Duskrider's Blog

It's been quite a while since I've written here, mostly because I just haven't had the chance, but also because my mind has been on other things lately.

I had a few computer problems mostly centered around a buggy Windows installation due to some bad ram sticks, and a bad hard drive (all ordered online - I STILL haven't learned my lesson there). This prevented me from making any images for awhile and generally put me in a bad mood for a week or so.

I finally got my home computer back up and running, at least well enough to do some more wallpaper work. There are sill some bugs (other than the normal Windows stuff that crops up from time to time), but it's pretty much OK. I know how to get rid of the bugs anyway, but they don't bother me enough yet to go through the whole format procedure I would need to truly fix them.

So I, like many others, live with them.

One of the images I put up right before I had all this mess was Grab the Web. This image wasn't intended to be a wallpaper, though I liked it enough to make it into one. The original intent, and it serves, was to make a logo for another website I'm writing. Since this one is more or less finished, code wise anyway, I need something else to divert my attention other than 3d images. To that end, I decided to write a site that is, rather than image based and graphic intensive, very simple on the outside. Underneath the hood, however, there is a few good solid weeks of programming, and it's not even what I would consider to be half finished. Call me a nerd, but I find that sort of challenge very entertaining. :)

So, in the course of thinking up that site, I stumbled upon yet another idea for a site requiring a good deal of backend programming. Add to that the fact that I want to eventually turn to website design as a career and open up my own small business doing it, and I have another site to design for that. To make a long story short, I now have 3 new domain names to try and find content for.

When a site is made, it has to be hosted somewhere... meaning a computer, somewhere in the world, has to hold that website and dish its contents out to the surfing public. This site happens to be hosted at The Planet in Texas, but you'd never know that unless I told you. The reason it's there instead of, say, in my basement, is because they have much better facilities than I could ever dream of. They have backups of backups, backed-up by backup power generators. If something goes wrong with the computer that's sending you this blog - it gets moved to another computer and I don't pay a dime. I DO, however, pay a fee each month for this reliability. It's still small potatoes compared to what I would pay for my own server though, so it works out.

The tradeoff, however, is that I share the computer with several other websites. I don't even know who they are, but they're hosted on the same box as I am. This isn't really a problem though, so long as everyone plays nice.

In the course of programming my new site and thinking about the programming that will go into the other sites, though, I began to think that maybe (If I'm lucky) I will eventually need to get my very own server hosted there. That way it will only be me and my sites with the whole server to myself. That would be nice... able to configure it however I want it, make it my own, host whatever sites eating whatever resources I want... yeah, that's the life.

It's also a couple of hundred dollars a month. Minimum.

Ok, so I'm content paying about a tenth of that for now. That's actually more than I was paying last month, because I just moved to a new server. I moved because I need to be able to host all my sites separately, and they new account I got will allow me to do that. It can get complicated, but suffice to say I wasn't able to do that the way I wanted before, and now I can.

So why pay 1000% more for a dedicated server if what I have now works just fine? The problem is that I'm sharing this server with other people, so I have to make sure I don't hog any resources. If I do, I'll get kicked off, and that's no fun. Duskrider.com, for sure, isn't a problem. The most resource intensive thing this site does is pull image information from a database, so no worries there. It's the other sites I'm worried about. As I said before, I'm not quite done programming them yet, so I don't know exactly how much resources they'll take up. I've tested the site I'm currently working on, and it seems ok, but that's just me. Throw a couple of hundred other people running the same script on there and I just have no idea how much juice it will need to run. The only way to know for sure is to let 'er loose and see how she does. That's at least a month or more away though. Worst case scenario is that my host kicks me out and I have to find another. No big deal at the moment, because this site is the only one I have that really matters, and I'm not making a living off it. Better to experiment now when it doesn't matter than later when it does.

I'm pretty confident that I've written the code in such a way that I won't hog too many resources though.

I hope.

Maybe I should dump that script that automatically calculates the distance, in inches, between the host of my site and the host of every other site listed in Google.

Nah.