a cloud server? Well on a cloud server you can do everything that you can do on a dedicated server with an added option of dynamic scalability. You can host your blogs, experiment with all sorts of fancy technologies and once you feel you are going out of resources ask your service provider to expand your Cloud Server in-terms of memory, storage or processor cycle limits. Having told all this lets have  look at the pricing for a minimalistic Cloud Server configuration provided by some of the Industry leaders:

Amazon EC2: For the smallest Cloud Server they charge 0.10 USD/hour that makes it 0.1 x 24 x 30 = 72 USD/month. For the same price you could easily rent a dual Opteron Dedicated Server with 2GB memory for your self.

Aptana Cloud: Their pricing for 256 MB memory and 5 GB storage is  20 USD/month. This seems a bit more reasonable. Actually this would also be the price of an equivalent VPS.

RackspaceCloud or Mosso CloudFS: Their pricing seemed the best to me. For 256 MB memory and 10 GB storage they charge on 1.5 cents/hour or 10.95USD/month. Now that is extremely low. This is just a little bit more than what most of the shared hosting provider charge for their pseudo “Unlimited” hosting. What more whenever your site seems to soar up in traffic just dynamically add another Cloud Server and share your load.

GoGrid Cloud Hosting: Their minimum offering is half a Gig of Memory and 30 GB of storage at a price of 0.095 USD/hour = 68.4 USD/month. This also seems high for a beginer.

There are other Cloud Computing service providers also, but most of their offerings target the enterprise more than to the  personal usage. One such example is RightScale, although they provide Developer free trials their pricing is simply too expensive for a beginner.

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Posted in Web Infrastructure | 45 Comments »

Weave Your World With Mozilla

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
Weave Mechanism

Weave Mechanism

Password as well as bookmark Synchronization is a thing of past. Welcome to Mozilla Weave, a Mozilla Labs project which is a tool designed to let you keep in synchronization with absolute ease & more importantly keep it secure. If you’re one of the many “road warriors” depending on Mozilla browsers, Weave is your ticket to a seamless Firefox experience across all your machines.If you only have one machine where you use Firefox to browse the Web, you probably don’t have much need for Weave. But if you’re using Firefox at home and at work, or any other scenario with multiple machines, you’ll definitely want to take a look at the latest iteration of Mozilla Weave. The project recently released Weave Sync 0.7 for Firefox 3.5 and later (including the 3.7a1 release)

Even though Weave is the answer to a lot of my problems, I haven’t been using it previously. I’d tried Weave before, but stopped using Weave pretty quickly because it seemed to make Firefox enormously sluggish. However, the most recent release seems quite snappy.

Using Weave is simple: Install the extension and restart Firefox. Then create a new account or enter your username, password, and passphrase if you already have an account.

One word of caution — you need to keep your passphrase handy. You apparently can’t recover the passphrase, only reset it and delete your data. This is a bit of a hassle if you (like me) have gone a longish interval between using your passphrase and have forgotten it. I have a number of “stock” strong passwords I use for services like Weave that I can cycle through, but passphrases aren’t terribly common — when I started looking at Weave 0.7, there was pretty much zero chance I’d remember what I used last time I set it up. I do know for certain what it wasn’t at this point, but that did me little good. Since I was only reviewing Weave and not depending on it previously, that wasn’t a big deal for me — but if you’re going to depend on Weave, make sure you have picked a passphrase you won’t forget!

What Weave Syncs

As mentioned, Weave does more than just sync passwords and bookmarks — though it does that. It also syncs history and tabs, and does so continuously. So, if you’re at home and logged into sync and surfing the Web at home, you should be able to pick up the same session at work after your commute.

Of course, you don’t have to sync all that. You can opt out of syncing certain things like history, tabs, passwords, etc. So if you want to sync history and bookmarks but don’t want to have your passwords backed up, it’s totally doable.

The data is also encrypted, so you shouldn’t have to worry about your data being exposed on Mozilla’s servers. If you’re truly paranoid, it gets even better. Individuals or organizations that would like to deploy Weave Sync without sending data to the Mozilla mothership can set up their own server. Yes, you can have your cake and sync it too!

The long term prospects for Weave are even better, though. Weave is actually being developed as a platform that will allow other extensions to sync data as well — so the possibilities for Weave are pretty exciting, if Mozilla can get the same kind of buy-in with Weave that they have with Firefox add-ons.

Finally, Weave also has a great story for mobile users. Weave also works with Fennec, the Mozilla Project’s mobile browser effort — so as users take up Fennec on mobile devices, they can sync with their desktop browser and mobile device. The most obvious advantage here is the ability to sync passwords with mobile devices to avoid retyping passwords on devices with tiny keyboards.

Overall, I was much more impressed with Weave this time around. Users who have a mobile lifestyle should definitely take the time to take it out for a road test. Some things remain unsynced (like extensions), but Weave Sync is a definite improvement over simpler tools like Xmarks.

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Posted in Web Development, Web Infrastructure, web | No Comments »