+971 55 881 1725 hmimthiaz @ imthi.com

hosting

Easy, Cheap and Robust Cloud Hosting Solution from Digital Ocean

For the past couple of years I have been hosting with Hostgator. I was a happy customer until the acquisition by EIG. In the past 2 months my blog was down for almost two days. I really wanted another cheap and best solution for hosting my website. Another thing is the response time has gone so bad over the months. When you goto their website for support you have to wait for 30 to 45 minutes for the technical guy to come up say something. So I decided to part away from hostgator for bad service and being very expensive.

Last week my friend Ambarish recommended a new cloud based hosting service from DigitalOcean. First I was very sceptical about this cloud as I tried hosting my site with same configuration on Amazon Cloud and did not get good result. But I though let me give a try. So I migrated my blog and did a test run for couple of days and I am pretty happy with it.

Some of the best features I like about DigitalOcean

  • Very easy to create an instance. (Droplets)
  • You have very good list of configuration to choose for the instance
  • The instance can be loaded at 6 different location. I choose Amsterdam as I wanted my instance to be high all the time 😉
  • You can boot the instance from variety of images
    • Fresh Linux Distributions
    • Pre build Linux Distributions with custom application like WordPress, LAMP, Ruby, GitLab etc
    • Your own custom images
    • Your existing backup images
    • Even from recently destroyed images
  • Automated Snapshot backup etc.

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The journey with DigitalOcean has been really good. Will be updating more on how to related to DigitalOcean and some stats in a months time. They are giving away 10$ credit for every referral I make. Please click on the banners in this blog post if you wish to get a new account. You will be supporting me on my hosting cost for this blog 😉

Imthiaz’s Blog powered by Amazon CloudFront

I have been experimenting with Amazon Web Services for sometime. I was successful in offloading media traffic with the help of Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront plugin for WordPress. But it was never enough. Please don’t think my blog traffic is very high, but this is the only website I have with which I could experiment and explore the new frontiers of cloud.

Two weeks ago I decided that I should start serious blogging again and as a part of commitment I would move the blog to a better hosting environment. Moving to Media Temple about a year ago was one of serious mistake. In terms for the scaling etc, media temple is good. In terms of server management I missed WHM and Cpanel very much. Plus media temple has many uninformed outages for my blog which was seriously disturbing for me.

Once again I was out searching for cloud based hosting. I experimented with Amazon EC2 micro instance which turned out awesomely bad experience. The instance never had dedicated CPU so my blog could get stuck for few seconds at times and it was bad. I started checking out some my previous hosting companies. Westhost had moved to cloud based hosting solution and their reseller hosting package was under my budget and was loaded with WHM. Moved all my sites to the new hosting environment.

After moving the site I decided to serve my blog with Amazon CloudFront. CloudFront has a feature to serve files from custom origin. With this feature I can create a distribution and point the source of the distribution to my web server. For more information on this please refer Amazon documentation for CloudFront.

Comments – When you use CloudFront the communication is one way, so having WordPress comments is out of the question. I have to look for hosted comments system. LiveFyre came to rescue, and it has 100% compatibility with WordPress.

Mobile Theme – CloudFront supports single cache for a page, So having a separate theme for mobile was not applicable. My friend Shuja Shabandri suggested to use responsive theme. After searching for a while I came with simple and responsive design Bugis by Elmastudio.

Content Expiry – CloudFront by default does caching for 24 hours. I had to reduce the caching to 30 minutes for HTML and others to 24 hours. For this I used Expires Headers from Apache.

Will be updating more on this latter 😉

Update: Did a load test using Load Impact Free Load Test and the load time were impressive…

Moved to new hosting Media Temple

For a very long time I was a happy customer with hostgator. Recently I faced couple of downtime with the reseller hosting package. For some reason due to another account the apache kept dieing without notice. So I decided to move my blog to cloud based hosting. Couple of months back my colleague Shuja had suggested me about Media Temple. Now I thought it was the right time to move.

I subscribed for Grid Service hosting which is for 20$ monthly. After moving my blog I did a load test and it seems to be pretty stable.

The good thing about this hosting is for 20$ you get fixed 1000 hours of GPU. And based on load and usage it gets consumed. Suppose if you see a sudden spike in the traffic your website will be scaled automatically. If you cross 1000 hours it charges 10 cents per hour. If anyone is looking for scaling your website I suggested you do a test drive with media temple.

😉

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