Brontesaurus Blog

The night before I left to travel for the holidays, I was very excited to receive my beta invite for Liquidweb’s new cloud hosting platform, Storm on Demand. I have been in the beta invite queue since Liquidweb first announced this new venture. To say the least, my excitement has not yet been let down.

Since I first signed up, I’ve been able to play with everything and the best way I can describe it is it’s a mix between Rackspace cloud and Amazon EC2. Liquidweb strongly pushes their support and service as does Rackspace and also include a backup feature but have also taken note on VPS’s CPU and memory and bandwidth pricing from Amazon. Then of course, they have thrown a few features of their own in too.

These are some of the features I’ve run into so far:

• Instance Backups
  These are entire images of your Xen VPS. You can pay for backup space by the GB at $0.10/gb a month, or you can buy bulk backup space sort of like Amazon’s EBS starting at $10/mo for 100gb. Backups are executed daily and you can retain up to a maximum of 90 days of backups.
• Extra Instance Addons
  Storm on demand offers managed hosting for your virtual servers as well as CPanel and Fantastico pre-installed on your server.
• Ability to scale up
  This is something I think Rackspace got right and where Amazon is lacking. Sometimes you just need more memory or more CPU to a single instance. Scaling out is usually the right thing to do, but for small to medium sized deployments, that just adds extra headache.
• Easily create custom server images
  This can all be done through the management console very easily and quickly. You can also launch a new from your saved image. Pricing for storing server images is $0.15/per gb per mo
• Firewall
  Like Amazon’s EC2, you can create your own  firewall settings and apply them to each instance and have multiple different sets of firewall rules etc. This takes one less hassle out of setting up a new instance and dealing with iptables accross multiple instances.
• Virtual Networks
  I really like what Storm did here with the networking. It allows you to create virtual networks between instances. This is pretty useful because you can isolate different machines. On Rackspace cloud and EC2 (though I guess you can isolate them with VPC, but that is more of a VPN product), basically all the instances on your account are networked together.
• Better pricing for large instances
  This is where I think Storm on Demand is a great value. Hardware is getting dirt cheap, and the whole point of having your server in the cloud is to cut costs. I think the huge value here starts at the 8gb instances for $200/mo. On Rackspace this same setup costs $350/mo and on EC2 is costs $248.20/mo (standard on-demand).

When a instance is created it basically is assigned certain number of CPU’s based on the size of the instance. Each virtual CPU is a 2.2ghz Xeon. They don’t advertise this on the Storm on Demand front page, but is displayed when you create a new instance. 2gb instance has 1 VCPU, 4gb 2 VCPU’s, 8gb 4 VCPU’s, 16gb 4 VCPU’s, 32gb 8 VCPU’s.

The control panel is very slick and responsive.

No host is perfect, so I want to talk about some of the downsides I’ve run into so far.

Major Issues:

1. No API
   Seeing as this isn’t even available to the public yet, it’s not really a big deal. The API is actually done but is in testing now and will probably be released in a couple weeks.
2. No full DNS
   There is some sort of sudo DNS. All it seems to do is create an A record pointing to your instance IP. What about subdomains or MX records or CNAME records I possibly need for my apps and/or customers? This is something I really like about Rackspace’s cloud is that they give you full DNS support that you can do anything you want with.
3. Weird/confusing billing
   They state that all charges are hourly and “Any terminated services are charged only for the time they were active.” but on the bottom when you create a instance they state “Payment due today, for service now through 2010-01-15″. I think they charge you a pro-rated usage for the rest of the month because I have a $38 charge on my credit card from Liquidweb from what I’m assuming was from the first test instance I created. They charged me $38 but when those resources were canceled and weren’t used up, my account was credited the $38 for future usage. I have no idea why on earth they would decide to do something like this. It basically is false advertising with all their “pay as you go” stuff, when it’s clearly not pay as you go. I should be charged at the end of each month for resources used during that month.

Minor things:

1. Only 64-bit images
   You don’t really need 64-bit support unless you need > 4gb ram. Using 64-bit libraries also uses up a bit more memory. While this isn’t a deal breaker because you can install 32-bit libraries with ease, I would just like to see some other choices out there.
2. Instance names require a fully qualified domain name
   You can’t just name your instances one word, it has to be a full domain

Overall impression

I’m always excited to see new hosting technologies come out and see what competitors come up with next. I think Storm’s big advantages are their price’s of larger instances and the ease of use of some key features such as backups and creating server images. I’m also excited to see what their API is going to look like. My biggest peeve of Storm so far is why I was billed $38 for something that I’m suppose to pay for only what I use by the hour.

Aside from a chat client, Skype is a great solution if you are looking to have another line. Currently I use my skype number as my office phone. At 3$/mo for unlimited calls, it is a steal. I have been shopping around for a good skype phone for a long while now and I have finally found one. The IPEVO S0-10W Wifi desktop skype phone. I have been using this for a few days now and it is great.

The phone features speed dial settings, 3 dedicated speed dial buttons, speaker phone, wifi capable, and a whole slew of other features. This phone is a nice compact size yet feels very sturdy when handling it. The buttons feel nice when you press them. You feel like you have really accomplished something while dialing a number. When I first pulled htis out of the box and plugged it in I was able to set it up in minutes. All I had to do was set the date and time and then sign in with my skype account. It will also automatically check for firmware updates, no need for a computer, completely indedpendent. Any settings you can set in the desktop skype client you can set on this phone (even your skype status and note).

Overall I am very happy with this phone. You can find this through IPEVO’s website.

Update: I just noticed that the base/handset has magnets in them to keep the handset on the base, very cool.

S3 is Amazon web service’s cloud storage solution offering very cheap price-per-gb storage and bandwidth which makes this a very cost effective backup solution. Currently I use JungleDisk for mounting S3 buckets as drives and to schedule backups, and s3sync to backup my files in various unix enviroments but I dont have anything in between to where I can easily manage my S3 files. That is where Cloudberry Explorer for Amazon S3 comes in. I have been using this for the past couple of hours or so and to say the least I am impressed. 

Here is what I’ve noticed while using Cloudberry.

• First off, this software is completely free. That is a huge plus because what I was using before, CrossFTP, you had to pay 25$ for the pro version to get S3 support and I had a whole slew of gripes about it.
• The UI is very clean and responsive. 
• Tabbed! Everything is better with tabs, especially if you are dealing with multiple uploads and/or multiple S3 accounts
• Very easy to upload and manage files with the intent of serving them on the web
• Cloudfront integration
• The ability to bill the requestor for a file for the S3 usage. I messed around with this for a bit and I think its just a flag that is set on the file? Not sure how to implement it.
• Plugins to Microsoft Powershell

Though through using this there are a couple things that could be added that would be nice.

• In the “MyComputer” pane, shortcuts to Desktop, My Documents, etc would be nice.
• Also labels for each of the drives I have. I have so many drive labels I often forget which one is a HDD, network drive, or DVD drive.
• Refresh the S3 pane after I copy a file to a bucket so I can see that file there after it is finished copying.

Overall, this is a pretty solid S3 client and I plan to keep on using it. 

Cloudberry Explorer for Amazon S3

A couple months back I signed up for the GoDadddy Grid Host beta. It was too great of a deal to pass up, 5$/mo with 100gb of space and 1TB of bandwidth (basically what MediaTemple gives you).

For this review I set up a test blog that syndicated around 20 different feeds. 37k posts and 2.7k comments later, I think I have a good base site to test this service with.

It has been 4 months, and so far my impression is “meh”. It seems to be plagued with the common problems that all grid hosting is struck with, one being mysql as the bottle neck. Everything I ran that did not require  a database back end was lightning fast, significantly faster than any shared host out there.

Here are the results of a benchmark I ran using a script that would test strings, dates, file system i/o, encryption, dates, images, arrays, and objects.

I swear, every single web host that ever existed provides the same old basic webmail platforms, either SquirrelMail, Horde, or both. Now don’t get me wrong, these two webmail platforms are very reliable and secure and have been around for a long time now, but they just feel really outdated and only come with standard features.

But if you are like me, you don’t want your eyeballs to bleed every time you need to read you webmail and a slick interface and some AJAX thrown in definitely wouldn’t hurt.

Roundcube – http://roundcube.net/

Pros:

• Slick, fast, easy to use interface
• Drag and drop messages
• Built in HTML editor
• Draft autosave feature with configurable settings
• Custom skin support
• Local cache of emails

Cons:

• Required magic_quotes_gpc php setting to be turned off. Not all shared hosts allow custom php.ini’s and this setting cant be set at runtime.
• For some reason a bunch of standard folders weren’t created by default (sent, junk, trash etc). I tried to save a draft without having the drafts folder created so I couldn’t save the draft.

Atmail Open – http://www.atmail.org/

Pros:

• At installation there is the option to import mail from other webmail clients. Support includes squirrelmail, roundcube
• Good email search feature. You can be pretty specific on what you want to search and where
• You can import contacts in from a csv file.
• Nice interface, including drag and drop feature.
• Pretty cool video attachment option, you can record a video straight from the browser.

Cons:

• When logging in and doing anything that required a connection seemed to take a long time compared to the other clients
• No HTML editor, plain text only
• Deleting/moving messages to different folders didn’t seem to work. When I refreshed the page, they would just show up in their original location.
• This is a free version of atmail and it seems they left out some things that would be a great help.

MailBee Lite – http://www.afterlogic.com/products/webmail-lite

Pros

• Very minimal and lightweight
• Available in php and asp
• No backend database required

Cons:

• All you can do is send and receive email. It is only an inbox
• No folder support

I noticed there something that all these clients including SquirrelMail don’t include that Horde does, and that is a calendar. Which to me, is really no big whoop, but it might be for others. If there there is important date or appointment I need to remember, I prefer to use Google Calendar, or I can put it in my phone, or my work calendar.

After trying out all these clients, I decided to go with roundcube for my brontesaurus email.