Hummm, i’ve made serious improvements on Besigh it should work like a charm now ^_^ also a major clean up of Hentaish is on its way, as well as 4 new sites hehehe
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Social Network Software Elgg Review
Yep, i’ve used Elgg social network software on 2 experiments, one live, another offline, both times, with versions 1.1, 1.2 and the new version 1.5, both times the software was lacking for my own needs as well as my users (i’ll explain the good things and bad things bellow), most of all it seems to be a software directed to a specific view of what a social network software should be, more than being an all round software… more times than none, it mimics in some way the features found in facebook and/or myspace, instead of giving what i would think that small to midsize social networks need. Also i don’t think most of the things Elgg lacks are core features, no but they are plugins that should have been developed by the creators and not users, since i totally agree with they’r notion of a platform core + plugins for functions, one of the things i was most impressed with Elgg.
This is a combined List from 1.1 to 1.5 (i know some things were improved and are now much better on 1.5, but in my view are still not ideal):
Awesome Features
- True Plug and Play System (The core can always be updated, cause both themes and plugins are totally unrelated with the core), similar to wordpress and in my view the only way to create software that is meant to be augmented.
- Basic Essential Social Network Features (User Profiles,Friends,Activity…).
- Security and Protection of users Privacy in mind.
- Even with more than 1000+ users, it seems to not be such a burden on the system and flows pretty well (i’ve seen SMF or Phpbb start crawling with the same load).
Not so Awesome Features
- Serious lack of communication from the developers (reason for me to not use the software anymore in any live site)
- No Central Forum System / Advanced Message Board.
- No Picture / Video Gallery System (the file system is just a very basic form of picture/video gallery).
- Authentication and OpenId still don’t work perfectly, several users constantly reporting problems and logouts, on a system were you should login once and never again.
- Several features are a little barebone (like blogging, files, pages, messageboards)
The results of using Elgg even with 1.5 is very little user engagement, even with high traffic flowing to the site, most users would register and then leave and never come back, mostly cause they dont have a central place (forum, video or picture galleries….) to find friends on the site (unlike facebook where you bring friends from the outside), while the same site now with SMF with very little extra functions (embeding and picture posting enabled) has in a very short time become a very active main forum with 4 times more page views and several times more engagement and time on site.
Also their upcoming Elgg hosted solution doesn’t give me much confidence, more on their communication with the community than on the platform, we will see, if they do improve, i’m sure i’ll change my mind, still awesome platform, poor functions ^_^
Shared Hosting VS Cloud Share VS Virtual Private Server
Shared hosting, including cloud shared hosting, and virtual private server (VPS) are some of the most popular options for hosting websites and applications. While they both serve the purpose of making your content accessible on the internet, there are significant differences in terms of performance, control, and scalability. We here on Hostcult use all 3, so i think its a nice write up to compare each with pros and cons, so lets check this out.
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is a hosting environment where multiple websites are hosted on a single server. It is a cost-effective solution, making it suitable for small businesses, personal websites, and entry-level projects. In this setup, server resources such as CPU, RAM, and storage are shared among the websites hosted on the server. This sharing of resources allows hosting providers to offer affordable plans to a large number of customers. It also shares the hosting software so it makes it super easy to run anything.
Pros of Shared Hosting
- Cost-effective: Shared hosting plans are generally one of the most affordable options, making them ideal for individuals and small businesses with limited budgets.
- Easy to manage: The hosting provider handles server maintenance, security updates, and technical support, relieving users of the burden of server management.
- User-friendly: Shared hosting often comes with a user-friendly control panel that simplifies website management, domain setup, and email configuration.
Cons of Shared Hosting
- Limited resources: Since resources are shared among multiple websites, the performance of your website can be affected by the activities of other users on the server. If one website experiences a sudden surge in traffic, it can impact the overall server performance, potentially slowing down your site.
- Limited customisation: Shared hosting environments typically have limitations on software installations and configurations since they aim to provide a standardised setup for all users.
- Security concerns: As multiple websites share the same server, if one site is compromised, there is a potential risk of other sites on the server being affected as well.
Cloud Shared Hosting
Cloud shared hosting builds upon the shared hosting model by utilising cloud infrastructure. Instead of relying on a single physical server, cloud hosting distributes resources across multiple servers in a network. This offers improved scalability and reliability compared to traditional shared hosting.
Pros of Cloud Shared Hosting
- Scalability: Cloud hosting allows for easy scaling of resources, ensuring that your website can handle sudden traffic spikes without performance degradation.
- Reliability: With multiple servers in a network, if one server fails, your website can be instantly migrated to another server, minimising downtime.
- Flexibility: Cloud hosting often provides more advanced features, such as load balancing and automatic backups, to enhance website performance and data protection.
Cons of Cloud Shared Hosting
- Cost variation: While cloud shared hosting can be cost-effective for moderate traffic, the usage-based pricing model can result in higher costs if your website experiences significant traffic or resource usage.
- Technical complexity: Cloud hosting may require more technical knowledge and expertise to set up and manage compared to traditional shared hosting.
- Unique infrastructures – By default a cloud infrastructure can be setup from pretty simple with a couple of servers or incredibly complex with thousands, that makes it hard to compare the benefits or each cloud provider, since one can have better performance and another reality and another connections and another replication.
Virtual Private Server (VPS)
A VPS is a hosting environment where a physical server is divided into multiple virtual servers, each acting as an independent server environment. Each VPS has dedicated resources allocated to it, providing more control and performance compared to shared hosting.
Pros of VPS Hosting
- Dedicated resources: With a VPS, you have guaranteed resources that are not shared with other users, ensuring consistent performance for your website and application.
- Customisation and control: VPS hosting grants you root access, allowing you to install and configure software as per your requirements. You have more control over server settings and can tailor the environment to suit your specific needs.
- Scalability: VPS hosting offers scalability options, allowing you to easily adjust your resource allocation as your website’s traffic and demands grow.
Cons of VPS Hosting
- Cost: VPS hosting tends to be more expensive than shared hosting due to the dedicated resources and increased control it provides. It may not be the most cost-effective option for websites with low traffic or limited budgets.
- Server management: While VPS hosting grants more control, it also requires a higher level of technical expertise to manage the server effectively. Users are responsible for tasks like server maintenance, security updates, and software installations.
- Performance limitations: Although VPS hosting provides dedicated resources, the overall performance can still be affected by the physical server’s hardware limitations. If the physical server is overloaded, it can impact the performance of all VPS instances hosted on it.
So shared hosting, including cloud shared hosting, is suitable for entry-level websites and projects with budget constraints. It offers cost-effective pricing and user-friendly management, but resource limitations and potential complexity concerns should be considered. Cloud shared hosting provides enhanced scalability and reliability compared to traditional shared hosting but can be costlier and requires more technical expertise to run.
On the other hand, VPS hosting offers dedicated resources, increased customisation, and scalability, making it a preferable option for websites with higher traffic and specific requirements. It provides more control and performance, but at a higher cost and with additional server management responsibilities.
To sum it up here on Hostcult we use shared hosting for small sites, placeholders and testbeds, we use cloud shared hosting for bigger sites and production and we use VPS for specific services or files/image/video hosting that need specific software/performance to run.
Spreadout Updates
Haiii haii been updating loads of sites and i have like… 3 or 4 new ones coming up, but for now… just re-did hostcult (yep our hosting domain), since we moved the hosting business to just hosting S2R projects, i didnt have time to re-do the domain and making something useful, well now i did, just a simple blog about hosting, both S2R and well the industry hehehe ohhh also i did a cool site called Smutish (its kinda an adult aggregator of sorts), so check them out YAYYY ^_^
Welcome to the New Hostcult
Heheheh,wait? isnt hostcult a hosting company? … humm it was/is ^_^ but since about a year ago, we refocused Send to Receive into a kind of web developing company and decided to just turn Hostcult into S2R solely hosting and services provider, so we pointed our customers to other cool hosting companies and some of them we still host (but this time for free >_< ), but since we have the domain (mostly used for dns and domain aliases), we might as well use it hehehe, so what does this new hostcult bring?
Well mostly talk about hosting, news about the hosting industry, reviews about hosting (that we use), well stuff like that, also with hosting related subjects with s2r (so if any s2r site is down or there is any problem with our servers, we will post here updates, since this blog is hosted on google’s blogger)…
news,s2r,
Think thats about it for now (still fixing up the hostcult theme), more stuff soon enough hehehe
Land of Upgrades
Yep, major improvements on hentaish (i went through everything, css, html, code, posts, graphics), preparing for the reboot ^_^ also a lot of tweaking on neechan and tentakle, and last and not least some upgrades on panchira… mostly security and standard upgrades yayyy
Quick and Dirty Upgrades
Yep Yep been busy offline, but also online, doing major improvements on yime.org (more sites added, the search is much quicker and nicer), also improving neechan.org search, should be way better now (it has more than 300 other image boards and such…) heheheh integrated google’s friends connect on ecchi.info and on kudasai.org, especially on kudasai it made a vast improvement in speed compared with using meebo’s rooms ^_^
Neechan Woes and Fixing Spam!
Well we run neechan and tentakle (these are both anonymous image boards) and since like a month ago, we started getting bombed with CP , although completely against our rules, the idea of a image board is that anyone can post easily, so CP and other nasty stuff tends to show up from time to time, but that was not the case, this was continuous multiple posts a day, the idea is simple, to bypass our various protections, they just post a CP image with the url to visit on the image itself, so things like banning the domain aren’t going to work as well as banning just posting images, cause that’s a natural thing to do on a image boards, so what did we do?
Hummm we started by increasing the restrictions, adding captcha and starting to ban by image hash, however all of these the bots kept bypassing, old captcha systems can be broken pretty easily by software, images can be changed ever so slightly to bypass image hash, that was especially hard on neechan’s wabaka captcha, that was easily broken, this got to a point that rightly so someone told google that we were hosting CP ourself, but only between the time of posting and the time it takes for an admin (me) to delete it, so clearly we needed to improve even more our code, so we hacked the code and started using re-captcha.
So did it work? actually yes, not only cause re-captcha is quite a strong captcha system, but mostly cause these bots are targeted to this software and its weaknesses, if i would change to a more simple setup i believe it would also break the bots, well until it was programmed to break that particular system, but this way, we can outsource at least part of our security to someone that knows captchas and thus solving our problem, so will we switch tentakle also to re-captcha, hummm if CP starts passing through it, absolutely ^_^.oO ( thank you recaptcha )
New Sites and Stuff
Just to say that Panchira is back on and doing pretty well, also i’m working on reworking (funny) a couple of other sites, as well as doing major updates on a couple more… lots of new stuff this week hehehe ^^
S2R is Over with Feedburner
This was the last drop, the only reason for using feedburner in more than 20 of our sites was that it provided a good and reliable storage of the feeds, the ability to manage the feeds and possibly monetise it and above all else because of the feed stats, but in a week time since we moved the feeds from feedburner to google feedburner, the bad service is even worse, its a case of google doing again a shit poor job of a service they bought and in our case its the final drop, and we are dropping the service all together, we prefer the clean workable and always available feed that our sites provide than the broken down mess from google’s feedburner, we are done and we recommend most users to drop them as well… really no point, you lose more than what you win…
Happy Christmas and Merry New Year
Aiiiiiii a Awesome Christmas and New Year to every random person on the Interweb hehehe ^_^