server administration

We lasted nine months. That's right, for nine months we hosted our Drupal site with a shared hosting account. Last January, I knew we were taking a gamble but the monthly cost savings for hosting the site was just too tempting. In this end though, CMS Report was too busy and exceeded the shared hosting provider's CPU usage policy.

So, during the past few days I've been busy moving the site onto a a Virtual Private/Dedicated Server. This time, I'm going with GoDaddy but as far as self-managed VPS/VDS goes there are a lot of good companies you can go with. Although I can do Web server administration in my sleep, I think I'm going to miss having someone else doing the server management for me. I know there are better hosting options for professional Drupal sites but I don't think I'm in need for a high-end hosting plan for this amateur site of mine.

One of the common mistakes website owners make is not recognizing the growth of their site. We all try to do things as cheap as possible and often fail to recognize the increasing size of our content management system or the increasing popularity of our site. In the Fall of 2007 I made this mistake. The hosting provider locked access to my site and I spent a stressful week getting my database from the hosting company and placed onto a new server.

Lots of people do interesting things once they've jail-breaked their iPhone. Dan Poltawski is no exception when he tries to turn his once client-only device into a Moodle Server.

Having ended up with a spare iPhone from a recent upgrade I decided to try jail-breaking the old one and see what software was out there away from the restrictions of the app store. I discovered that lighttpd, php and sqlite were all available from the software repositories for download - these three combined are enough to run a Moodle server. So out the window went cleaning my flat and sensible tasks - I had to make my phone into a Moodle server!

Once you start reading the article you will find that his first attempt at installing and using Moodle on his iPhone wasn't that successful. Still, Moodle on the iPhone is an interesting concept. To say the least, the concept is much more interesting than the YouTube video he provides of his experience. Dan, couldn't you at least added some background music or some audio of you swearing at your iPhone?

CMS Report is switching servers this weekend and making some DNS changes.  In other words, we may be down for a few hours on Saturday or Sunday.  If we run into problems, we can switch back to our original server.

Update: Bulk of the transfer was completed by 10 PM CST.  I will need to do some fine tuning here and there though.  More later...

Last October, Packt Publishing sent me one of their latest books on the Plone CMS, Professional Plone Development. This is a book I had been saving for review until I had a chance to install and use Plone myself. Plone is one of those CMS that I've really wanted to learn more about by installing it on the server myself. Unfortunately, too many things on my "I want" list have had to compete with my "I need" list and I never got around to installing Plone. With no Plone on the server, I unfortunately never got around to reviewing the Plone book written by Martin Aspeli either.

This book is aimed at "developers who want to build content-centric web applications leveraging Plone’s proven user interface and flexible infrastructure". Given the fact that I haven't installed Plone myself, I can't honestly give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on the book. However, what I can do is talk a little about the book and let you decide for yourself if this book is worthy of your hard earned money.