Roids??? Huh? Everything about the site still looks the same. In fact it looks exactly the same. So what’s different? Well, you may have noticed that the site felt a bit different when you first arrived. You’ll likely notice a difference when you’re browsing through pics, and you’ll almost definitely notice something different when you’re viewing videos.

What the heck am I talking about? I’m talking about SPEED, lots of it! As of today, RohJuh.com is being served from a commercial hosting provider instead of my home Mac.

As I’ve complained about at various times in the past, most ISP (internet service providers) cap the upload speeds on home internet connections. Prior to today, RohJuh.com resided on my home Mac. Thus, anything that is requested from the site (text, pics, vids) must be uploaded from my home Mac to the end user, and is thereby restricted by that very limited uplink. For text it’s no big deal at all. For scaled pics, it is somewhat bothersome, and for vids and full-size pics, it can be downright annoying! I’m not sure what my uplink is now with my hosting provider, but it is likely more than an order of magnitude better than my home DSL. Whereas the bottleneck before was my home DSL’s upload speed, the bottleneck now will likely be your download speed.

So why do this now? Why didn’t I just go straight to a hoster 5 years ago when RohJuh.com first launched? Simple. 5 years ago, you could get maybe 100MB of disk for $20 a month (I don’t recall the exact rates at the time, but that’s not too far off base). Not only did I not want to fork up another $20/month, but 100MB simply wasn’t enough room for all the worthless pics that I wanted to put up on the site.

Bang for Your Buck
It’s amazing how much things change in the span of 5 short years. Moore’s Law looks to be alive and well in the hosting industry. Check out this comparison:

CY2000
100MB (estimate from memory)
$20/mo (estimate from memory)

CY2006
20GB (that’s a “G” as in Gigabyte)
$7.95/mo

That’s what Dreamhost is currently offering. Wow! Now it should be noted that companies offering such packages are clearly overselling. That means that they are counting on people using far less resources than allotted because if everyone used their complete allotment, they’d go out of business. They’ve done the calculations to know that most people will use far less than their full allotment of resources. While some people are vehemently opposed to overselling, I don’t mind it as long as my site’s overall performance is not adversely affected in a noticeable way.

Overall Cost
Performance advantages aside, I wanted to know how much moving to a hoster would really cost me so I ran some calculations. In order to run a server from home, it needs to be always on. A reasonable estimate is that my iMac uses 100W of power while on. A reasonable electricity rate is $0.08/kW hr. Some simple math results in $5.76/mo in electricity costs for my iMac running 24/7. Of course, I’ll still be using my computer for normal purposes so let’s estimate I use my Mac for 4 hours/day. Taking that amount out, that means that I’ll be paying $4.80 more per month to leave my Mac on 24/7. That’s almost the cost of hosting right there!

It gets better. Currently, I’m paying $20/year to have my custom email at rohjuh.com. I’m also paying $9 or so a year for the domain name rohjuh.com. With many hosting packages, including the one from Dreamhost, I get both of these for free.

But wait, there’s more! I’ll also be getting a secure, off-site backup. I’ve invested a lot time and energy into RohJuh.com so backups are very important. An offsite backup offers an additional level of security and peace of mind.

Hosting Requirements and the Contenders
The argument for moving from a home server to a hosted environment was obviously very compelling. I decided to go for it. The next step was to find a host that met my needs. I quickly discovered that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of different hosts to choose from.

My hosting criteria were:

• Unix/Linux & Apache (no problem here as this is the most popular hosting platform)
• PHP & MySQL (again, no problem as you’d be hard pressed to find a host who didn’t offer these)
• Minimum 11GB disk (preferably 12 or more)
• WordPress & Gallery2 (I wanted to know that these could run and run well)
• IMAP email with no disk limits other than your total alloted disk space
• Generally reputable company that’s been in business for a while
• SSH (secure access through a command-line/terminal - this is necessary to compile, install, and run certain things like AWStats. It also makes many tasks much quicker and easier.)

I spent some time on WebHostingTalk.com to read about people’s experiences with various hosts. After wading through a bunch of reviews, my list narrowed to Dreamhost, Site5, PowWeb, and Mid-Phase.

I eliminated Mid-Phase because as I dug deeper, it seemed like they had a history of recurring customer complaints. Pow-Web has a lame 100MB limit on email storage plus several complaints about slow performance with Gallery2 so I eliminated them as well.

Dreamhost and Site5
My short short list came down to Dreamhost and Site5, both of which were generally highly regarded and have been in business for several years (since 1995 for Dreamhost). I ended up going with Dreamhost because of their superior disk space, 20GB (+ weekly increases of 160MB) vs. 11GB at Site5. All the files that comprise RohJuh.com plus all my saved emails totalled around 10.5GB. With Site 5, I’d be pushing up against the limits right off the bat whereas with Dreamhost, I had a lot of extra room. Further, Dreamhost has a fantastic deal where you only pay $22.40 for your first year!

While Dreamhost had been in business for a while and generally had a good reputation, they seemed to be going through some problems. Apparently, they were attracting many new users because of their fantastic offer and weren’t quite able to keep up with the sudden growth. I monitored the situation for a while on the Dreamhost public forums (which was another plus for Dreamhost because many hosts do not even have a public forum and of those that do, many censor the messages that are posted).

For a while, there were lots of complaints about poor speeds and performance. I took this with the appropriate grain of salt because I knew that people who are having problems are typically the most vocal; those whose sites were working well generally didn’t hang around and post on the forums. I figured all hosting providers will have the occasional hiccup; the important thing is how they addressed those issues. It wasn’t long before the performance issues with Dreamhost subsided. I decided to take the plunge and sign up. Dreamhost offers an industry-leading 97 day money-back guarantee so the risk was low in case I wasn’t satisfied.

Moving the Site
Account activation was relatively painless. Next, I needed a good FTP program in order to upload all the necessary files from my home Mac to the remote Dreamhost server. I quickly decided on the highly acclaimed Interarchy ($39) which has received numerous glowing reviews for its functionality, power, and stability. One of the nice features of Interarchy is that it has powerful mirroring and syncing capabilities. Even though Dreamhost maintains backups, it is always a good idea to maintain backups yourself. With Interarchy, I can easily set things up so that my local Mac always has an exact mirror of the live site at Dreamhost.

Uploading the files took quite a long time. The total size of all my files (website and email) was around 10.5GB. Considering my DSL upload speed of around 300Kbps, that meant the total transfer time would be around 77.78 hours or 3.24 days! Yikes!

The transfer went relatively smoothly. I had to deal with a few idiosyncrasies of Dreamhost (such as the way MySQL databases are set up), but for the most part, there weren’t too many gotchas. The main problem I had was getting ffmpeg to work properly. ffmpeg is used by Gallery2 to process video files (extract the size of the video and create thumbnails). For some reason, I couldn’t get ffmpeg to process Quicktime 7 files which I definitely want to use because of its fantastic quality to compression ratio. I still haven’t got this working on my Dreamhost site so until I can figure things out, I’ll have to manually create my thumbnails of videos that I add (old videos already on the site are not affected).

IMAP Email
My other reason for transferring the site is that I wanted to set up Judy’s and my email for IMAP. Previously, we were using POP email in which our email was received by a remote server and then downloaded to our home computer. After a while, the email was deleted from the remote server. All our saved emails and folders were present on the home computer. Although we could check our email while away from home (such as from work), we could not access any of our old emails nor did we have access to any of our email folders.

With IMAP email, all the emails and folders are stored remotely and your local computer simply reads that info. Since the emails are centrally stored, you have access to all your old emails and folders regardless of where you are.

Since all of our emails for the last few years were based on POP, I needed a way to be able to convert all those saved messages into a format that I could transfer to Dreamhost. Dreamhost uses the Maildir format and all our mail messages were stored in the OS X Mail mbox format. I found a handy conversion tool called Emailchemy ($25) which was able to do this conversion. After figuring out some of the idiosyncrasies of Maildir, I was able to successfully transfer all our old emails and configure our mail clients for IMAP.

RohJuh.com is now live on the Dreamhost servers and the web server on my home Mac has been shut down. The name servers have been changed and should fully propogate in the next day or two. I’ve been really happy with the performance so far, especially when I’m at work. Since TiVo has a really, really fast internet connection (broadbandreports.com showed an insanely fast 30Mbps download transfer rate), video files download ridiculously fast. Even at home with my ~1.2Mbps download, things feel much more zippy. Now we just need to get out there and start creating some new video content!

Posted by Roger at 8:43 am.