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Content Delivery Network

Is your blog growing big fast? If you’re overshooting your bandwidth allocations or your server is slowing down to a crawl with your continuous traffic, maybe it’s time for you to consider utilizing a CDN (Content Delivery Network). Here’s Wikipedia’s brief description:

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a system of computers networked together across the Internet that cooperate transparently to forward stage content closer to end users, most often for the purposes of improving performance and scalability.

A CDN is a cost–effective way of offloading your content to other servers so you can deal with the more important performance aspect of your site. If you’re using WordPress for your site or weblog, there are two plugins that will do the CDN dirty work for you:

The first one works only with the Amazon S3 service while the latter works only with Cloud Files.

Consider a CDN solution next time your site seems slow to load, it just might be your solution.

Slicehost VPS Hosting

I recently mentioned in my personal blog that I’ve just moved most of my sites to a virtual private server over at Slicehost, I just think I should share my thoughts about it here on this development–related blog. If you have a handful of weblogs with more than a trickle of traffic, and you’re looking for reliability, getting your own VPS hosting is the best way to go. VPS hosting gives you the flexibility you need without the compromises of free hosting.

I got my VPS running in just a few hours or so by using this excellent guide from MENSK Technologies Corporation, it was good enough for my needs with just the bare essentials: PHP, MySQL, Nginx. Yes, I opted to ditch Apache for Nginx and have been very satisfied ever since.

If you’re looking into moving up from your aging shared hosting account, consider a VPS. You will be happily rewarded. 🙂

Free Ruby on Rails hosting

Everyone has been happy to jump in on the Ruby on Rails craze, with its rapid development benefits converting many developers from other web development platforms. However, not all web hosts provide RoR in their list of services. Only the big guys like Dreamhost come with Rails.

For someone just trying out RoR development, you can always deploy a local server on your desktop for coding and debugging. However, at some point the need for testing your code in the wild is a must. Hosting Rails allows you to just that, providing free rails hosting along with their affordable web hosting packages. If you’re evaluating RoR, their free hosting plan will be good enough for your needs.