David Fisher : What is Noise Blog

Somehow in my WordPress migration between servers twice, and upgrading to WP 2.7 it seems that I killed all of my photos posted to the blog prior to 12/2008. Umm, opps. I could work to restore them likely, but for the time just go check out my Flickr account, which you can access via the “Photos” tab at the top of the page. Probably shooting myself in the foot SEO wise, but I’ll have to live with it until I can find my server backups of the photos and restore them.

Thanks to the amazingly awesome Dan Choi of betahouse the blog has undergone some major changes in the past month including a full migration to Slicehost.

Dan helped me massively customize the workflow on this theme, even though he had never really done much PHP work prior. He’s basically a genius when it comes to picking up things almost instantly. We now have 4 categories and a 4-up splash box on the front that shows the most recent post in each category. If you’re interested in how we did it… umm, I’ll have to dig around a bit (I could send you the PHP files if you want) as I only partially know what he did. Also we have feedburner RSS feeds for every category (although everyone is only subscribing to the main feed which is just fine with me).

I’m also on Slicehost now. Slicehost (as you may notice) is at least 4x as fast as Dreamhost. Ok, sure it costs about 2x as much, but also it has significantly better uptime and doesn’t oversell. Plus you can easily expand your slice. At some point it’s probably best to take your image to EC2 if you expand a ton, but for hosting of stuff like this blog it is awesome. Plus I don’t need a fancy cPanel, as I actually have full SSH access. They tell you exactly what you get. At most there are 64 clients on a 4-core 16gb server. Never more, likely less.

I feel now I can safely say: I never would recommend Dreamhost to anyone for any reason. It is horrible and the tech support is non-existent. Stay away. I have warned you. I do wish I had done some benchmarking before I moved (suppose I still can), but lets just say this… dreamhost sucks

I’ve been using Dreamhost since about October of 2007, on recommendation from a friend (actually just noticing that he was using it for his blog). I could tell that they were overselling from the start. They advertise 5TB of bandwidth per month, which is 1.92MB(15.36Mb) per second continously per ‘client’ per month. With the fact that I understand they have at least 100, if not thousands of users per server… this quickly becomes rediculous. Amazon’s EC2/S3 is $0.20USD/GB of transfer. They ‘actually’ serve that much up. 5TB/month would cost $1,000USD on EC2. Amazon’s margin on this isn’t that big. Certainly not $995 of margin on it.

Dreamhost basically sells just what their name is, a dream. It is not reality, could not be reality and will never be reality. I kind of wish I could easily set up a test to show that there is no way they could offer that bandwidth and never would. I just don’t have a connection that would be able to push that myself in order to do the transfer.

Dreamhost has given me nothing but slow speeds, much downtime and many headaches. I like the simplicity of some of their things (DNS management, 1-click installers) but honestly I need uptime and speed more than anything else.

So I am moving to Slicehost in a few days. It’s twice as much as Dreamhost for a single 256mb slice, but that should be more than enough really. It’s a known quantity and they aren’t overselling. Dan Choi is going to help me move. There might be a tiny bit of downtime over the next few days while the DNS propogates, but soon hopefully we will have a sweet and snappy site.

I am working on migrating to WordPress. Everything (soon) will simply be at http://whatisnoise.com
It’s not that I specifically dislike Blogger, but I just feel that there’s more I can do with WordPress. I am worried that running it on my own server (a dreamhost server) might not do so well in case it gets slammed by Digg some day, but I’ll see if I can install Squid/Varnish somehow on the Dreamhost server.

So not only will I be blogging better, but I will have a better looking and acting page. Woot.