My understanding was that it was for 'application hosting'... an application can be a website if you wish.... but you could also just use it to provide a webservice.

I hear nothing but bad things about GAE. Terrible customer service (obv with Google though) and just generally poor results.

FFS we have some middle ware that uses rest calls to interact with our main product, under load those rest calls can time out and return no XML, just an HTML page, and the ****ing middleware doesn't do error checking or retry the request, it just spits out ****ty data. And the mother****ers were making fun of the design of the main product while writing this ****. Now it's all "fix the main product to prevent our ****ty product from making ****ty data." I've been down here too long...

You could check the content-type of the the response and resend if it is text/html but it doesn't solve your real problem as it could just continue failing until the load drops.

i'm trying to imagine a REST framework that doesn't do this kind of error checking for you. what's that? the team decided to re-invent the wheel instead? cool story bros.

Question, I installed debian in a VM and plan to use it as my development env. Setup everything properly AFAIK and everything is great except there's a problem with certain characters not being rendered properly in vim on both the terminal in the VM and through putty.

For example, I'm using the nerd tree in vim and there are supposed to be +/- characters and a pipe to show the tree lines but on my end it just renders an empty square icon for the +/- icons and there's no pipe lines for the tree.

Also when I run screen it doesn't seem to support 256 colors because my vim color scheme is getting reset to some non-256 variant. This is lame but not a huge deal because I can just edit my code in a different putty window (was going to do this anyways) but it would nice to fix it.

Any ideas? I never used debian before and not having too much luck Googling.

Also on an unrelated note, does anyone have a more verbose list of html elements than this page?
http://www.html5accessibility.com/html5elements

I could Google for one but it might be handy to have here too if someone happens to have a "mother of all html elements" reference handy. It would be useful to have so you can setup and preview your reset/normalize/whatever css file.

My guess is them hammering the machine looking for responses isn't helping...

http://www.html5rocks.com/en/ has some good info about some of the new features.

Yeah, I was just looking for a page that has every valid/supported element lumped together so I can test how well this html5bp normalize css file is.

There was a toggable hidden field in the link I posted that gave a run down on the elements they didn't test and elements not officially supported so I think I might be good to go.

shoe,

re: your character set question: "character set" and "locales" are some keywords that might help. it sounds like you are using C or ASCII or something instead of UTF-8? i'm not an expert in this area but hopefully this helps you get on the right track.

Why not use the HTML5 standards?

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps...ge/#auto-toc-4

Laziness mostly. Writing out every single element by hand or copy/pasting them 1 at a time would have taken a long time. I got things settled though.

Can anyone give me some advice on web hosting?

We're currently on:
Windows Server 2008 R2
Virtual Server (shared with 5 other clients)
Standard (64 bit)
2xCPU @ 1.87 ghz
2GB RAM
SQL Server 2008 R2 (1GB ram limit + 1CPU limit)

Looking to upgrade to:
Windows Server 2008 R2
Dedicated server
8 Cores x 2.5 GHz
8xCPU @ 2.5 GHz
16GB RAM
SQL Server 2008 full (no hardware limits)

I've never upgraded server before, so am unsure what performance improvements to expect, and I'm not too hot on what hardware I need.

Our blog homepage for example takes 300ms to render on the server, could I expect this to improve on the upgraded server suggestion?

For example, is a server with less but faster cores better than a server with more cores that are slower?

I'm looking at dedicated servers from 1&1:
http://order.1and1.co.uk/ServerPremi....serverpremium

Specifically this middle one:
http://order.1and1.co.uk/ServerPremi...btn.package.xl

But it doesn't seem that much better than the one on the far right here for half the money:
http://order.1and1.co.uk/ServerPremi....btn.package.l

Not sure how significant those hardware differences are

The problem with eyeballing price comparisons on 2 totally different setups is that server providers like to charge a very ******ed amount of $ for extra ram or HD space.

Maybe they value 250GB at $19/month and an extra 4GB of ram is another $39/month. That would increase the third link's price by $60 which puts it nearly even with the middle one.

My friend's media blog (tons of photos + articles) pulls in about 60k uniques a month and it's hosted on a quad core xeon 2ghz with 8gb of ram and it barely breaks a sweat. It's using crappy WP plugins too and the server is also running a mumble, shoutcast, and minecraft server 24/7 (but those 3 apps have very low traffic).

Having it dedicated + at least 8GB of ram should give you plenty of room to grow. His same site exploded on shared hosting with like 25% of the traffic he currently has, but that was shared with an unknown amount of clients (bluehost).

No one can really answer you without posting much more info about what you're serving, the traffic you're getting, much data you have / plan to cache, expected growth rates, and the current bottleneck (cpu or IO?).

I'll just stress again I'm not very good on hardware etc, but here's the resource monitor at what I consider to be a quiet time of day:



Looks like the CPU is working quite hard. The DB is hardware capped at 1gb ram and 1cpu so I would imagine this is a major bottleneck.

Again not sure what the best way to workout/measure all this stuff is (if anyone knows some tools let me know).

Traffic is growing reasonably rapidly every month, serving currently around 1m page views a month (expecting this to continue growing quite rapidly). A lot of pages work quite hard, multiple DB calls on every page view.

look in to how much it costs to rent space/bandwidth in a London datacentre that you could drop your own server in to.

Very expensive, server of that spec would cost ~?2k surely? We'd rather someone else have responsibility on hardware/service as well.

lol I've been looking now, 1U rackspace with 5TB transfer would cost ~?45 per month, a decent server ~?3k. Would pay itself off in 2.5 years. But I don't know anything about co location or anything like that, what happens if things go wrong etc.

Their support seems absolutely top notch. Haven't used them personally but I was curious so I looked. http://www.rackspace.com/managed_hos...dedicatedteam/

I doubt their server comes close to ?3k - a single low end bulldozer cpu, and a pair of likely desktop-class hard disks running software raid is gonna be nearer ?1k imo

here's perhaps a reasonable suggestion (?899): http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/serve...serve-xe3-r130 - but i'd read quite a few of these reviews (I like PC pro mag, for sure)

lol, pretty much the same whatever you're doing - either you fix it yourself or make a phonecall and get it fixed e.g. the server linked above has on-site next business day warranty, so that's the maximum time it'll be until you get a replacement in the event of hardware failure.

software problems, they're entirely down to you in both scenarios iirc.

I'd think you'd learn a LOT, and have a great deal more flexibility having your own actual server, although it may not be the smoothest sailing.

Thanks for the links! Kinda getting quite excited by this idea now, this site sells that server and others:

http://www.broadberry.co.uk/opteron-...erve-gt24b8236

Been playing with the one above:

GT24B8236 SATA Onboard RAID, Dual Gigabit LAN, IPMI & KVM Remote Management
AMD Opteron 6272 - 2.1Ghz, 16Mb Cache, 16 Core - 115Watt
3x 8GB 1333MHz DDR3 ECC Reg w/Parity CL9 DIMM Dual Rank, x4 w/Therm Sen
1TB Enterprise Class SAS2 6Gb/s 7200RPM - 3.5" - Seagate CONSTELLATION
9-5 Technical Support for System Lifetime
48 Hour Comprehensive System Testing Procedure
UK Country Kit & Mains Cable

This seems comparable to the 1&1 servers and costs inc vat ~?2k so would pay for itself in 18 months which seems reasonable.

Again total noob here, but I guess I would benefit from something like raid? Raid controller + something like 3HDDs?

Someone also suggested might be a good idea to run the site on the rackspace cloud for 1 hour at a time under different setups (only cost couple ? an hour) and hit it with a lot of traffic see the performance increase for real.

I would not recommend buying your own server for your site. You are going to get bitten down the line when something goes wrong... and its not uncommon. Even if you have support available, it is likely to end up costing you a lot more when a cpu or ram chip burns out and you need them to fix is ASAP because your site is down and you are no where near your physical server location. On top of this, a good 'dedicated server renting' company would probably just move your site over to a working box... at a server farm where you own you hardware... what are you going to do when they tell you its going to take 3 days to get that component.

I have looked into getting a small rack server for myself in the past just to host some non critical stuff, and its a really neat idea... would be cool to actually own your server, but the more I researched it the more I realised that by going down this route, there are 10 times more things that can go wrong then just renting a dedi server (not to say that dedi server renting doesnt have its own problems), and the costs are likely to go much higher than the initial cost of the box + renting the rack space.

The rackspace servers seem to have a raid setup, for redundancy most likely. They also offer an off-server 250GB FTP access too for backups and guarantee 1 hour hardware replacements.

It's too bad SSD HDs are so expensive. It would be interesting to use them for certain data but I don't think the cost is worth it.

I'm against getting your own server too. 6-7 years ago I would say go for it but there's really no reason to worry about that stuff in today's world.

What happens when you need to scale out and need 6 boxes? Are you going to front the $10,000 (probably not much if you need that kind of power), but then you need to manage 6 boxes. The more boxes you add, the more chances something is going to break.

It's way easier to click a few buttons and get your 6 servers setup/guaranteed maintained in a few minutes.

You said it would take 1.5 years to pay itself off. It's worth the peace of mind and ease of use to pay the premium of leasing. It's not like you're buying a house vs renting it. In most cases the house is going to retain its cost value if not show a profit. The server you buy will be obsolete in no time.

Do not buy actual metal unless some of you are sysadmins, and even then you should just use AWS or some other service.

Yeah guess I'm getting ahead of myself and the geekiness just wants to own one, I'm confused as to how much better `Server XL 8` is (http://order.1and1.co.uk/ServerPremi...btn.package.xl) over `Server 4i` http://order.1and1.co.uk/ServerPremi....btn.package.l

I suppose go for 4i and upgrade if needed