Recap: Don't Let Success Bring Your Web Site Down
June 10, 2010 Emily Lewis
Our May presentation, Don't Let Success Bring Your Web Site Down was another great success and a testament to the talent in Albuquerque thanks to our presenters Chris Kenworthy and Mick Thompson. We had a "sold out" presentation, with 38 attendees who all walked away with a fundamental understanding of web hosting options.
If you weren't able to join us or need a refresher, you know we got your back (as always).
Recap
Chris and Mick's presentation focused on scalable server configurations and cloud computing. Some takeaways:
- When registering a domain name, don't go with your hosting provider. Keep eggs in different baskets to avoid potential fees and charges if problems occur.
- With a VPS, you get what you get. If you use your limit, you get your limit. But can't go over … its not unlimited.
- If you need more than shared hosting or VPS, there are options. With dedicated hosting, can have managed or unmanaged.
- Pros of dedicated hosting: data center takes care of problems — hardware, outages, etc. Cons: it's expensive.
- Colocation is where you buy the server yourself, and set it up, then basically "rent" space for that server.
- "Cloud" refers to applications (Gmail), infrastructure (Amazon EC2), platform (Google App Engine).
- EC2 has gotten huge adoption. Only out of beta for two years, with almost 80k instances running on it.
- Cons of EC2: instances die (it's just a fact) and performance isn't always as good as dedicated. Pros: you plan for problems with instances and you get lots of flexibility.
- YSlow is a Firefox add-on that helps you to see how your (or any site) is performing.
- Things you can do to improve performance: reduce external calls (JavaScript, CSS, images), minify your CSS and use CSS sprites.
- You can also use a CDN to free up your server.
- More optimization tips: cache control, file compression (GZip), CSS at the top, scripts at the bottom.
- There are no definitives with optimization. It is all about your site. The point is to be knowledgeable about what you need.
- Monitoring is the best way to know what's going on with your server. And there are a range of services available, from pinging to HTTP monitoring.
- Keep your backups separate from your web hosting provider. If there are problems or disputes, you don't want to fight for your data.
Slide Deck
Chris and Mick's slidedeck is available on Slideshare:
Video
Video of their presentation is available on Vimeo:
Photos
Photos are available on Flickr:
Coming in July!
Our next presentation is Make It Small: The Magic of Audio and Video Compression on July 7, 2010, beginning at 6:30pm at One Up.
Local web specialist Jack Moffitt will discuss clever algorithms to make MP3s and video files tiny without altering their quality much.
Registration for our July event is not yet open, but be sure to mark your calendar! We'll be opening registration up about two weeks prior to the presentation and will notify our members across our various social networks, as well as on this site.
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See you on July 7!