BIG holiday present !

Updated Dec 29 at 09:34 CDT (first posted Dec 22 at 05:06 CDT) by Remi in Django, General, Plone, Python, Rails, Shared, TurboGears, Zope  - 13 comment(s)

Well, here comes our BIG holiday present to everyone:

We've added one long-running process and 40MB of RAM to all plans !

This means that Rails, Django and TurboGears hosting is now available on our "Shared 1" plan, starting at $7.50/month. Zope is now available on our "Shared 2" plan and Plone on our "Shared 3" plan.

But that's not it: we've doubled the diskspace and quadrupled the bandwidth included in each plan !

Also, a private IP address is now only $5/month and an extra 40MB of RAM is only $7/month.

Happy holidays everyone :)

Remi.

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Handling the Digg effect on a standard shared hosting account

Updated Sep 9 at 05:26 CDT (first posted Aug 14 at 05:04 CDT) by Remi in General, Shared, Tips  - 0 comment(s)

I've written before about how we handled the Slashdot and Digg effects on our main website and blog (serving tens of thousands of 10-40MB videos). I explained how we load-balanced our blog on multiple servers, but this article is about handling the Digg effect on one of our standard shared hosting accounts.

Last Friday, a nice article from Amir Salihefendic landed on the front page of Digg and got over 800 diggs !

This generated a pretty big amount of traffic on Amir's site but the site stayed responsive at all time, the load remained low on the server and the other sites on the server weren't impacted at all.

Amir has a standard Shared 2 account with us (in fact, his site is on "Viper", one of our oldest servers) and his site uses mod_python.

This confirmed what we've thought for a long time: Apache rocks, provided you use the following simple tips:

• Use "Timeout 30" and "KeepAliveTimeout 3" (or similar values): this will insure that no client will block Apache's threads or processes for too long (otherwise the number of Apache threads/processes will skyrocket). If you're hosting with us, these values are set by default in our main Apache server for you.
• Serve as much content as possible statically: even if you use a dynamic framework such as Rails, Django, TurboGears or mod_python, you should try to serve your static data (images, stylesheets, ...) statically (ie: serve them from your web server directly and save your dynamic framework from having to serve all these extra little requests). Our control panel makes it easy for you to configure that.
• Use caching for expensive tasks: if parts of your pages are expensive to build (for instance, they require multiple DB queries), try to cache the result (either the HTML itself or just the result of the DB queries) to avoid having to rebuild it every time.

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More bytes, less dollars

Posted Jun 7 at 09:23 CDT by Remi in General, Shared  - 0 comment(s)

Well, we've done it again ! We've made our plans even cheaper and we've doubled the amount of diskspace that you get for a given plan and tripled the amount of bandwidth.

We've also introduced a new two-year prepayment plan that gives you an even greater discount.

Of course, all of our plans still have no setup fees.

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Shared hosting pre-sales questions

Updated Mar 12 at 09:44 CDT (first posted May 12 at 09:59 CDT) by Remi in FAQ, Pre-sales, Shared  - 0 comment(s)

Moved to http://www.webfaction.com/services/hosting

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