Jason Hoffman of Joyent has written an interesting article, Why EC2 isn’t yet a platform for “normal” web applications.

1. No IP address persistence (they all function as DHCP clients and are assigned an IP). One has to use dynamic DNS services for a given domain.
2. No block storage persistence. When the instance is gone, the data is gone. Yes I know you can send this back regularly to S3, but isn’t that actually a ‘hack’?
3. No opportunity for hardware-based load balancing (which happens to be the key to scaling a process based framework like Rails and mentioned above).
4. No vertical scaling (you get a 1.7Ghz CPU and 1 GB of RAM, that’s it). So like the block storage problem, this hits databases, we run about 32GB of ours in memory.
5. Can’t run your own kernel or make kernel modifications so there’s no ability for kernel and OS optimizations, and no guarantee that they’ve been done.
6. Images have to be uploaded and then moved around their network to find a launching point. This can take several minutes, if not more. Move 100 GBs around a busy gigabit network sometime and see.

Via Web Hosting Unleashed, HostGator has announced a new niche hosting service — SEO Hosting. From its hosting plan page:

Our hosting plans are designed for those who require advanced Search Engine Optimization tools. Our customers know that the key to a successful SEO campaign begins at the foundation, their web hosting provider. SEO hosting customers have come to depend on the reliable, easy to use interface that we have developed for unsurpassable Search Engine Optimization.

Last Sunday I had my first chance of buying an SSL certificate and setting it up on Nginx. Prior to that I have always just signed with my own CA, and then just import my own CA’s certificate into browser’s root certificate repository.

Anyway. What happened was on a website I am developing, I have provided some API via Javascript, so this guy I am partnering with can just include my dynamically generated Javascript to produce content on his site. However, his site runs entirely on HTTPS but mine is not, so you get that dreadful This Page Contains Both Secure and Non-Secure Items error message in some IE versions.

I guess the easiest way for me to fix it up is actually running the site on HTTPS as well. So I went out and bought a certificate from GoDaddy ($18/year — why so much price difference?), but it wasn’t that trivial as GoDaddy does not have any installation instruction for Nginx, which my site is running under. Why not?! Consider Ngnix already has a sizable market penetration (especially if are a Russian malware distributor). Well, here are the steps.

Lxlabs’ LxAdmin Host-InA-Box is a “feature-complete” server control panel product designed for web hosting. There are already many control panels for web hosting providers. Some are commercial, some are free, and some are open sourced/free software. What then makes LxAdmin HIB unique? Its runtime size, which claims to be only 15MB! The tiny memory footprint includes not just the control panel software itself, but also the mail server, IMAP server, POP3 server, DNS server and web server — everything ready to get you started with web hosting.

Many commercial control panels require at least 128MB to have everything up and running, and it is commonly known that cPanel won’t be happy with less than 256MB of memory. Then how did LxAdmin HIB achieve such low idle memory foot print? I was wondering about the same thing when I first heard about it, so I bought a small VPS plan and found out.

Well, the title of this post is simply not true. I did sign up an EstDomains reseller account. However, just before logging in to set up all the details, I diligently googled their name trying to find out why they are so cheap but people rarely talked about it. Then reading through pages after pages of reports, blog posts and forum discussions on how EstDomains and co. are almost an equivalent of spammers and fraudsters’ nest, I think I will have to cancel what I had signed up to.

There are some very good Xen hosts. SliceHost being one that I have had experience with — it has rock solid stability, very good uptime, great performance and all the flexibility of Xen at an incredibly price. Too bad they are not in Australia. I don’t know how bad a Xen VPS host can be, but I certainly have some bad experience with GPLHost, whom I have reviewed their Sydney-based VPS 6 months ago. They were “tolerable” for the first few months, but got worse over the last couple of weeks.

Royal Pingdom: Theoretical vs real-world speed limit of Ping, shows the theoretical minimum ping between two furtherest places on the planet Earth, assuming everythings travel at the speed of light in vacuum.

If you choose the shortest route, the maximum distance between two locations will never be more than halfway around the planet. Halfway around Earth is about 20,000 km.

Considering that Ping goes to a destination and then back again, the packet sent by Ping would travel 40,000 km, the equivalent of a trip around Earth.

That is 133 milliseconds.

Anyone who has tried to ping various servers across the world will know that this is a way better response time than what you can realistically get. So why is ping so slow?

Then it summaries why in reality, the packet round trip time is much slower, because:

• The actual distance will be even lower because cables zig-zagging all over the place, not to mention light bounces along the inner-wall of fibre optics.
• Things rarely travels at the speed of light in vacuum. Light travels slower in glass, electrons are even slower, and devices like routers and repeaters don’t help.

Sounds like it is PHYSICS that prevents me from getting ultimate ping time to servers in the US, and there is almost nothing we can do about it! Oh wait, here are some proposed plans:

1. Create a worm hole between my house and that big data centre in Dallas, so I can plug my CAT5 cable right through to their switch.
2. Big data centres moving to Sydney, Australia.
3. Me moving to the States.

From the look of it, I think (2) is most probable. Sydney is such a nice place — good weather, good beaches and few natural disaster — don’t you think so? I am sure everyone would love to bring all their servers down here so I can have sub-20ms ping to all my favourite sites :)