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Time to rebuild my host spread

You bet - because multi-hour outages are bad news for free hosts if unexplained. Also I have a weird custom file whose only copy is currently on your server, so I should get around to changing someone else's local version for a while.

Fortunately it's early in the morning, so fewer should be affected than later in the day.
 
Sure. I meant to suggest that a staggered backup at the cost of a slow response is better than a total outage during backups, because it's the outages that catch my eye.

Otherwise it sounds like we're settling in. Schmarvin, did you want in before I start putting the gloss on my page versions across the hosts?

Heh - Like this post! At least I was polite enough to call it a backup rather than assume a problem!
 
End of the Tunnel

It's been fun, but this *has* been a project with a clear goal - to find some hosts with a durability focus that I can both use and recommend.

Not least because I got tired of looking at "Placeholder 4" in my Science group, I decided that this is a big enough area of my computer investigations to get higher billing than "Misc Topic 4".

My Science Page is now complete.
http://taophoenix.babblehost.com/Science/ScienceIntro.html

A very rough version of the Free Web Space page is:
http://taophoenix.babblehost.com/Science/ScienceGroup4.html

(I now have a slight logical-structural problem but I'll think of something.)

Round 3 will be the last as I no longer see a Grand Slam implosion of my spread. There is one final slot. Then I will write articles in two sections - Winning Hosts and Hopeful Hosts.
 
Incidentally just an update on the IsMyWebsite issue, since I was reading through the old posts and wondered what they're up to since we haven't heard anything in a while.

They seem to have delayed their reopening to June 15th. Probably technical concerns and lack of available staffing based on their reasons for having disabled signups originally.

Everything's still good and solid here. Once again I can keep the servers alive without a lot of trouble, but still working on my marketing formula to populate said servers with customers.
 
"Who's On First?"

...

Everything's still good and solid here. Once again I can keep the servers alive without a lot of trouble, but still working on my marketing formula to populate said servers with customers.

Something I hadn't yet settled may now be relevant. I currently have "two winners and five hopeful hosts" in my study. Depending on who feels an urge like yours to add some marketing, will influence which of the new hosts I pick for my more volatile experiments. From your note, I am taking it you are volunteering, but please confirm. Last I knew Cross is all set with its marketing plans.

Colorhost, you moved to be a primarily paid service. To me that means you are almost volunteering "Double-Or-Bust" because of the general thematic division between free and paid service. Can you confirm that my bandwidth-heavy experiments should run through you? For example, I may submit a Slashdot article in the medium future, and that site is infamous for 2-day bandwidth spikes that take down typical small hosts. Are you ready for that?

Anyone else who wants a crack at that can volunteer, because I am all about Opt-In, but the general warning is if you get hosed you get "gently laughed at" by one of the 100-smartest blogs on the net. It's okay if y'all say "we prefer slow and steady hits". cWahi is the other candidate for power-spikes.

I am big on "Internet Branding" so I'll need one or two of the hosts to give me another couple of small-space accounts just so that the subdomain doesn't read "TaoPhoenix.yyyy.com". Again, apply as interested.
 
Depends on how big of a hit we are talking about and where it is being flung at. I could always lock down my proc limits as well so that at worst a site or two is slow responding and I get a fairly high load for that two day stretch, but if it is going to hit a heavy load like a PHP/MySQL backend such as a forum that'd more than likely hit me with more power than a DDoS as far as my server's capabilities are concerned.

What exactly did you have in mind? I am well aware of the tremendous potential for legitimate traffic in volumes greater than some botnets DDoS at when playing with the slashdot effect. Ultimately it would come down to where the hit landed- a static HTML I could probably survive it by throttling while a hit to a page that made heavy use of MySQL could deal a crippling blow.

If you notice some brief outages from me tonight they'll only be temporary- no more than a couple of minutes hopefully. Going to see how hard of a stress test I can put on it without killing it to see if I think I can take that next step with the arrangements I have now.
 
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It would be a static html page. (That's all I design currently). Fortunately, it would also be small, such as a under a meg.

"Survive by throttling"... sounds like a slow page load. If you want I can make you 2nd link behind cWahi. You may not have been around for their appearance, but they marched in with "Hi. You can't bust our bandwidth".

You'd get the overflow traffic, which may be a better compromise - juicy customers with a decent page load, but let the first wave of the tsunami go to Cwahi.
 
Better hope their claim is good then. In that arrangement, a failure of the first link would cause a tidal wave of connection requests that would probably knock out everyone else.

I think it would be better to use a DNS Round Robin and load-balance the incoming traffic across all of the hosts participating in this stage. That way they all receive relatively equal share of traffic in order to more accurately compare slowdown effects. It would also avoid a chain reaction if a host failed, because their share of the traffic would be redirected to the still-standing hosts.

The way I would go about setting that up is get a free domain name like taophoenix.co.cc, set all of the hosts to accept that as an alias of the existing sitenames, and then configure the short TTL multiple A-records needed for that to be used for load balancing. As long as all of the sites had the exact same content, it would operate transparently to the viewers, but we could check each host in turn using the current link structure to see who can take the heat and who can't.

Even with that though, knowing slashdot there's a good chance it'll knock out quite a few hosts. I'll probably have to let the datacenter know it's not an incoming DDoS, when they see the charts go nuts on my line they'll be wondering what is going on.

When I stressed my server earlier the relatively static index to my own site was able to recieve as much traffic as I could generate for benchmarking using my other server with nothing more than a load spike and a bit of slowdown. It worked out to just under 1000 simultaneous requests, processed as fast as it could go.
 
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(Part 1)
"Better hope their claim is good then."

To which I reply 'Ya'Know - No'. They got kicked off here for that audacious claim, in the whole "unlimited" wars. For anyone else I'd agree with you. But that's why they have that eerie #1 spot on my study - because after the furor died down here, no one has been able to bust their claim.

I asked a second time on someone else's request for hosting a linux distro which would involve people downloading 700meg distro files, and they said "Bring It On and Include the Girls From The Movie (My exaggeration)".

The thing about audacious claims is they stake out special mind-space. It's like when a new religious leader shows up. Only one in a 1000 pulls it off, but when they do they rewrite the game. (Ye Current Religious Leader is Steve Jobs.)

Generally you are right and over a long haul I'd set up something like that. But a couple two hosts giggled at me for "not having a real site" ... So for this one shot I'd probably just try to strategically list the hosts in descending order. Slashdot is fairly good at being sensible; generally they don't deliberately set out to hose people. (I'd be more worried about stuff like that on Digg etc.)

It is fair though to give warning, because it's just an article and not a time sensitive piece, so they can follow your tip and not call it a DDoS.

This is actually a weird puzzle. I don't yet know "Hu's On First and Watt's On Second". Remember Colorhost has that weird link color because they're positioning themselves as a paid host, which to me says they need to be able to take a little heat.
 
Study Entrance Closed

Versions are HardLocked and Registration is closed. Thanks everyone for commenting and thanks for all the hosts of any phase to were/are involved.

http://taophoenix.colorhost.net/ReVision.html

All hosts have been granted something like 0.6 bonus points for being part of the final phase because now it's becoming more like those reality shows where the cast only dimishes. Put humorously, it now takes "Pi" # of incidents" aka a hair over 3 to be finally disqualified. This means that there is some leeway for blips, but it would take a Series of Unfortunate Events to really get booted off the island.

Current hosts are still requested to post downtimes. This is now the key factor that determines the final decisions. There is less jockeying for positions from the cold logical standpoint now. Remember that if possible slowed service fares FAR better than an outage, which reflects my view of how the industry should work. To recap, outages "start a clock ticking" in which the user begins to doubt whether the host is falling prey to the usual Free Host volatility. If you're doing a backup but the page does eventually load, any number of things can be assumed but it means that the host is there somewhere under the rubble.

The final board can be considered my recommendations for hosts in very approximately the order listed. Recapping the conceptual assumptions of the study:

1. I negotiated some "manager coupons" to even out disk sizes. This is roughly 1GB, which is where I feel the industry will soon stabilize as a minimum with Linkback Only. Plans offered under 1GB in my view are a concession from the user forgoing competitive selection to help a (typically new) host get practice as an educational experience. Plans above 1GB may appear here and there, but eventually it starts entering the Red Zone of overselling.

2. More manager coupons are present to trade default ad placement / post count requirements for ease of output similarity. In this case the very basic level I have is LinkBack, with the additional trade of publicity and "certification" to FWS. Since ad placement / post requirements are instant subjective decisions by host managers, I left them out of the study to prevent aggressive jockeying. At the moment Colorhost remarked they want to move to paid only hosting, hence the special color, but they're still a valid entry for durability.
 
SelfCertified Adult Hosts

Shortly I will have an important reordering of the placement. I noticed in passing the occasional requests for adult hosting. Of the hosts on my board Seraphim is the lead SelfCertified Adult host. If any of the other hosts present want to announce to FWS that they are open to adult material, I will update the board. (Colorhost, I'll think of something for your alternate PaidHost status, this was a fluke.)
 
Alright, we're all re-situated after our OS reload, and we've been stable for the last couple weeks, much more so since then, so I think our software nags are over - for the time being.

I'm also working on testing and trying out a new billing and client management system, Since you're here to experiment, I will be PMing you instructions later on on how to register with my system, would like your opinion on the sign up process!
 
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Shortly I will have an important reordering of the placement. I noticed in passing the occasional requests for adult hosting. Of the hosts on my board Seraphim is the lead SelfCertified Adult host. If any of the other hosts present want to announce to FWS that they are open to adult material, I will update the board. (Colorhost, I'll think of something for your alternate PaidHost status, this was a fluke.)

I am open to any Adult material that is Legal within the United States.

Also: Downtime for the month was <5 minutes for standard server reboots.
 
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Got it! Here is my first attempt at a widescreen version. (The links are smashed though because it was a total paste experiment.) Recommended screen res is 1600x 1200 with the browser maximized ... show of hands - is that good for the "medium-highend net"?

I have a bad habit of biting off grand plans, so I think I have 1 too many levels in the phone version, and I should lengthen and consolidate the articles.

http://taophoenix.colorhost.net/ReVision.html
 
Decent. You should look up how to use CSS and Margins instead of tables and hard-coded graphics. It helps smooth things over and make it faster/lighter with current web browsers. Plus it avoids the ever common exploded table issue that happens when hand-editing a table based html.

And yes, while I do allow adult content I do not endorse that content type in any way. It's just one of those where there is a market for that type of service, and since the ad networks for it have a higher payout it's worthwhile picking up a few customers in that area when possible.
 
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