Web

Expected downtime

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It looks like all of my sites will be down Friday night until early Saturday morning. DreamHost sez:

Due to continued space and power constraints in our primary data center, we will be moving all central DreamHost functions as well as the “spunkyâ€? cluster to one of our newer data centers. This move will begin Friday, March 21st, at 9PM PDT, and is expected to last up to 12 hours, until Saturday, March 22nd, 9AM PST.

Central services include panel.dreamhost.com, dreamhost.com, dreambook.com, files.dreamhost.com, media.dreamhost.com, wiki.dreamhost.com, discussion.dreamhost.com, basically everything but secondary DNS and this status blog. Primary and tertiary DNS will be going down as well, but will have a more limited downtime window of only 2-3 hours. For spunky, all web servers, mail servers, file servers, and MySQL servers in the randy cluster will be unreachable.

The last time they did a big move like that, it was a major fiasco, which resulted in over 24 hours of downtime.

Content Scrapers

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I just checked my Akismet moderation queue and found that no less than 5 splogs republished an item I posted less than two hours ago. I bet this item will also be scraped and republished. If you’re reading this anyplace other than mcdevzone.com, this post was illegally republished.

Evil Software

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I don’t pay much attention to Windows shareware & freeware, so I haven’t heard of G-Archiver until I read this item at Coding Horror.

I was looking for a way to back up my gmail account to a local drive. I’ve accumulated a mass of important information that I would rather not lose. During my search I came across G-Archiver, I figured what the heck I’ll give it a try.

It didn’t really have the functionality I was looking for, but being a programmer myself I used Reflector to take a peek at the source code. What I came across was quite shocking. John Terry, the apparent creator, hard coded his username and password to his gmail account in source code. All right, not the smartest thing in the world to do, but then I noticed that every time a user adds their account to the program to back up their data, it sends and email with their username and password to his personal email box! Having just entered my own information I became concerned.

Actually it’s very easy to back up your Gmail account to a local drive by simply downloading your email via POP3 or IMAP.

New tagline

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I’ve changed the tagline for MacMegasite to “Mac Community News”, which reflects the focus as a community driven site better than the old one, “News for mac geeks”.

Moving back to Dreamhost

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I’m now in the process of moving this site back to Dreamhost. I’ve already moved the database, so the same content will be mirrored on both servers.

I found that HostGator doesn’t seem to offer any advantages over Dreamhost and their control panel (CPanel) is nowhere near as nice as Dreamhost’s control panel, plus I have a lot less bandwidth & disk space, and they don’t offer shell access.

Web hosting scorecard

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This has been a weekend from hell for my web sites.

It started when Dreamhost moved one of their server clusters, which affected all of my sites. It was only supposed to take 8 hours, but it turned into almost 24 hours. Unfortunately that seems to be their usual pattern. Every planned change they make always runs into unforeseen complications and results in extra downtime. On the plus side, Dreamhost has the best account management & control panel of any web host I’ve tried. Their hosting package also offers the most features, disk space, and bandwidth for a reasonable price. Thanks to referrals, I haven’t had to pay them for a few years.

During the downtime I decided to look into other hosts. Media Temple’s GridServer seems like a great idea, but I had tried it previously and found it to be much slower than Dreamhost. A google search turned up lots of reports of problems with it.

Two hosts that seemed to get a lot of recommendations were Bluehost and HostGator. I first signed up for BlueHost but started running into problems immediately. I host several sites for myself and for friends, so my major requirement is to be able to host each site independently, preferably with a unique login and home directory for each site. As is the case with most sites that use CPanel, Bluehost only allows additional domains to be treated as subdomains, sharing the same directory with the main site. I find that unacceptable.

Next I signed up for a reseller account with HostGator, which is where this site is now hosted. It uses WebHost Manager with CPanel. Did I mention CPanel sucks? Even though each CPanel account can only host a single domain, I can create separate accounts for each domain, which is sort of like Dreamhost but much less convenient. Unfortunately no shell access is available, unlike Dreamhost.

For now I will keep this site at HostGator and the rest of my sites at Dreamhost unless they have another major meltdown. I can create about 40 additional user accounts at HostGator, which I can either use for my own sites or resell.

DNS Problems

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The DNS entry for Macmegasite is screwed up right now, so it’s inaccessible. I had temporarily switched it to Bluehost and a little while later switched it back to Dreamhost. The first DNS change is in effect now, so it’s pointing to a non-existent site at Bluehost. It *should* be back to normal by the end of the day or early tomorrow.

Back Online

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This site is back online, now hosted at Host Gator. The rest of my sites are still at Dreamhost for now.

I had tried Bluehost first, but I cancelled almost immediately when I found out that they can’t host multiple independent domains on a single account- multiple domains are treated as subdomains.

There are still some DNS issues, so email for this domain isn’t working yet.