That was my question all through HostingCon last year. Almost every pillar seminar had some mention about “the cloud” outside of any context that meant anything other than finding an excuse to talk about cloud hosting.  But really, who cares about cloud hosting?

No really — I’d like to know who thinks cloud hosting is really worth its hype and would benefit a hosting provider offering shared hosting services.

You need special hardware and software to efficiently support a cloud hosting platform. It’s not like a cPanel server you can turn on and set up – and I so far haven’t come across any [good] user-side control panels available for cloud hosting. That means that you’re going to have to find a way to come up with your own.  Since the hardware is also specialized, I’m sure the scope of vendors is limited, and those vendors probably take full advantage of that by cranking up their prices.

And…

The purpose of cloud hosting is expandability and reliability. You have multiple servers working in tandem serving sites, so if one server has a problem, the others pick up the slack. Then if you plan on doing what other hosting providers so, you’ll charge your clients based on how much system resources they are using instead of changing their hosting plan every time they have a burst of traffic. The part about the stability is great – but the same can be achieved by load balancing.  And not limiting a user’s resources but charging them for what they actually use is great too – until they use too much, especially in conjunction with other users on the system who are coincidently “overusing” resources as well.  But you’re probably losing money, and fooling those customers into thinking that they can get away with running that junk on a shared server.  Thank you, Mr. Over-Cloudy Shared Hosting Provider, for providing a false sense of need to your customers so they cause a problem for the rest of us when they decide to switch hosts.  

I don’t know how they do it in the cloudy wonderland up there, but in the real world of hosting, if one of my customers is burning an excessive amount of CPU cycles, they’re not going to be on one of my shared servers – they’re moving to a dedicated server.  If a site gets enough traffic to warrant VPS or Dedicated hosting, why would you willingly keep them on a shared server? You’re stunting your revenue by 1) allowing high resource customers to pay for shared hosting, even if the cost fluctuates based on their usage, and 2) decreasing your shared server capacity so you end up needing more servers to accommodate users that shouldn’t be on them to begin with.When a server runs out of resources it runs out of resources – whether it’s one server or 10 servers “clouded” together.

Cloud hosting tends to only beneficial to the customer, who is certainly getting the better end of the deal by costing you money.  I’m just going to put it out there that while customers probably like the concept of cloud hosting, most probably have no idea what it actually is, and wouldn’t notice any change in hosting quality from that of a standalone or clustered hosting solution.  So I’m sure you could actually just run their site off a crap dedicated server with 100 other customers and randomly change their hosting bill every month to make it look like they’re getting cloud hosting, then laugh while they talk about how awesome it is to be on the cutting edge of technology.  Heh.

That also brings up a customer service point about cost.  I checked a few pricing points for cloud hosting providers, most of which charge on a percentage of RAM and CPU cycles used per month.  To me, that just screams customer service problems. Most of the time when I try to tell a customer that they are using too much CPU on a shared server, the first thing they do is either deny it, or blame it on us.  You can imagine what would happen if a customer’s traffic quadrupled one month and they look at their bill, suddenly realizing that they were charged more.  A majority of your customers are likely non-technical and therefore not going to understand why their hosting charges changed.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not against cloud hosting, I just don’t care for it, and I’m tired of hearing about.  If you’re a hosting consumer and looking for hosting and your site is as massive as Google, you could benefit from a dedicated cloud hosting solution. But otherwise, just stick with the simple stuff. Standalone and clustered servers have been used for years, and tend to be very reliable if managed efficiently.

I mean, people thought the iPad was going to be the next best thing but it turned out to be a piece of shit.

Um….what?

I thought something was up when for the last month my traffic rate went from 300,000 in May to only 24,000 in June, even moreso when I found out my pagerank dropped from a 6 to a 4. I was de-Googled! Apparently a month or so ago a spam comment slipped past Akismet and got posted to my blog, and that meant that my site no longer meets the “quality” guidelines for Google. I found the post and removed it, but upon filling out their reconsideration form it appears that it takes 4-6 weeks to be reviewed and added back. Man, that sucks….

Anywho, I’d hate to do this mainly because I’m lazy, but I’ve set Wordpress to send new comments to moderation again so I have to manually approve them. What I’m confused about is that if my site doesn’t meet quality guidelines for Google, where does this guy fit in?

I knew something was fishy when I got an IM from my ex whom I haven’t spoken to in over a year:

hey How are you???? this is ur pic rite?! http://www.msn-gallery.com/gallery.php?user=blue_butterfly21.jpg

Worse enough I can’t believe I clicked on that shit.. I thought maybe it was one of those pictures from the amateur night at JB’s Gallery of Girl back in 2004 that caught up with me. But no, as soon as I clicked on it my PC (which unfortunately is the one that runs Windows XP) froze up for a good minute during which time it was sending the same message to all 158 people in my MSN friends list.

Arrrggg…anywho, the virus — which is the Backdoor.Generic3.SAT – is pretty harmless as far as your PC is concerned but you’ll probably get  kicked every time you open an MSN window. So, close your MSN and go here and here to read about how you get cure the internet STD’s you’ve probably just spread around to all your friends. It’s like the 70’s all over again only the free clinic isn’t as crowded.

I thought this was too shocking to be true but the other system admins confirmed it – Google officially wants to be the next god of the universe. The datacenter that houses over a hundred of our servers also caters to some of Google’s servers, and apparently Google also owns part of the building or something like that. They decided that they don’t have enough power for their servers, so they are actually demanding that the entire datacenter be stripped of all power for about two hours while they install more power lines. No, not more power for the datacenter – but just for their little cage. So basically, all hundred or so of our servers housing thousands of sites (as well as the other hundreds of servers belonging to other occupants of the datacenter) are going to be powered down for two hours so Google can expand their empire and eventually take over the world. I hope Google is happy with the fact that we’re all going to lose customers and reputation over this, so happy that they all get gonorrhea and die.

Also, mozzy on over here and take a look at the mildly humorous pictures.

I don’t want to admit that I still have PC’s that dual boot Windows XP and Vista, but given the occasional problems I have after Ubuntu and Fedora updates I’m not ready to give them up yet. Some time in the middle of the night last night my laptop, which used to dual boot Ubuntu and Vista (before I deleted the Ubuntu partition), rebooted and left me with a ginormous GRUB loader error:

GRUB Loading stage 1.5

GRUB loading, please wait...
Error 15

The issue is that the boot loader probably went apeshit and doesn’t know what to do.  Since Windows is the MBR nazi, it’s best to use Windows to fix it.

Luckily with all the luck I’ve had with Vista I still had the install CD and was able to recover quickly. For those of you at home, if you don’t have the original install CD you need to create a boot disk and slide it in <insert giggle here>. From the CD, when the menu comes up hit ‘R’ for recovery console which will bring you into the Windows command line. If you’re using the boot disk, you should already be there.

From the command line type ‘fixmbr‘ (or fdisk /mbr for versions < XP) and then you should be able to successfully boot into Windows XP (or Linux).

If you’re still running Linux on dual boot, another option is to run the recovery from the Ubuntu CD.  However, this can take a lot of time and if you don’t know what you’re doing you may end up deleting your OS.

Working in webhosting for a while now I’ve had some people ask for really weird shit, and I’ve dealt with a lot of people who try to sound a lot smarter than they actually are (I’m one of them). The latest of the bunch is a guy who asked for MySQL 7.0 claiming that he’s a MySQL programmer and that he specially programmed his database to work with MySQL 7.0. He really didn’t take it to heart very well when I told him that there is no MySQL 7.0 and the most he can hope for is 6.0x alpha (FYI for future readers a year from now, read the damn date on this post). Besides the point, the guy apparently felt like I was talking down to him so he went out of his way to mention that because he has a bachelors degree in computer science and that he’s an avid Microsoft Word user, he definately knows more than I do when it comes to doing my job. So, I gave in and agreed to upgrade him to MySQL 7.0.

The trick of the trade here is that you can essentially install any version of MySQL that you want to, whether it exists or not! It’s a long-standing suck point in cPanel that the MySQL version in user cPanels are read from a static file within the datastore directory:

/home/username/.cpanel/datastore/_usr_sbin_mysqld_–version

Within that file is the output of the ‘/usr/sbin/mysqld –version‘ command, which cPanel reads and outputs to each user’s cPanel. You can easily edit this file in one user’s account to make it read whatever MySQL version you want:

Needless to say, after I ‘upgraded’ his version to 7.0, he claims his scripts started working!

A few days ago I came across some processes on one of our servers that just wouldn’t die. Even after doing a kill -9 and all that good stuff, more would just keep spawing until there were dozens running on the machine. A head system admin of ours gave me this command, which will mass-kill all alike processes so they don’t have a chance to re-spawn each other.

The processes running were all some form of “init_”, like init_1, init_13, etc. To kill these:

ps aux |grep init_ |awk ‘{print $2}’ |awk ‘{print “kill -9 ” $1}’ | sh -v

The ‘grep init_’ should reflect the common name of all the processes.

Have you ever read an article somewhere and realized that it looks too familiar?  That’s because you probably wrote it a year or so ago, or read it on someone else’s blog.  “Splogs” are usually fake (and some legitimate sites) blogs that harvest your blog’s content via script, then mirror it on their own sites in order to boost pagerank and ad revenue.

Honestly I was unfamiliar with this term until a few months ago when I started getting emails about my posts ending up in various places on the Internet.  Some people were accusing me of stealing, others were just looking out for a fellow blogger and letting me know that my boobs weren’t the only thing going around the web.  I think the act of someone’s website being duplicated around the Internet is like web herpes — it spreads around and you can find it all you want, but there’s no stopping it.

When it comes time that you find one of your posts lingering on an unfamiliar website, don’t just ignore it!  My first brush with splogging was back in April when a ton of my tutorials ended up on some web development site — no credentials, links, or anything.  When I tried to contact the author I pleasantly found out that the blog contained no contact information or even so much as a contact form or ‘about’ page.  So, I did a whois to find out who the guy was and he obviously denied stealing the content stating that he runs a feed site that wasn’t crediting articles properly.  A load of bullshit, but it brought up a good point.

So what can you do?

If you notice that some lowlife is stealing your posts, the first thing you should do is call them out on it.  I’ve gotten more in the habit of leaving comments on the blogs with a link back to my article, and by the time the site owner is able to remove it, the credibility of their site is already ruined.  If you’re not the blatant confrontational type and the idea of content stealing doesn’t horribly disgust you, try contacting the splogger privately. While most blogs will have some kind of contact page or obvious way to get ahold of whoever owns the site, splogs usually do not.  This is because splogs are usually not maintained by actual people, but rather scripts that spider around the internet and collect content.  If that is the case, you can try to contact them in other ways, or get the site shut down:

• If the blog is hosted with a blog service like Blogger or Wordpress.com, you can flag or report the blog as spam or questionable.  Most services will immediately remove splogs
• You can do a whois on the domain name, which may contain the splog’s owner and contact information.   Since most registrars provide domain privacy and domain owners can easily fake information, the information you get may not be reliable.
• Find out who hosts the site, and email their abuse or legal department.  You can find out who hosts almost any site by going to whoishostingthis.com .
• If all else fails, run a whois on the IP address of the site, which will usually give you the collocation provider who owns the IP space so you can complain to them

Most all hosting providers (usually hosts in the U.S.)  have strict policies against copyrights and plagiarism, so don’t be worried that your complaint will not be taken seriously.  Since splogs are also considered as spam, most hosts will be happy to get rid of them as they are just a waste of space and bandwidth.

My Good Luck Pineapple broke today and I’m very upset….it’s the very first pineapple I bought when I moved out of my parents’ house three years ago, and it’s been in my freezer ever since.  Man, the last time I was this upset was when I bought Capone a fish named Charlie…and then he ate it.

And I use the word “released” very loosely. Yes, I just upgraded my blog to use Wordpress 2.2 after this guy made it sound delicious. No, I don’t regret it, but I do think it would be best to wait for a bugfix. I shall start with the positives:

- It’s optimized a bit more to help your site load faster. This may or may not be noticeable to you, but it probably is to your webhost

- It’s harder to break your site by enabling a botched plugin. I tried to enable Staticized-Reloaded and I got what I interpret as the “Wordpress Screen of Death”:

This is also a shame because this happens to be one bad-ass plugin.

Now for the bad, which outweighs the good:

- Don’t be surprised if your plugin database disappears. From some odd reason, Wordpress could only find it after I created a new plugins folder and copied over my plugin files again….and yes, I had to re-enable all 30 of them.

- WP-Cache no longer works (at the time of this writing), and you’ll find that enabling it will cause some strange behavior on your blog. Oddly enough it also caused my plugin database to be erased yet again

- TinyMCE (the WYSIWYG editor) malfunctions, esp. in Firefox when trying to use certain functions.

- You may need to tweak your theme a bit. I had to make several code modifications to my sidebar and header files.

- Your boobs might shrink in size. Oops, wait…that’s what happens when you stop taking birth control.

Anywho, those of you who are thinking on upgrading, be prepared to spend a few minutes messing with your site and testing your plugins and such. It may be a good idea to wait for a bugfix, which by Wordpress history will probably be out within the next few days.