Naveen's Blog

I started this blog in March 2007 after I acquired this domain name at SnapNames. I hosted this blog on DreamHost until November 2010. I then moved to HostGator to get rid of problems I was experiencing there. It has been a year since I moved to HostGator, so decided to write a review of these top brands in ‘shared hosting’ arena.

When I started learning web designing and hosting, I only had one domain, this blog. It was running smooth on DreamHost. Then, after a year, I bought couple of domains and started experimenting and developing to learn various Content Management Systems.

In 2009, I was hosting nearly 10 domains on it with two sites getting good traffic. Others were in development and were receiving few visitors. In the middle of 2009, my blog and another site were getting around 2-3k visitors per day along with 1k visits from all other domains. This is the time, DremHost started to put me in trouble. Sites started to load too slow or broke up in the middle of loading. 4k visitors a day is not at all a heavy traffic that a shared hosting cannot handle. These sites were running on WordPress, Drupal, and MyBB with catching mechanism in place.

When contacted the DreamHost, they started to tell all the nonsense things. They were pointing to one or another plugin saying that it will cause problem on shared hosting and consumes too much resources. Though I disabled the plugins they pointed to, sites were showing up “500 internal server errors.” My blog has started to show empty page few times a day. The reason for it was killing processes automatically on the server and they showed the reason as excessive usage of memory. Just google the words “dreamhost killing processes” and you will see ‘n’ number of complaints.

Then, I decided to move to another host and read a lot of good things about HostGator. I signed up with them and moved all my domains to them. My blog has started to receive more and more traffic along with few other domains, which were in development earlier. Now, these sites are getting around 7-8k visitors per day without any problem. It has been a year now and I am really happy with the HostGator.  I never experienced a single problem with their shared hosting.

DreamHost
Pros:

• Easy-to-use control panel.
• Free Domain

Cons:

• Only good for static sites.
• Can’t handle more than 2-3k visits.
• Downtime issues.
• No telephone support (chargeable call back service available).

HostGator
Pros:

• Can handle heavy-traffic sites.
• Cheaper than DreamHost ($95.52/year with 20% off coupon)
• Faster response to tickets.
• Chat support.

Cons:

• Nil (at least for me)

In conclusion, HostGator is the best in shared hosting industry. Never, signup with DreamHost, you will end up moving to another host when your site gets decent traffic and it will be a headache at that time.

\\ tags: Best Host, Best Wordpress Host, DreamHost, DreamHost Review, HostGator, HostGator Review

I have recently started experimenting with Amazon S3 to host the static content of my blog, like CSS, images, etc. Good news is that Amazon Web Services is giving one year of free usage for new S3 accounts (5 GB of Amazon S3 standard storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests). You will easily run out of the GET request limit even if your blog has just hundred visitors a day. My blog is consuming around 3 lakh GET requests per month, but these are really cheap, only a cent for 10k requests. My S3 bill is coming around Rs.20, which is negligible.

Though the GET requests are cheap, it will add up if somebody is hotlinking to them and if the hotlinked files are videos, software, or other stuff  of few MBs, then you will surely run out of free data transfer limit too. Amazon provides support for conditional rules to access the buckets via Bucket Policies. We can use this to prevent hotlinking. We can allow or deny access based on request attributes, such as HTTP referrer and IP address.

Get the free version of S3 Browser. Login using your Access Key and Secure Access Key. Change the ACL permission of folder and all its content to private (accessible to owner only). Right click on the bucket you are using for hosting content and choose “Edit Bucket Policies.” It will popup “Bucket Policies Editor.”

Paste this and edit aws:Referer section with the domain name(s) you want to limit the bucket to.

{
"Version": "2008-10-17",
"Id": "httprefererpolicyexample",
"Statement": [
{
"Sid": "Allowgetrequestsreferredbywww.xyz.com,
xyz.com",
"Effect": "Allow",
"Principal": "*",
"Action": "s3:GetObject",
"Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::imgbox/*",
"Condition": {
"StringLike": {
"aws:Referer": [
"http://domain.com/*",
"http://www.domain.com/*"
]
}
}
}
]
}

Your images only show up on your domain and show 404 error if image is directly called or hotlinked.

\\ tags: Amazon S3, Bucket Policies, hotlink prevention

Images of blog consume a significant portion of the bandwidth. Many shared hosting providers impose bandwidth and CPU usage limits, which may be reached quite easily if your site has significant amount of images in it. Some providers also kill the processes if they are CPU intensive causing your blog to throw errors.

I heard about using Dropbox’s^† “Public” folder to host static content of websites. I have searched on the net and found that there is a WordPress plugin to host theme images. Also, there is a plugin to sync the images of WordPress and load them from Dropbox, though it is not working with the latest version and throwing up lot of errors. I searched the WordPress plugin repository to see if I can achieve the same with any other plugin.

I came up with the following idea, implemented on few blogs of my clients, and now the image bandwidth usage is down to only “few MBs.” Also, the blogs are loading faster.

First, create a free account on Dropbox. It gives you 2 GB free storage.

Install the “Real-Time Find and Replace” plugin from dashboard. It will replaces the code and text from themes and other plugins with your chosen text dynamically.

Offloading WordPress theme files to Dropbox
In Dropbox’s “Public” folder, upload your theme folder retaining the directory structure. Upload only CSS and images. Look at the screenshot. I uploaded the “Pilcrow” theme.

Obtain the public link of CSS file by right clicking on the file and selecting “Copy Public Link.” It will look like this: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1234567/pilcrow/style.css. From this URL, we can understand that, our theme folder on Dropbox is “http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1234567/pilcrow”

Now, the real magic happens. Go to the Tools>Real-Time Search and Replace. Click the Add button and you will see two boxes, Find and Replace.

Now, browse your blog and see the source of webpage (Ctrl+U in Firefox). Your theme CSS URL will look like http://www.yourblog.com/wp-content/themes/pilcrow/style.css. Enter that in first box and replace URL will be http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1234567/pilcrow/style.css.

That’s all. Now, your entire theme images and CSS will load from Dropbox.

Offloading all the uploaded images to Dropbox
*. We know that all the uploaded images and files are stored in “wp-content/uploads” folder. Go to Dropbox’s “Public” folder and create a folder “uploads.” Download all the files in your blog installation’s “wp-content/uploads” folder and upload them to Dropbox’s “Public/uploads” folder that we just created.
*. Obtain the link of that folder by right clicking on an image. See above to see how we have done. It will look like “http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1234567/uploads/some.jpg.” From this URL, we can note that the link of this folder is “http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6784327/uploads”
*. Now, in “Real-Time Search and Replace” settings, add like this:
Find: http://www.yourblog.com/wp-content/uploads/
Replace: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1234567/uploads/

That’s all, all images will now be served from Dropbox.

Important Note: When you create new posts, you need to upload those images into Dropbox’s uploads folder as well. If you are organizing uploads into months and years folders, then you need to retain the structure in Dropbox’s uploads folder too.

If you want to upload files to Dropbox without leaving the WordPress dashboard, consider using The Dropbox Plugin.

If you exceed the 10 GB public folder bandwidth of Dropbox or run into any problems, just deactivate the plugin, and all images will be served from your host.

†Dropbox is a file syncing and sharing service. You can use it for storing files and documents and can sync them across all the computers you use. Even, you can sync the files into your smart phones like iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android phones.

\\ tags: bandwidth, CDN, Dropbox, image host, static content, Wordpress

I have tried a lot of free web hosts when I was learning WordPress and other open source CMS applications.  From year 2005 to till date I have tested more than 15 free web hosts.  Free web hosts normally put their advertisements on top of the site to cover the costs they incur on free web hosting, which makes the site appear somewhat ugly.  The ads occupy the large space.  Another disadvantage using free hosts is that we cannot question them if it goes down.  Some free hosts go down even for weeks.

After testing these free hosts for more than six months, I chose FreeHostia as the best free web host.  I have been using it for more than three years without a problem.  I have been building mini websites and blogs for my customers using FreeHostia.  FreeHostia offers an ad-free Linux hosting for free.  It has the following features:

• Apache, PHP, MySQL, PHPMyAdmin, and Perl
• Hosting for 2 domain and 10 subdomains
• Data storage of 250 MB
• Monthly bandwidth of 5 GB
• 1 MySQL database (10 MB DB space)
• 1 FTP account & web-based file manager
• 3 POP3 accounts with SpamAssassin protection & Webmail
• FrontPage Extensions
• Free 24/7 technical support and ticketing system

Review and sign up for the free hosting here.

The downside of FreeHostia is 10 MB limit of MySQL DB.  When you reach that limit, you can either move to their paid hosting plan, which costs $1.95 per month and upgrades your MySQL database size to 25 MB or to a better and cheap paid web hosting like DraemHost, which removes all limits.  If you are planning to install WordPress on it, don’t forget to install the plug-in Revision Control, else your database will be filled up too fast because of the new feature called “Post Revisions.”

\\ tags: free hosting, linux hosting, web hosting

If you are using WordPress for your blog, you might have already come across the name “Kaushal Sheth” when searching for free WordPress templates. Have you noticed the recent theme, Tick Tock Green, from him? I like it and looks very nice. You can also hire him if you need a custom theme.

I have com across a recent post by him on web hosting and seen that KS has rated Host Monster, Host Gator, and Yahoo Host as the best hosts. I have never used these web hosts. I have been using Dream Host for the last two-and-a-half years and I am happy with their service. I think one cannot expect 100% uptime from a shared hosting seller and I see 1-10 mins downtime with Dream Host once in a quarter or so. I see that lot of hosting companies guaranteeing 99.5% to 99.9% uptime and never 100%.

If you are using above hosts, just let me know how they are working for you and have you noticed any downtime with them. Already KS has given #1 rating to Host Monster.