I’ve been using WordPress for several years now for blog-type publishing but never used it for a full scale CMS. For more complicated sites, I use Joomla. The latter is more powerful, flexible, extensible, scalable and with tons of plugins and templates to choose from. But because Joomla is a full-featured CMS, complexity comes with it. A lesser mortal like me would take time to implement changes, much less when I try to create application on top of it. On the otherhand, WordPress doesn’t really consider itself as a CMS platform but instead “a state-of-the-art publishing platform”. And since it’s core purpose is to publish, a lot of people say that it is not scalable among other things which is true.
But with the rise in popularity of WordPress, it has evolved in a more robust application framework where you can build your application on. It still lacks a lot of features other CMS have but it has all the important ones. It has become an increasingly flexible framework where you can build your application on. And with the help of talented template designers, has moved the presentation of WordPress sites even higher. And despite its improved capabilities, WordPress still managed to maintain improve it’s uberly simplistic and almost idiot-proof administration interface.
I think a post over at graduallythensuddenly.com on “WordPress Makes Drupal Irrelevant” explains it further. And if you want to make your application adhere to the MVC(model-view-controller) framework, somebody has just explained how to do it over at nixonmcinnes.co.uk.
And as for me, is it time for me to use WordPress on that web application that I’ve been postponing for the longest time? You bet, it is! And as a matter of fact, I should have started earlier. Actually, I already migrated one custom-script-powered website into wordpress over the weekend out of necessity.
But this decision to migrate to WordPress doesn’t mean I’ll be dumping Joomla altogether. I’ll still use Joomla and will still be my choice for full-cms and complex website for the time being. However when it comes simple blogsite to magazine type websites, WordPress is the way. And one of the added indispensable bonus is the ease of administration. It’s so damn simple, it’s almost idiot proof.
I’ve been a customer of Crucial Webhosting for almost a year now and lately, I’m having problem with them. Apparently, Crucial Webhost has an unwritten term of service that you bars you from placing more than 50,000 files per account. No matter what kind of files they are, you are just limited to that number. So if you are running several addon domains to your account, you’ll be out of luck. And that’s what happened to me. Because on my account, I host several other small domains and that caused the problem.
But looking at the problem, I just can’t get it. They offered 250GB of file space that comes with 2.5TB of bandwidth and yet I can’t use them all? That’s totally ridiculous. What’s the use of so many file space if you can’t use it? In that sense, they stoop down to the level of Host Gator.
To compute through simple math, 50,000 files of 1024KB each is 51,200,000KB or 51,200MB or 51.2GB. That’s just a fraction of my allotted space. And we’re just talking about 1MB files. What about your config files, your template files, the scripts and all the other files needed to run your website? And how about that 2.5TB? Since I do not have a high traffic website, I only use a tiny fraction of it.
Do they suck? I don’t know but I feel shorthanded. I did not get what I paid for. They never told me that there’s that 50k inode limit. I signed up for their service because their split-shared package is really good according to reviews. I like most the fact that your account is sitting on a max of 30 accounts per vps that limits the probability of your site going down together with other accounts sitting on the same server as yours. And I paid US$215 for the whole year at a discount price if you compute it with the US$22 monthly they usually charge.
And all the trouble isn’t really compensated with their so called reliability. Because they’re not that really reliable. I found out that some servers Crucial Webhost went down last November. And there goes reliability.
So I’m now on a shopping for a better host. Maybe a VPS will be in order.
What is Split-Shared Hosting
Split-Shared is popularised by the webhosting company CrucialWebhost. It is achieved by using virtualization in a powerful server to create multiple virtual private servers (VPS) and thus, splitting a server. Now, each VPS can then be shared with by a small number accounts and virtually isolated from other accounts in the other VPS in the same server.
In the case of CrucialWebhost, their enterprise grade server comes with Dual Intel Xeon 5450 Quad Core Harpertown processor and 12GB of RAM and 1 local RAID will be split into the following detail:
- 10 VPS per server
- 1GB per VPS
- 25 accounts per VPS
In all, a server can have a maximum of 250 accounts grouped via VPS. But since each VPS runs independently with other VPS in the same machine, there’s less chance that a heywire website will affect your account so long that that problem site is not on the same VPS where your account sits on. The setup, with 2GB RAM to spare allows CrucialWebhost to dynamically ramp up the memory allocation for accounts that requires it.
Is it Right for You?
For a start, it doesn’t come cheap and that would deter much of the would-be clients. But if your sites are already earning money and uptime is critical, I guess it provides one of the best bang for the buck. So if you are just starting and don’t have the money to shell out, this may not be for you.
Conclusion
The introduction of “split-shared” hosting is a good development in the hosting market. Having less clients per instance means there are less competition on resources. But just as important as the hosting service, support is equally important. And it is very important that we read the fine prints that comes with a package.
I admit that when I started with this industry, I was easily attracted by huge numbers of space and bandwidth. Had I inquired further, I wouldn’t have encountered the downtime problems. But that’s part of the learning process. So we must remember that reading and understanding every details of the package allows us to make an informed decision.
What?!?
Huh! Not a not so original title, ha? It may even sound corny. Yes, I admit but in reality, this site is making a way out of its dungeon. For two years, this site had several makeovers. It has been a test bed for many experiments both in SEO and website development and up until yesterday, you won’t find anything here.
A Time To Share
More than three years when I started my hands on website development and two years after I decided to buy this domain, I think I’m finally ready to share what I learned. Sure, it’s not enough and I will surely continue to learn new things. There’s a whole lot more to learn and the recent events just adds more excitement and eagerness to learn more. And as I thread along this road, I’ll share with you whatever new things I find.
A New Journey
For those who are new in website development and Search Engine Optimization (SEO), I welcome you to this world. I am once and still like you. I may have several years of headstart from you but it doesn’t matter. I never really had time to do this and only lately I was able to understand what I was doing. It’s so easy to get on board in this world but without proper knowledge, patience, perseverance and willingness to learn, we’ll get easily burn out. And that’s what exactly what happened to me…. almost. And hopefully, this site will help you get through it by applying what me and my friends learned(the hard way).
Programming and System Administration
This blog will also function as a repository for the techniques that I stumble on programming and systems administration. Oracle PL/SQL, Oracle Forms Developer, Visual Basic, Sybase, SQL Server, Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL and a lot more! I’ll also detail here my planned experiment to prepare a fully functional web server that is not run simply by XAMPP. Not that I don’t want it but XAMPP made it too easy I don’t know how to setup Apache/PHP/MySQL.
Hop On
So join me on my new journey. Let’s take the world one website at a time.