live website creation and promotion

Finally moved all my sites to a new dedicated server, they should be stable now. Server is located at ThePlanet datacenter and performs thousand times better than previous virtual dedicated at GoDaddy (not mentioning other problems with GoDaddy that I got rid of now). Will start adding new features very soon.

Tried to install and configure IBM DB2 on our virtual dedicated server. It just doesn’t work well - half of operations were aborted due to memory limit. So we’re moving to 1and1 dedicated root server (Fedora Core 4, Plesk 8, 1Gb RAM, unlimited traffic). They have 2Gb RAM option as well, but I don’t think we will really need it soon, even though DB2 is not very lightweight software

P.S. DB2 is just fantastic, I’m able to do things that MySQL can only dream of, and it still works fast, despite of the fact that I didn’t set up any indexes yet - except of primary keys in tables.

Several days ago, all our websites were unaccessible from time to time, this problem is fixed now. Here’s the quote from Joker.com, company that we use to register our domains and for DNS support:

A distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) of unknown origin started Monday, 2006-03-20
…
Upstream providers reported traffic peaks of about 1.3 Gigabits per second on a single line. This was enough to overload our lines, causing communication problems between our border routers and the upstream providers, and thereby interrupting all services for a short period on 2006-03-20
…
We responded by adding more nameservers, some of them being hosted in external data centers with own DDoS protection. We reserved more bandwidth for Joker.com exlusively, and implemented automatic systems to react on certain incidents.
These measures seem to have helped, since the later attacks did not affect our systems as much as the first one. In the near future, we will do more to protect your domains and our business against such criminal activities.

We know Joker.com as a very reliable service for already 2 years of good work and recommend it highly.

I’m having constant problems with MySQL, it is very slow now, especially when there are dozens of search bots parsing my sites.
I also found it very annoying that simple subqueries take a lot of time to execute - it works about 10 times faster after I separate them and use two queries instead of one, passing the data from first to second via PHP script.
It appears to be a well-known problem for MySQL 4.1 - I’m not sure if that’s still happening with 5.0 version - but I don’t have too much time to make thorough tests, so I’m going to move to PostgreSQL, as it seems to be a much better solution. Right now my database code is not too complex (yet), so it won’t take long.
Any comments?

P.S. I understand that this move also means ideology change - things should be done with stored procedures, foreign keys, triggers and so on - so part of business logic is moving to DB. But actually this is exactly how it should be, IMHO.

Update. I’m seriously thinking about IBM’s DB2…

Shared hosting is a good idea for static sites, or for not-so-popular sites, but it’s not my case. After series of problems, where I couldn’t do anything except asking for support from hosting provider and waiting for solution from 15 minutes to 8 hours (each time the interval varied), I decided to upgrade the hosting. Virtual dedicated server offer from GoDaddy was attractable enough (good service + only $35 monthly, instead of $9 for shared hosting). I don’t really need normal dedicated with current server load, and I think I can work with VDS for at least next few months until I need to upgrade again.

So I moved the site. It took me several hours to properly configure the server, apache, php and other stuff. By the way - right now the site is running Apache 2.0, PHP 5.0, MySQL 4.1 versions. Will (probably) post later more details about configuring all this. I also promise to post all details about VDS itself, any arising problems and their solutions.

I almost finished changing site design, prepared for me by Denis Perekhrest, with help from Glen. IMO site has got much better and professional look now. Glen reworked HTML/CSS in such way that programs list (the content itself) moved to the top part of HTML, before tags panel - so it will look better in search engine results now - when search engines rescan the site. Right now Googlebot has scanned about 35k pages, MSNbot - 9k pages.

Next step was to find a hosting for my new baby. Actually, I already found it - I’m working with Peterhost from 2004, already a year, since I moved eMule Plus website there from SourceForge, cause SF’s hosting was not good enough for us. The only disadvantage I know about Peterhost is that you has to know russian, it is russian hosting
If you’re looking for non-russian hosting, you may check my hosting bookmarks. There are only few, but maybe later I’ll add more. Or you can check there.
So, I created another account on Peterhost and setup website and MySQL database. It took about 2 days though to “connect” domain DNS and website, so I had to wait a little - I wanted to start working and playing with subdomains. I created several subdomains for the project, thus enabling http://myprogs.net/ANY_USERNAME to be valid (I limited minimum username length to 3 characters), because everything else was working from subdomains. People are saying that many subdomains make search engines go crazy and lower search results for your site¹, but that was not the main point for me, plus I made only small number of subdomains. All those subdomains actually pointed to the same site, I used Apache’s mod_rewrite technique to perform different tasks based on chosen subdomain.

………………………………………
1. Actually, after some time I can tell you that it’s not happening for my site, you can see here links from all relevant subdomains.

“In the beginning created God the heavens and the earth; and the earth was without form and empty, and darkness on the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was brooding on the face of the waters.”

Actually, it was simpler
I always wanted service like this and nobody yet made it. So I thought - maybe I have an opportunity here to build something useful, and benefit from all sides. And here it started…

The idea is ’social’ software list. People make lists of programs they use, tagging software into categories, thus making it possible to search by tag, find popular programs in various categories, track after your friends’ or colleagues’ new software picks, etc.

First thing was to find cool URL. I opened joker.com¹ and started whois queries. Suddenly I found that myprogs.net is free². Register it. 2 years. Visa details. Done!

………………………………………
1. I’m using joker.com since 2003 and it always serviced my needs in good and reliable manner. It also has full DNS support in case you want to point your site to your home computer with static IP. See this as promotion from faithful customer
2. URL myprogs.com was already taken, but contained some small software store, nothing that can compete my site in any way. I also made some checks in Google and Del.icio.us to see that there’s nothing alike my idea yet.