RadioWest.ca's New Host

[jon]

This morning, we began our move to our new web hosting company. The databases where our posts are stored, and that run View Most Recent Posts, were moved to the new company's server. Over the next 48 hours, I'll be moving the programs and other files that make everything work, as well as the pictures and sound files, over. But you won't notice, as the files will be on both servers, as the definition of radiowest.ca is changed (from old server to new) and makes it way around the world. Which can take up to 48 hours.

We have already been informed of our first scheduled outage. More accurately, there may be periods between midnight and 2am (Pacific time) tonight when this site is not available.

In the past, if you don't monitor the hosting company's forums, you didn't know until you or someone else noticed the outage. Now I am getting advance notice by e-mail.

[jon]

There is no secret about it, so I should say that our new web hosting company is Arvixe. They are headquartered in San Luis Obispo, California, but their Data Centres are in Dallas and Houston, Texas. Data centres in different cities allow them to be prepared for localized disasters, beyond what backup power and network connections provide.

The server we were assigned to has eight Intel E5430 quad-core processors. That works out to the equivalent of 32 processors at our disposal to handle our work and that of all the other customers sharing the same server. Each processor is rated at 2.66 GHz, which is still pretty fast these days.

I looked at a lot of alternatives, and soon found a web site that had been testing hundreds of web hosting companies every 10 minutes since late 2005. Arvixe came out second in Uptime, even though they had 5 different servers monitored, while most others scoring well had only 1 server monitored. The #1 rated Uptime company had only one server monitored and only sells to large businesses.

Another factor that was very important in our choice is whether we were sharing a server with customers who had been offered unlimited web space or bandwidth. "Unlimited" web hosting plans are common these days, but that still doesn't make them a good idea. Arvixe does offer some unlimited plans, but not in the type of plan that we chose. Because I also believe that such plans are part of a flawed Business Plan, I was glad to see that Arvixe only offered "Unlimited" in their more expensive "Pro" plans. And, as I said, the Pro version of our plan, is not Unlimited.

A third factor is Support. As well as Googling for bad comments on Support, I also have tasted a little of their Support myself. I don't expect to find no bad comments, of course, but I do read them carefully, judging for myself as to who is at fault. I forget who it was (not Arvixe, though), but the only bad report I could find on one company complained about a domain name that had expired two months after the customer had cancelled their web hosting plan. What did he expect?

A fourth factor is Cost. We have to be realistic. Yes, you can find Hosting for $4/month U.S. funds. And even at least one company that offers free hosting to non-profits. We are now paying double what we were at HostingZoom, excluding the fact that the Canadian dollar has dropped dramatically against the U.S. dollar.

And the last factor is listed last because it is the least important. But a great Nice to Have. Separate "file spaces" for each web site. In other words, it is impossible for one web site to accidentally store data on another web site's file system or databases. We can even setup test copies of this discussion forum on completely isolated web sites.

One other factor that wasn't in our original set of considerations turned out to be a real boon: cpanel and whm. These are two pieces of software from the same company that provide "point and click" kind of control of pretty much everything that matters on a web site's configuration. Many web hosting companies don't use these software products because, unlike the Open Source software that dominates the non-Windows web site marketplace, they are not free. Both Zoom and Arvixe use cpanel and whm, but Arvixe has the current version which offers some new features, one of which saved me some major research and messy coding, to run an old version of the php programming language until I get around to redesigning the Edmonton Broadcasters Club web site using WordPress.

If you want web hosting, we are in a position to now offer it through Arvixe. Either by reselling it from our own account (i.e. - it won't cost us anymore to add you), or by selling you your own account (i.e. - we get a commission). Either way, you would help us pay for some of our hosting costs. Contact Radiofan for more details.

I've also been asked what other hosting services I actually tried, and gave up on, and why.

Amazon's Cloud Computing offering is much too immature to guarantee the kind of reliability we are looking for. It is also expensive -- $75 U.S. per month just to do nothing 24/7. They had a major/lengthy outage last July that clearly indicated they hadn't yet got the basics right for reliability. And, they have a long way to go to build the "point and click" control required to build a "virtual server" in their "cloud". At the moment, you need to know how to do all the command line stuff that guys know who built Unix and Linux server software stacks in the old days of building kernels, etc.

ICDSoft has a reputation for fabulous Support, all the way down to perfect grammar in their e-mails. And I can confirm that based on my one Support ticket. But all their web hosting plans are intended for one web site per account, which makes them very expensive, even more than Amazon, for our needs (23 domain names, of which some are dormant web sites). I had planned to use the same approach that we do on Zoom, using a special control file to redirect each web site to a different folder. It actually worked on ICDSoft, but there was no way to configure e-mail for more than one domain name. I asked about the e-mail issue, and also inquired if I was violating Terms of Use by hosting multiple web sites this way. It was clear that future Terms of Use would likely "outlaw" my usage.

Along the way, I discovered that ICDSoft does have some downsides. Their replacement for cPanel leaves you unable to control a lot of things. So called "dot files" are hidden to FTP. Since these provide key control features, this would be a major problem. For example, when I replaced one of these files, I was not warned that I was overwriting it, because my FTP software (FileZilla) did not know one already existed, because they are hidden by ICDSoft. Another FTP problem was that connections did not disconnect properly, severely reducing the speed of transferring files from my computer to the ICDSoft web server. Programs like FileZilla get their blazing speed by doing multiple simultaneous file transfers, using multiple FTP connections.

Artery Planet is certainly an intriguing name. And initially looked promising. But a senseless requirement, and a clear unwillingness to change it, boded badly for the future. Specifically, to create the second to 23rd web sites, I would have to point the domain name at Artery Planet, BEFORE I could move any files over. Which, of course, means an unnecessary outage. For RadioWest, for example, we would have been down for close to a week.

A couple of friends asked me about specific hosting companies, so I thought I'd mention them here. HostGator has got a lot of good comments about their Support, and they regularly win awards, but their Unlimited Web Space and Bandwidth scared me away because it is a Business Plan asking for trouble.

Vancouver-based NamesPro.ca has the best Domain Name Registration service I've ever seen, in terms of how much control I have as an owner, and how much information they provide in their KnowledgeBase & FAQs. Their prices are great on .ca domain names, but pricey for .com, etc. They recently got into the Web Hosting business, which means they don't have enough track record to make me comfortable. But my main reason for not considering them was that they only offer Windows-based hosting. Linux is the place to be for Open Source software, which is what we must strive for, if we want to keep our software costs down.

I looked at a lot of other companies, but rejected almost all of them based on their published plans.

[another dog]

Jon,

To me, it sounds as though you have "done your homework". Both you and Radiofan have always shown me that you are both on the top of things.

Congratulations and top honours to you both. Keep up the excellent job. I knew that of Radiofan back some time ago when we did Web work.

So, I suppose I could go on forever, but to make it simple, I will say, "Thank you both again". Two trhumbs up.

Another Dog

[jon]

Is our new host doing as well as Radiofan and I have been experiencing? Yes, we know about the scheduled outage last Friday night, and the unscheduled outage that preceded it (the server actually crashed).

Since some of you would have still be using the old host until Sunday afternoon, we are really interested in any issues you've experienced since then.

[Howaboutthat]

Everything's been smooth on this end Jon... thanks for all your work!