I’m working on a new little side project which I should be able to announce next week at some point. My plan is to create a Web 2.0 Digg style site and do it in under 20 hours from start to finish. This whole venture will be detailed here on RadicalHive, but I won’t let anyone know WHAT the project is until I’m done it. It is vaguely related to All New Comics, but different enough that it’s going to live on its own enviornment.
I have the technology down, this site will be using PHP and mySQL, and I want it to be able to handle large traffic loads with relatively little downtime. I have already selected a content management solution for it, and I’ve started creating the basic template for HOW the site will look (complete with ads and such). – UPDATED July 1st @ 9:24pm!My next hurdle is hosting. Because it’s different than All New Comics I want to try a different host, and I want to keep it as much off the ANC infrastructure as possible. My criteria are: Able to handle burst able traffic (to account for the Digg Effect), minimal downtime, natively handle PHP and mySQL, and fast response times.
There are three main contenders that I’m looking at right now.
Looks like a good solution, but it may have a little too much for what I’m looking for. There’s quite a bit of recent negative comments about these guys, and their control panel looks just a tad too fancy (I know the irony of ME saying something looks too fancy).
- 100 GBs of premium storage
- 1 TB of short-path monthly bandwidth
- Host up to 100 individual sites
- 1000 email accounts
- 64 MB Ruby/Mongrel container
- $20.00 / month ($200 / 1 year)
Hosts hundreds of good sites already use DreamHost, including Snook.ca, 1500 servers, 70 full time employees, they host over half a million sites, this is all good stuff.
- Disk Storage 500 GB
- Monthly Bandwidth 5.0 TB
- MySQL 5 Databases Unlimited
- E-Mail Accounts (POP/IMAP) Unlimited
- Full Shell / FTP Users Unlimited
- Domains Hosted Unlimited
- $10.95 / month + $49.95 sign up fee (or $119.40 / if you sign up for a year)
- UPDATE – They also give you $40.00 off with a referral code, so that makes it only $79.99 for a year. We might have a winner here.
Okay, I just had to do a comparison of a total “el cheapo”, and these guys are it. Really cheap monthly fees, good reviews, but they’re a Russian company, and I’m of the opinion that you get what you pay for.
- 500 gigs disk space!
- 5,000 gigs bandwidth!
- Host 20 domains on 1 account
- PHP, Perl, Python, GCC, Ruby on Rails (RoR)
- PHP 4.x or PHP 5.x Supported
- Unlimited MySQL DBs WOW!
- $6.95 / month $0.00 setup
I’ve read up on all three, and all three have their pros and cons. I think this is really a two horse race at this point. On one hand you’ve got the lower up front cost of Media Temple, but on the other hand you have the lower overall price point of Dream Host.
The reviews I’ve read have all three listed as equally crappy, it’s the individual positive reviews that interest me more. The buzz I’ve heard about Dream Host is that it’s mostly reliable, and fairly scalable, so that might be the direction I lean in.
UPDATE! – July 1st @ 9:24pm ET
So I went with DreamHost, I uploaded my little website, I created my little mySQL database, I created the god account, created the “Brian” account (because let’s face it, the very least I should get is the ability to use my own name on the darned site), and proceeded to build out all of the titles, categories, and what have you.
I’ll be playing with some design ideas tonight, and maybe I’ll have a germ of a website tomorrow morning.