Out of curiosity... is there any reason you are not looking at on demand (e.g. AWS) instances?

Thanks, looking at AWS but the large package is 50c per hour ($352/m) with:

7.5 GB memory
4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each)
850 GB instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
API name: m1.large

The small instance seems to be a worse spec than we have atm

The AWS large seems to be a lesser spec than the dedicated from 1&1? Again I don't fully appreciate all this HW stuff, is the AWS network going to be a lot faster/better quality?

It would be nice to go on a cloud so I can upgrade hardware as required, but the entry point on a decent one seems to be quite high.

I cant speak for the speed of AWS vs others, but certainly the ease of scaling makes it appealing (AWS does come with its own box of traps however).

This is a bit out of my depth tho... I only really have experience running small sites so not sure what would be best for something on your scale.

you need to figure out where the bottlenecks are in your current setup.

SATA hard disks in software RAID are lol for any server imo. decent RAID chip with it's own memory, and a few SAS drives pwn.

I think you're way better off long run with your own metal. A lot due to experience gained running it if you scale up big in the future. the 16-core opteron you speced earlier is similarly beastly than the £249/mo XXL, though it's yours and you can drop in another 16-core opteron for a one-time fee if need be.

Isn't that no different unless you get a managed dedi? "sysadmin" is dealing mostly with OS setup/issues, no?

hardware failure should be covered by next-day on site replacement warranty - there should not be any possibility of "it'll take 3 days", any more than a rental dedi could fail and they'll tell you "sorry it'll be 3 days before we can find another box for you". I mean, that's why you rent the rack space in London - so it is fairly nearby most of the time.

For any setup (own server or rented dedi) I'd recommend having failover to AWS or another backup server ready to go at a moment's notice. AWS would be good since it'll cost almost nothing unless it's in use. You'll need regular backups (/sync depending on content) but that's mandatory anyhow ofc.

Depending on what server platform, there isn't really much you fear going wrong - epic motherboard failure, cpu failure mainly. ram failure just go there and take it out, server will limp along just fine I would guess until a replacement is fitted. raid 5/6 the disks, dual psu, dual+ network ports etc.

It's hard to tell from the 1&1 page what (if any) monitoring / iLO is there for you, or if they just take care of it. if they do, that's a plus. on the other hand, thay might not do anything until you find your website has been down all night and call them up to find out what's gone wrong.


Another thing is firewall/security, it could be there is absolutely none in a £45/mo 1u rented rack slot, and that'd be annoying as hell to manage yourself imo (or expensive).

One caution about Rackspace: their support is nowhere near as good as advertised. We use them at work (we host at least a thousand sites, most pretty small) and getting actual service from their customer service people is a ridiculous exercise in frustration.

Dunno, I've found their chat pretty helpful. Makes it harder for them to wiggle away without solving your problem

@dave I love the suggestion I really do, but I'm worried I'll spend more time setting it all up, worrying about it, etc etc over just paying some more money and getting on coding new things for customers. As much as I would love to learn about it all as that's valuable I think my time is more +ev spent working on the site itself. I've talked to my brother who I run the site with and we agree it's a good idea but it's slightly too early for us.

So I just wasted 2+ hours of my time on the fact that a library I'm using has a different implementation of a method based on the platform it is running on. On the desktop, it runs as expected. On Android, it always returns true. In the source, there is a comment saying a real implementation would be non-trivial, but that is NOT a Javadoc comment.

it's like, damn, author dude, at least return false!

So, The developer before me seems to return random things all the time with zero comments on what they mean.

I found this gem in our code today....

Not necessarily bad, except we are NOT designing anything with any sound playback.. Nor has it ever had that. Sadly, this isn't ever close to the strangest thing in the code. Yes, they are actually implemented and reassigned a few places...

Possibly silly question but is there any reason it's "is_stoped" other than not being able to spell?

what language is that? i'ma guess one of the inbred microsoft dialects.

hahaha @ the daily wtf

http://thedailywtf.com/

You have to access articles at the IP level. For example, this is not blocked:

http://74.50.110.120/

funny

Updates!!!!
There is good news and there is bad news. The bad news is, technically, I was wrong and there was documentation saying the method doesn't work on Android. However, the documentation is on a method in the core library (not the platform specific add-on) that calls a similar method on a platform specific implementation of an interface. A little backwards and not the way I would expect it to be, but technically it is there.

The good news is that the developer responded within an hour to my post to the mailing list. AND, because of my question, he found an answer on SO that provided an implementation for the thing that was originally thought to be non-trivial. Therefore, in the next release of the library, this method will work as expected.

Awesome!

This is going to be a very productive day at work now that I can't read Wikipedia or look at random things on Reddit.

He posted vanilla c++

Yes the is_stoped is a standard variable name for him.

We have a function called PutLandDataInPostion(). //Missing an i for position

Almost every time I use it I spell it correctly and of course get errors. I suggested fixing it but its been copy and pasted all throughout the program and I was told "it doesn't matter as long as your consistent" that I stopped trying.

EVERYTHING it seems is a class. This is okay.
99.9% of functions are PUBLIC.
Every Class has the exact same function that saves an object to a database which doesn't function correctly in every spot. Its 100+ classes and I haven't been able to change it every where as its 2000ish lines heavily tied to the UI

The common way to fix problems has been copying code from one file to another and commenting it out. The main form .cpp is 25,000 lines of which at least 20% is commented out.

I found a map .bmp of a map of Florida and logs of AIM conversations saved in our source code....

I had a bug I spent forever to find. We have Purchase Orders and Sales Orders.
We had one database Table where the Purchase Order Number was being saved in the Sales Order Column. His code accurately reflected this and displayed it under Purchase order header in other places so appears to be intentional.

The biggest annoyance I see it that the ONLY comment I have found besides commented code is from where a functional was copied from the internet... I googled the lines of code and got a hackchina website

Oh and my favorite that I found was no variables are initialized to zero. Just used.
This was a problem when he had a ListView shrunk to the size of one pixel hidden on a form that was being used to store data in one line.... One out of every 100 times we opened the screen, our application crashed.

I know very well what not to do in my first programming job I supposed
/rant from what I'm sure sounds like know it all kid...

Oh my god that sounds awful. I guess "we're not consistent because I can spell" isn't getting through? So glad right now I only deal with people like that in a grading capacity where I can mark them down and write nasty notes

Sometimes you never get to the p4s and a misspelt variable name can start as one. I would just find a way to use position in every email I sent to the guy and misspell it every time...

Loving the protests today online, Wikipedia, Reddit, TechCrunch, gg all of them. Feels good that people are all banding together on this one

don't want to start a new thread or move this one off the topic it is on at the moment, but I want a interface for postgresql. I've used command line and phpMyadmin for mySQL but I have been given a postgresql database to analyse and have no experience on how to access the data or use "describe" features etc. Could someone PM me with some recommendations.

Thanks

pgAdminIII works very well.

Thank you. I will have a look.

EDIT: Perfect thank you.

Yeah this is great. Finally getting some traction/attention in the mainstream. Hope it's enough.

"PO Conversion subscreen, you on the screen you can type an invalid PO number in the PO column"

The above is great Engrish for my testers sadly. I spend approx 5 hours a week trying to translate trouble tickets. I also had an argument about a bug on a Sales Purchase Summary Detail Report. He repeated it in every email for a week before he finally realized we have no report called anything remotely close to that.