I was interviewed by Stefano Bellasio from HostingTalk.it. Big thanks to them for interviewing me on blogging about the web hosting industry. It was a bit unexpected as I am not even in the hosting industry and am just writing reviews (and rants) on my attempts trying to host some of my own projects. But I guess as an outsider I can provide a different point of view than those in the industry.

Stefano actually asked a few good questions that I still not have put much thoughts in. For example DreamHost delegates some email hosting to Google — which I think is actually a good thing (although many in the industry don’t agree). It also reminded me that I need to spend a bit more time on this blog. However with wife, 2 kids, full-time dev job + a few websites to manage, HostingFu has unfortunately been stalling at the back of run-queue for a while. :(

Here is the Italian translation of the interview for those who are privileged to know the language.

Sorry about lack of updates on this site. This is something that I’ve done last week — trying out CacheFly, the Content Delivery Network, to host some of my static files.

What is Content Delivery Network, and Why?

Why Content Delivery Network (CDN)? In layman’s term, it makes your website appears faster to your visitors with minimum change on your site. There are many reasons why a website appears to be slow. It could be a slow server that takes ages to generate that dynamic page. It could be a slow network or throttling on server’s outbound port. Or it might just be the connectivity between the server and its visitors. When you have high latency due to geographical separation, and have many Javascript, CSS or other media files on the page — a slow link between your visitor and your server can really slow down the website.

Steve Frank’s article on Don’t Use FTP has been posted on various social news sites, and I think it is an excellent piece how this 20+ year old protocol should have retired from being the stock standard of transferring files at many web hosting companies. It is not secure (not guaranteed even when FTPS is used), it is a PITA for those setting up firewalls, and it is definitely not the best protocol for developers to automate file transfer. Why many shared hosting companies provide only FTP for file upload is beyond me.

VPS Media, a relatively young provider in the virtual private server scene — yet have years of experience in application hosting, is marketing itself as “for Designers and Developers”. Thanks to Carlos T. who has provided me a testing VPS over the last two weeks, and here is my review on Xen VPS at VPS Media.