While “Game of Thrones”‘ filesharing rates are probably driven in part by its appeal to the young, geeky male demographic that’s most prone to using torrent sites, HBO hasn’t helped the problem by making the show tough to watch online for the young and cable-less.
This sounds about right. If you don’t have cable, there’s no other way to watch Game of Thrones. Sorry old school, this is the way it is. See also: The Oatmeal.
By separating myself from the constant connectivity, I can see which aspects are truly valuable, which are distractions for me, and which parts are corrupting my very soul. What I worry is that I’m so “adept” at the internet that I’ve found ways to fill every crevice of my life with it, and I’m pretty sure the internet has invaded some places where it doesn’t belong.
I wonder what would happen if he tried to do the same thing with travel infrastructure. If he said” I won’t drive, fly or take a taxi this entire year”. He would be a hermit, stuck in the island that is his apartment. This is, more or less, what’s going to happen to him when he “quits” the internet. Technology moves us forward whether it’s roads or fiber optics.
If you weren’t nauseous before using this bathroom, you might be after.
Last night I got to see The Black Keys live at Cynthia Woods Pavilion. Not the best venue but they put on a hell of a live show. I’d highly recommend seeing them if they roll through your town.
500px has no shortage of fantastic photographers. Marsel van Oosten is someone that I’ve stumbled upon a few times, each time amazed at what he was able to capture. This post is an interview with Marsel complete with seriously incredible photos. A must see.
Watch the video. It’s equal parts awesome and stupid.
I guess they bought a house with all the fix’ins just to wreck it. My favorite was the water-bed, or the red wine in the microwave.
I know this isn’t exactly news anymore, but I’ve thought about pledging for this project since Saturday. Who didn’t want a Dick Tracy watch as a kid? The only negative seems to be its release date. September is a long ways away and gives the competition plenty of time to catch up.
Good thing I still have 31 days to decide.
This one comes to you thanks to John Gruber. Instarchive lets you download all of your Instagram photos. I’ll be closing my account soon and this seems like the best way to get all of those pictures out before I do.
TL;DR DreamHost has a bunch of things they need to work out, from topography to name servers to limiting user resources. For a few extra dollars a month, MediaTemple is a much better host that seems to have figured things out the past couple of years.
I bought my first domain and hosting plan three years ago. It was for a senior capstone project at The University of Toledo. At the time I chose to host the site through MediaTemple, a well-known host with an elegantly modern management console in a sea of cPanel fugly control panels. At the time I thought this was the only thing that distinguished one host from another, aside from price.
Because this is just a hobby of mine I generally get a shared hosting plan. What this means is my site(s) are essentially on a virtual computer that is shared by who knows how many others. You don’t have much control over the under the hood stuff. For hosting small blogs like this one, that’s no big deal. At MediaTemple this is called Grid-Service.
MediaTemple had a rough year in 2009. By December I had lost connection to my database more times than I wanted to count. Compared to other hosts out there, (mt) was pricy and I started shopping around for an alternative. This is when I found DreamHost. DreamHost is a popular web host that is known for reliability and crazy sales. When I discovered them, they were running a sale that the first year of services was only $10. This is compared to the normal $10 a month DreamHost charges and $20 a month I was paying for (mt). So I left for greener pastures.
For the most part the first year was fine. I had all but stopped writing here, and wouldn’t have really known if performance was bad. Last August, a year and half after switching, I started writing again. At first it was at SquareSpace, which doesn’t use my host, but in January I returned to my self hosted WordPress install. Like any nerd running a website, I wanted my barebones site to load as fast as possible.
One of the things slowing my site down seemed to be bandwidth. This site doesn’t use much bandwidth, but perhaps another user on my shared cluster was overdoing it. If you want to try out a VPS, or virtual private server, it’s free for the first week. I flipped the switch to see if this helped. What it did was allow me to troubleshoot the issue that was causing my site to be slow. The database server I originally was given was in a different building than my web server. Not good. After talking with their support team they moved it to the same location and things sped up marginally, but it was still obvious that IO’s were a little slow. The VPS helped though, and at $15 extra a month I let it ride for a while. This brought my total monthly bill at DreamHost up to $25. I wasn’t ecstatic with the results, but I wasn’t unhappy either.
On April 1st DreamHost announced a partnership with CloudFlare, brining the service to my attention. CloudFlare is a service that sits in between your site and the world-wide web, pushing the content quicker across the globe and protecting it from spammers and hackers. I signed up for the free plan (why it was free I don’t know) and gave it a try. What I noticed bothered me.
My site was loading quick, once it connected. The connection time took up to six seconds, longer than it should. This seemed to be caused by DreamHosts name servers. To summarize, a name server points to the place where your site really lives on the web. When you enter in www.mlapida.com it points to an IP address where my content resides. This should be near instant, but it wasn’t. It was taking up to six seconds. CloudFlare can’t speed up a site that it can’t find for six second.
Before outright switching, I looked to see if I could use someone else’s name server. Amazon has a service called Rout 53 that uses their name servers to propagate your DNS all around the world for ultra fast name resolution. DreamHost doesn’t make it very easy to use a service like this though. Even if they did throw you a bone setting it up, a little site like this shouldn’t need a global name server to rout requests. The “stock” option, so to speak, should work just fine. Paying a few dollars to Amazon each month for this service would be silly, and this silly stuff was beginning to add up.
Anyway, I started thinking the best bet was to move hosts. In January DreamHost was hacked and forced all users to reset their passwords. This means they don’t properly encrypt users password data and this just added to the negatives list. I know my little site doesn’t demand a whole lot of security, but it’s a piece of mind thing, and if they weren’t salting the passwords, what other security faux pas were there waiting to get exploited?
So Yesterday I signed back up for MediaTemple. I had a 20% off coupon code that made it easier to swallow and began moving everything over. Instantly I notice improved name resolution times, and database IO time was exponentially better. All in all, less than 24 hours later, I think I made a good move. I think DreamHost, with its cheap plans, unlimited everything and clunky interface, has outgrown its britches. A host is like a bank. No one really likes moving banks, but when the negatives of your current institution outweigh the positives, you do what you have to do.
