GoDaddy

At the point where I felt my home setup was “obsolete”, I then took the plunge onto GoDaddy dedicated servers, 2 of them at the time. One was for websites and ran Windows 2003 Server with IIS. The other was a mail server and each had DNS running on them so I didn’t have to depend on/pay for a third-party DNS provider.

GoDaddy dedicated servers ended up being the biggest mistake I ever made.  They ran well for a while, but then a worm of some kind crawled around their internal network and came in through some backend they use to manage the servers.  I had everything well locked down, all Windows sharing turned off, including unneeded admin shares (C$, etc.) and had the firewall pretty tight. It took around 3 days to recover fully from the crash and even though the machines were virtually “destroyed”, I was fortunately able to FTP out all my customer data.

Crystaltech

I moved most of my ASP & .NET sites over to a Windows 2008 Server here. Including email (SmarterMail), which I love, but with the limited space on a Windows VPS, it is quickly filling up with email (people rarely delete things when using IMAP). I still use Crystaltech and they’ve been very stable, but their cost is quite a bit higher than other virtual solutions.

Slicehost

After the GoDaddy crash, all my PHP sites moved to virtual servers running Ubuntu with a standard LAMP stack. Apache got old real quick. It required constant tuning.  I explored many web servers to find one with better performance, at one time, I had three setup for ALL my virtualhosts where all I had to do was stop all the web daemons, change the config of the one I wanted to use to 80 and just start that one, bring up all my sites on a different daemon.  I finally settled on Cherokee and have NEVER looked back.

Slicehost, in my opinion, had HUGE potential at one time (pre-Rackspace buyout).  The support was phenomenal, everyone in the company was open and reachable. I many times talked to the founder via chat and email.  But all of that went down the drain with Rackspace and all Slicehost’s offerings and prices went stagnant.

I recently cancelled Slicehost completely after getting a hard to access domain, whose DNS was hosted with Slicehost, to change their nameservers to Linode’s.

Others

I’ve used a number of other minor providers from time to time that I won’t get too much into here.  None of them seemed to be as “turnkey” as places like Linode and Slicehost when it came to the admin backend experience.  They were either too complicated or did not even have some of the basics required for “full service” hosting.

Linode

Linode, so far (knock on wood), has been the best company I’ve ever done business with.  Rock solid, great support at all hours, fast host servers, lots of datacenter locations, excellent control panel, iPhone app, etc.  I can’t say enough to express my happiness with the service.

I currently host a number of VPS servers with them and have brought over a few clients onto their own server(s).  We host everything from test servers to full production and even PBXs.  All runs perfectly.

I will be a sad day in VPS hosting if Linode ever gets bought out by some mega hosting company like Rackspace.

To end this up, decentralization has been the best thing I have done and it is multi-faceted.  I separated websites onto multiple, less expensive virtual servers, which prevent ALL my sites from going down when something happens to one of them.  I’ve moved most of my clients to Google Apps for Domains, both business and standard, for email.

My uptime has dramatically improved, my customers are happier and that’s what matters.

Square Card Reader in iPhone 4

Guess I’m a little late jumping on the bandwagon, but this past week I discovered Square. Square is a, in my opinion, revolutionary way to accept credit cards, whether it be within a company’s location or anyone who is constantly on the go.

It is very easy to signup and really the only thing to do is verify your bank account, so Square can direct deposit the funds you charge and the waiting time for the reader itself. I only signed up this past week, so I’m still waiting on my reader. Once it comes in, it looks as if it’s compatible with the iPhone, iPod touch, iPod and some Android devices. Just plug it into the headphone jack, open the app and swipe away.

When you swipe a card with the Square reader, the fee is only 2.75% which is quite excellent. Manually entering the card is 3.5% + 15¢, which is bit higher, but still not bad for the convenience it provides. I went ahead and manually entered a test charge from one of my cards and it went right into my account, minus the transaction fee. So even with the higher charge, $20 came out to $19.15.

A photographer friend of mine uses Square and it increased his revenue quickly. An IT associate uses “Square Up” with his clients onsite and does not have to worry about monthly invoicing paperwork and running to the bank to deposit paper checks. You don’t even have to be a “business” to utilize this, even individuals can use it. Square can be very helpful for anything from flea market selling to adding a convenient payment option for garage sales. Heck, you could even sit outside at your kid’s lemonade stand and use it for the “larger” transactions.

I plan on primarily using this “app” when I do work onsite for clients or over the phone if credit cards are the best option for them. I may add a slight surcharge if it’s done manually. But I think with the convenience it provides, it’ll definitely help increase my revenue stream.

I’m sort of the same way with other devices, for phones and PDAs, I’ve used Palm (legacy and WebOS), Windows Mobile, Apple iOS (v. Original-4.x), Symbian, etc. But I had never taken the plunge into the newer Android OS.  Perhaps I figured it wasn’t as stable or mature as iOS and some of the others that have been around for a while.

This past week, my wife lost her phone, so she met me at the Verizon store on her way home.  I was there about 20 minutes earlier, so I was admiring the new Droid X, HTCs and the Samsung Fascinate.  When she arrived, I suggested that we try the Fascinate since there was a “buy one get one free” special, we’d get rid of the MiFi 2200 since they have the WiFi Hotspot feature for only $20/mo more, and we’d come out a bit ahead.  We were both Upgrade Eligible, so I did everything I could to sell her on it.

Now my wife is NOT really a techy person and since she already used her iPod touch as a PDA, I didn’t think she’d go for it, but she did.  I was amazed.   Now I’m the happy owner of a new Android phone.

My first impressions are good, it’s fast, has plenty of features and customization, a decent selection of apps, great hardware while still maintaining really good battery life and form factor.

Virtually everything I needed and had on my iPhone 3G plus more are now installed on my Fascinate and I only paid for one app (WebSharing).  The camera (5mp) is excellent, the video (up to 720 HD) is also very crisp with GREAT audio quality for a phone.  The screen is very bright and does a good job auto-adjusting based on the ambient light level.

The only minor con is that there is only a Bing search widget available.  There is no factory option to change it to Google Search.  This is just wrong in so many ways.  Other than that.  The Samsung skinning of the Android interface is a bit annoying, but since I’m a first time user, it’s not too bad, but I did like the interface better on the non-Touchwiz Droid phones.

My favorite feature so far is the Swype text input.  You just draw the word on the popup screen keyboard and it intelligently pulls out the words, even if they’re names or website addresses and so on.  It is very accurate and intuitive.  The Swype website has a bunch of nice tutorials for more advanced input options.

Now that I’ve had it for a few days, I am sort of disappointed I waited so long.  Perhaps it was a good thing to let some of the early bugs get worked out.

Linode has turned out to be the best VPS provider I’ve ever used and it as of yesterday (6/16/10), they upgraded all VPS’ memory by ~42%.  All I have to say is Wow.  Since I’ve been with them, they have upgraded HDD space, which is also nice, but not something I really needed.  RAM is a different story, that is very important for VPS customers.  That much more memory means a LOT and really makes the entry level 512 servers (for only $19.95) much more useful without breaking the bank.

I currently have 5 512MB Linodes (upgraded from 360) and one 768 (upgraded from 512).  I should now be able to do much more with these servers now and offer more scalability to my customers who are paying for their own servers.

Linode, in my opinion, destroys the competition and always seems to be ahead of the gang of “peer” VPS providers like Slicehost, Rackspace Cloud Servers, VPS.net and others.  They may not have the “prettiest” or most user friendly control panel, but they offer a level of flexibility unrivaled by others.

I setup a 512mb Windows 2003 Server to test. So far it seems to be quite excellent and fast. On speedtest.net, I got 67mb down, 27mb up. Not bad. It looks like the Windows 2003 Servers are running under XEN and the 2008 are most likely under Microsoft’s Hyper-V.  The new machine I setup did have SP2 on it, but was unpatched otherwise.  First thing I did was update everything.  The Windows Firewall is completely closed off by default at least.

I’m definitely going to keep testing it on Rackspace, but it would be nice to have one control panel and have them available via Slicehost.com as well. Even it if is an extension to the Slicehost control panel accessing Rackspace Cloud’s API. Better integration of the Slicehost offerings with the Rackspace Cloud services would help both entities since they should be one big happy family now.

I almost wish they would merge completely and integrate all the features from both sides of the house.  I’m sure that’ll happen in time as the old loyal power users move off to Linode (I moved 4 VPS to Linode) and it’ll have the least impact, churn-wise, if done smoothly.

My setup, if anyone is interested, is the following:

• 1x256mb Slicehost VPS running Cherokee/MySQL hosting ~25 sites.
• 3x360mb Linodes + 1x540mb Linode.  3 Servers are dedicated to individual customers, the other is for more sites I maintain.  Mostly running Cherokee/MySQL or Apache/MySQL.
• 1x1024mb CrystalTech VPS  running Windows 2008 for hosting email and websites for a number of customers
• 1x2048mb SingleHop Server running Windows 2003 for a few sites that wouldn’t work correctly under 2008 for a number of reasons.  This is an Intel ATOM based Server w/ 320gb HDD.  Not bad for $99.
• 2xMedia Temple Grid accounts for customer sites that need higher scalability.

If the Rackspace Windows VPS works out well, I’ll probably move the stuff off SingleHop since the Rackspace pricing is much better for me and SingleHop’s server is overkill memory and HDD wise for a few relatively basic websites and apps.

But I will say SingleHop’s services have been EXCELLENT in the year or so I’ve been using them.  No complaints at all, 0% downtime that I, or my monitoring software, have observed.  Good customer service and GREAT prices for dedicated servers.  I just don’t need dedicated servers at the moment.  If I did, SingleHop would be the place I’d go for both Linux and Windows dedicated.

CrystalTech has also been extremely reliable and fast, but the pricing is way too high, in my opinion.  $149 (including backups) for a 1024mb VPS w/ 60gb HDD when I can get a dedicated for not much more at SingleHop.

I’ll post more on Rackspace Cloud as I start using it more.

Here’s why:

AT&T as the only carrier
AT&T SUCKS!  Need I say more?  Those Verizon commercials about AT&T are all 100% correct.  AT&T’s 3G coverage is sad, Verizon’s is amazing.  Until AT&T is gone, the only version I’ll ever get is the WiFi only and use my MiFi 2200 on Verizon for data on the move.

No front-facing camera
ALL of Apple’s computers and monitors come with webcams these days, even the iPhone has a camera in the back.  Why did they not do this? AT&T probably had some say in it, because they SUCK so badly, and wouldn’t be able to handle video conference over 3G.

No Multitasking
They touted this device as something “better” than a netbook, yet it cannot even multitask like a netbook.  ANY netbook is better than this device for this one simple feature.  This feature is “crucial” for a multi-function device like this for it to have any kind of usability outside of basic apps.

The iPhone’ish Operating System
I would’ve preferred something more of a hybrid between the iPhone OS and Mac OS X, I know that would’ve probably required more power and therefore shortened the battery life, but add only 1-2mm thickness and a lot more battery could fit in if shaped correctly.  Having a “fuller” OS probably would’ve solved the multitasking issue and would allow people to run more apps therefore making it that much more of a “usable” device.  Even with this robustness, it would most likely NOT cut into the Laptop market since it doesn’t have a mouse and sometimes you just need a mouse.

No Removable Memory Options
Apple should have simply created 2 versions, a WiFi Only and a WiFi+3G, have some onboard memory, maybe 16 or 32GB, then allow us to expand with it SD cards.  SD Cards are getting bigger all the time and would allow much greater flexibility for expansion.   Of course that would cut into Apple’s profit margins when they want everyone to buy the 128GB version coming out next year.

More Codecs
As much of a “media company” as Apple is, they still need to support the needs of the public as a whole.  Everyone, or at least most, has DiVX AVI or MKV movies that they’ve downloaded or gotten from friends.  It would be really nice if these videos could be natively viewed on this device.

Overall, complaints aside, it is still a nice device.  For the price, it’s still, in my opinion, a much better value than the Amazon Kindle line.  The Kindle is too “plain jane” and black and white while the iPad is the Kindle’s hot younger sister that still has some growing up to do.

I will watch the iPad over the next year or so and if they do make some of these improvements, especially the carrier, multitasking and front-facing camera, I’ll buy 2-3 for me, the kids, and around the house.

At home, I tend to use VirtualBox from Sun. It seems to be perform the best for both Windows and Linux, although I lost the ability to Bridge the VM’s NIC after upgrading to Windows 7.

At work, I initially used VMWare Server to setup numerous VMs for software testing and platform integration testing and other fancy stuff like that. I tried for about a year to get our IT staff to start using it, and FINALLY, they decided to go completely virtual running VBox on the Solaris platform. I still use VMWare Player for a couple VMs I have left from the past, but VBox is my favorite.

XEN I did not have so much experience with since I *thought* it was more of a IT Backendish type of Virtualization software and more arcane. Perhaps it was at one time.

But regardless of my misconception, I decided to download XenServer last night and install it on one of my spare boxes. XenServer is full virtualization “OS” that you install and all the guest machines are built inside it.

Won’t go through all the details, but the XenServer was a breeze to install, only asking basic questions and for the IP address of the server. It’s best to put it on a decent machine with lots of hard drive space and  plenty of RAM and processor power (Virtualization Extensions on the CPU is a BIG plus and allows you to run Windows VMs).

On older machines, like my old Pentium D (Dual Core) machine, it does not have processor virtualization extensions, so it was not able to run my Windows virtual machines.  The Linux (Ubuntu) servers worked just fine.

For Windows ones, I used a newer Quad Core Phenom box and put 4 Windows Server 2003′s on it by using the VMWare to XEN conversion program.  Was a little buggy getting it converted, but the Citrix XEN forums helped.

There are some sites out there you can google that have XEN ready images you can upload through the XenCenter software into the server and boot.

Overall, I’ve been extremely happy with the performance of XenServer and don’t think I’ll go back to desktop type virtualization solutions like VirtualBox and VMWare Server which has a crappy, buggy web interface (last time I used it) and requires you to already have an existing OS.  XenServer is OS+Virtualization solution all-in-one.

I am usually not big on Microsoft releases, but since Vista was a disappointment and XP was getting so… old …I decided I would do something I’ve never done before.  I actually purchased a version of Windows.  Now don’t get me wrong, I have technically purchased older versions, but they were all pre-installed or re-installed through restore CDs and the like.  Basically I was good and paid the “Microsoft Tax”.

Since there are quite a few workstations in my home, I chose to buy the Family Pack, which gives 3 licenses, and installed first on my dad’s computer (No, I don’t live at home)…  Figured if Dad was ok with it, then it’ll probably be ok for the rest of the family.

His machine is an older HP a1430n purchased from the local Office Depot,  it only had 1GB of RAM, AMD 64 3800 processor, integrated nVidia video, 250GB SATA drive, a printer, Microsoft fingerprint reader, and a few other misc peripherals.   Since he was running XP on it, I was required to do a “Clean install” instead of upgrading it, which was expected.  It did put everything from XP into the C:Windows.old folder and did a nice, fast install of Windows 7.  No problems and it was noticeably faster installing than even the 2009 RC1.

Got him booted in and went to manually copy a thumbdrive backup of his My Documents into the new Documents folder.  Nicely, Windows was smart enough to realized what I was doing and proceeded to place the My Pictures, My Videos, etc. from the old My Documents into the correct locations that Windows 7 puts them.   Nice!

Fired up IE 8, nothing new there, basically the same as IE 8 on XP.  Downloaded Firefox and Chrome and setup his Google Apps icons for email, docs and so on.

For a 60 year old, Dad is pretty savvy on the PC primarily just from using them casually over the years, so I plan to let him install his software and misc printer drivers and so forth.

The only thing that really won’t work on his setup is his Microsoft Finger Print reader for logging in.  Microsoft did not seem to write a driver for it and I didn’t try using the XP one.

I did also yank some RAM from an old machine and upped him to 3GB RAM and he’s good to go.  No complaints so far.

Second Install

Second install, it was my turn.   I have a Gateway Quad Proc AMD Phenom, 8GB RAM, nVidia 9800GT w/ 500 watt PSU, Blueray ROM drive along with a normal CD/DVD RW.  running Windows Vista Home Premium 64 that came with it.  Fired up the install and it was for the most part non-eventful although it did end up taking around 4 hours since I upgraded instead of clean installing.  It gathers all settings and files from the old OS and “moves” them into the new.  That takes forever and at times it seems like it is “locked” up or frozen at certain percentages of the process.  I just let it go, it rebooted a few times and came up.

Once in, I was sure to check for updated versions of all my utility software and Open Source things I run to ensure maximum compatibility.

A few minor annoying things I’ve noticed, in no particular order:

• Windows got sluggish a few times, which I believe was my Tortoise SVN process updating the working copy of my Repo.  Once done, I upgraded it to the latest 64 bit version and it has been fine.
• My USB ports on the front of my machine cut out a few times, not sure what the cause was, but everything seems to be ok now.
• My Multimedia card reader doesn’t seem to be working.  Windows 7 used a generic driver for them, so it may just need to be updated.
• When plugging in a USB card reader, Windows recognized it, but it could NOT read a FAT32 formatted Sony Memory Stick and it insisted on me to format it.  Luckily I did NOT, put it on my Mac and it worked fine.  Pictures SAVED!  Yay!
• External hard drives (I got 4 of them) are working OK.  One of them has been dropping out occasionally (my bittorrent drop) and Vuze gets angry.

Most of these annoyances don’t bother me too much.  Overall, World of Warcraft (WOW) seems to be noticeably faster loading and exiting, program loading is fast and I have no other complaints.

Next Install, the wife’s machine.  More to come.

The nicest thing, I think, about this server is the simple Web configuration UI (cherokee-admin).  When you start it, it generates a one time hashlike password that you then use to log into the web config.  From there, you can configure virtually (no pun intended) all aspects of the web server, including virtual hosts and many other settings.

The reason primarily for my use is serving up my static HTML sites and light PHP ones as well, light meaning minimal DB calls for things like contact form entry, single simple “SELECT * from where whatever = whatever” type querys with small recordsets and so on.  I moved about 20 of my customer sites to it and so far so good.  That is the level of confidence I had in Cherokee.  100% stable so far.

Compiling it from source may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it really isn’t that difficult.

Here’s how I did it from a new VPS.

apt-get install nano htop build-essential mysql-server php5 php5-cgi php5-mcrypt php5-mysql gettext

This installs nano (a simple text editor), htop (top on steroids), build-essential which is a meta package containing necessary packages to compile crap, mysql, PHP, a few extensions and gettext which the ./configure told me it needed and I’m surprised it wasn’t part of the build-essential.

If this is a fresh ubuntu build, you’ll probably get a locales error… Use this to correct.

sudo locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
sudo /usr/sbin/update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Download the latest cherokee source.

Untar it and enter the folder.

Now run these commands, modify the paths to your liking.  This runs the pre-compile config, makes then installs it, it then copies the init script to that folder and changes the permissions to allow it to execute.

./configure –localstatedir=/var –prefix=/usr –sysconfdir=/etc –with-wwwroot=/var/www
make
make install
cp contrib/cherokee /etc/init.d/
chmod 755 /etc/init.d/cherokee

to Autostart the init script on boot… Run this…

update-rc.d -f cherokee defaults

That’s about it, read the documentation for specific information on features and have fun.  It is a VERY fast and light webserver that is very well suited for basic websites running on minimal memory VPSes.

Screenshot (in native IE 8 mode)

So I figured I’d try the IE 8 compatibility mode to see if it would fair any better…

Actually, quite a bit worse…

On the other hand, Safari 4 did perfect.  Granted, it is a beta, but a very functional one.  Firefox (3.0.7), Opera (9.64) and Chrome got up into the 70′s and 80′s, but still did not get it.  At least they’re trying.  Here are the screen shots for the 4 other aforementioned browsers.