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.. the more things stay the same

by | May 29, 2012 | evilzenscientist, Linux, Uncategorized

Back to self hosting.

83541_server_networking_4

The blog has moved from home, to hosting at GoDaddy and up to Azure.

All had advantages – all had downsides. It’s the private cloud/public cloud conversation in a nutshell.

Ultimately GoDaddy performance let it down – especially for the database – was unacceptable. Their support was also pretty poor. As always “you get what you pay for” – but the bottlenecks for even simple, near static, WordPress sites were unacceptable.

Azure has a lot going for it – I am still keeping my eye on future features that are currently in beta. Performance was incredible; the process of getting apps updated was a little too cumbersome for me.

Self hosting really requires me to get dirty with the infrastructure and tuning – but the fact that I can lets me drive the performance. I’m also responsible for everything below the app – hardware, storage, network, connectivity, OS, security etc etc.

Picking up the blogging again

by | Sep 22, 2011 | blogging, Evangelism, evilzenscientist, Technology, Uncategorized

Firstly – it’s been too long without posting here. Lots of reasons, lots of excuses – mainly workload and not having anything public to blog about.

Secondly – I’ve changes roles inside Microsoft – moving from Business Development (where nothing is public or bloggable) and into customer facing enterprise strategy.

The role is a great fit – and it takes me back to what I love – working and interacting directly with customers.

I’ll write more about the role and the experience in the next few days.

Uploading mysql dumps to GoDaddy

by | Nov 28, 2010 | Technology, Uncategorized, wordpress

Strictly a console guy – I’ve been struggling to get the big blog database dumps up to the new hosting. phpMyAdmin claims to support zipped dumps – but that doesn’t work. There are also timeouts in the console for the upload and import.

I finally fixed it by using scp to move the non-compressed dump to the hosting server; and then using the Hosting Control Center to restore the dump as if it was a backup.

It’s running right now – so hopefully I’ll have happy blogs again soon.

WordPress filesystem abstraction – and automatic updates

by | Jun 11, 2009 | patching, Uncategorized, wordpress

Way back in the not-so-distant past the only way to update WordPress was to download (wget/ftp) updates, plugins and themes, unpack them and perform the update/install.

It is possible to pull the latest builds from subversion – but that’s really focused on the core hacker.

New in WP 2.7 was the ability to update automatically.

There were a few challenges with this – permissions, PHP modules, various host implementations – but I found it generally quite successful.

I found a great FAQ here – http://dd32.id.au/2009/02/20/wordpress-filesystem-abstraction-faq/

From the same author is a very cool plugin – core-control – it lets you enable and disable various transports – and shows the status of them.