Smutish was always kinda the black cheap of the family, kinda weird design, no real purpose, it was a experiment left abandoned to itself, still people seem to like it and wanted more, so after a bit of tweaking its finally something pretty cool, its still the same posting cute naked people, but now its simple, clear and way faster and with HUGE picture sizes hehehe, enjoy!
Huhumm, new site, its called Luz Portugal, and of course its about Praia da Luz, Algarve, Portugal, its kinda a portal of sorts, i know there are a couple of sites kinda like this, but i wanted to make one that is nice to look at and nice to use, mixing helpful information and funny and interesting things about Praia da Luz, hehehe cool humm.
With the recent news about Google’s App Engine pricing, i kinda want to give my own 2 cents, not only on that but also on Google’s attitude towards web developers in general.
So just incase you werent following up, Google on its spree of canceling products, decided to not cancel the App Engine product but instead turn it into a enterprise product, the App Engine is basically a scalable hosting solution, were you can build websites or applications.
So when the App Engine debuted it was touted as a one stop app hosting solution, were you could build your web applications quickly and they would run on Google High End Systems, kind of like Amazon Cloud offerings but simpler and easier to use, well it wasnt really easy, you have the choice of Java or Phython (pretty much) and the system is a bit trickier, but at least it was cheap and once you got it up and running, it was pretty cool, so that premise brought a bunch of developers to the App Engine, hey it wasn’t perfect but it was pretty easy and cheap.
So fast forward to now and the App Engine is a completely different beast, by switching their pricing model the App Engine has become way more expensive (mostly because before you paid for what you used and now you pay for what you need to use, even if you don’t use it, big difference) and im not saying like 20%, im saying 200%, and so Google’s answer to the outcry was:
So basically Google did a bait and switch, pulled in all this small developers that had the time, interest and risk to create stuff on an untested new platform as the App Engine (cause understandably Large Companies seldom risks trying new things), but now that the system is somewhat stable and ready for prime-time, those same developers get shafted, so in the end whats the point of having a scalable hosting solution if a developer cant afford it.
But this wasn’t the first time and it wont be the last, Google’s only interest is Google bottom-line, that’s it, developing anything on top of Google Services is a huge risk, they also recently disabled a ton of API’s, that a lot of sites depended on and were created on top of, also pushing Google Chrome Only/Optimized features, as well as a bunch of other services.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticizing Google for doing it, i’m just saying that when Google says they are making new tools for developers, new API’s, new hosting platforms, support open source, supporting webmasters… that you should take those offers with a huge grain of salt, for myself, well im off the App Engine and most of my apps wont be moved over, im keeping to what i know, i learned this lesson before, with Ning, with several Hosting Providers and such, never build anything you don’t have absolute control of, lesson learned.
Awwww, its a site about kittens, and yeah i know kity.org isn’t quite the correct spelling, but i don’t care, and yes its supposed to look like a sickly sweet eye candy orgasm! haahah its wonderful, guaranteed to lift anyones spirit hahahaha (or at least mine hehehe) ^_^
Oh this is funny, remember when there were like all this influx of buttons to save/post/share/like and then came the aggregation buttons, like addthis and addtoany or sharethis, all of this was a freaking drag on webpages and i was never a big fan, cause they weren’t really very useful, sure 1 or 2 people might use it, but the vast majority doesn’t, and why make your pages load like shit just to make life better for a couple of visitors?
Most people that use delicious have and use other ways to bookmarks, users of stumbleupon probably have the bar installed, so there wasn’t any point, that is until facebook started with the like buttons, those seemed to be way more practical and a stronger promotional tool, same goes later on to the tweet buttons and now the google plus button, so we are back to the same problem, although the buttons are more useful and practical its still at least 3 or 4 hits to different places dragging your own pages down (ohh and the tweet button is kinda the worst of the bunch).
That is were addthis comes along and just adds these buttons to their standard setup, so now instead of all those hits you are just hitting the addthis site, add to that asynchronous loading and you are pretty much having the best of both worlds, adding to this the fact that i dont need to hardcore parts of the template or some referral on the buttons to make them work properly, makes addthis even more practical, so expect some more buttons popping out of s2r sites hehehe.
This is getting ridiculous, but Google Blogger is having a fit since Saturday at about 11:30am CST, random actions give you random 503 errors (by the way 503 Service Unavailable: The server is currently unavailable. Generally, this is a temporary state), from settings to posts, practically everything is being affected, comments as well, hell this post gave a couple before being able to post, and worst is that although there is a huge amount of posts on twitter and Google groups and help regarding this in the last 24hours, but there are no updates on this on Blogger Status or Blogger Known Issues, such a dumb fail again from Blogger >_< but well kinda getting used to the Google wall of silence.
Most likely Blogger hosting system is under some form of unscheduled maintenance or just failing all over the place from overload or just plain fail, pretty much after they announced the new interface (that is a mix bag, for one hand is nicer and cleaner on the other hand its difficult to read and slow as hell to use) for anyone using the draft panel.
So i got an e-mail from EveryDNS warning that they are moving on from the freemium model into the dyndns paid DNS (they were merged or acquired some time ago), that’s cool, i guess, i was only using them as backup DNS for Hostcult, since that domain runs pretty much all our hosting (so if it fails 90% of my sites start failing), before i was just using my domain registar DNS ( ResellerClub ) and they pretty much failed a lot on me over time (with glitches, maintenance, performance issues), so having a backup DNS was a pretty good idea, so with this e-mail from the now defunct EveryDNS, i think i have a opportunity to check my options (and in the process share them with you all).
So why not choose a professional/paid DNS? well if i don’t find a good alternative, them ill probably pay for it, but DNS is such a thing that 95% of the time im running it myself on each server, i only really need dns for off server domains or for my main hosting domain, so checking the free alternatives seems like the place to start, so i’m doing a showdown between: Hosted VS ResellerClub VS InternetBS VS NameCheap VS CloudNS VS Hurricane Electric VS PointHQ VS XName VS CloudFlare.
Added info for the tables:
Europe Avg: A 24 hour average from my computer in Europe.
Monitoring Avg: A weekly average from Pingdom DNS (From 2 locations in Europe and USA), 5min intervals.
Monitoring Spike: The worst performance for that week from Pingdom DNS (From 2 locations in Europe and USA), 5min intervals.
Uptime: If it was online or not.
Location: where the DNS server is.
Local DNS
| Europe Avg | Monitoring Avg | Monitoring Spike | Uptime | Location | |
| ns3.hostcult.com | 170 | 129 | 419 | 100% | USA, TX |
| ns4.hostcult.com | 166.5 | 109 | 325 | 100% | USA, TX |
Notes: Running on Cpanel, Complete DNS functions.
Restrictions: None.
Comments: Well running your own DNS isn’t perfect but its simple and doable, the client when doing a DNS query will have a quicker time, connecting again to the site (since both are in the same place), also changes to DNS are done quicker, overall good if you are hosting the sites on the same place as the DNS, and not that important the reliability, since if the server is down, the DNS being up or down is irrelevant.
| Europe Avg | Monitoring Avg | Monitoring Spike | Uptime | Location | |
| ns11.hostcult.com | FAIL | 112 | 301 | 100% | USA, TX |
| ns12.hostcult.com | FAIL | 98 | 293 | 100% | USA, TX |
| ns13.hostcult.com | FAIL | 105 | 283 | 100% | USA, TX |
| ns14.hostcult.com | FAIL | 82 | 258 | 100% | USA, TX |
Notes: Didn’t get any response from my own tests >_<, Average Control Panel, Complete DNS functions.
Restrictions: Its only available for domains hosted there.
Comments: Humm ResellerClub is my main domain registrar, and my current main dns host, but like i said above and as you can see on the tests, ResellerClub leaves a lot to be desired, its average at best, normally not so good, it also doesn’t help that all of their servers are in the same place.
| Europe Avg | Monitoring Avg | Monitoring Spike | Uptime | Location | |
| mercury.orderbox-dns.com | FAIL | 93 | 275 | 100% | USA, TX |
| venus.orderbox-dns.com | FAIL | 77 | 219 | 100% | USA, TX |
| earth.orderbox-dns.com | FAIL | 88 | 212 | 100% | USA, TX |
| mars.orderbox-dns.com | FAIL | 118 | 363 | 100% | USA, TX |
Notes: Didnt get any response from my own tests >_<, Average Control Panel, Complete DNS functions.
Restrictions: Its only available for domains hosted there.
Comments: Much like the Branded, the Un-Branded DNS is kinda slightly better, that makes it even more disappointing since i use the branded, ResellerClub is average at best, normally not so good, it doesn’t help as well that all their servers are in the same place.
| Europe Avg | Monitoring Avg | Monitoring Spike | Uptime | Location | |
| ns-canada.topdns.com | 175 | 88 | 245 | 100% | Canada, QC |
| ns-usa.topdns.com | 133.5 | 91 | 205 | 100% | USA, NJ |
| ns-uk.topdns.com | 109 | 74 | 176 | 100% | USA, TX |
Notes: Average control panel, Complete DNS Functions, although ns-uk has uk in the name, its actually hosted in USA, weird…
Restrictions: Its only available for domains hosted there.
Comments: Well InternetBS is also one of my domain registrars, and i can say im pleasantly surprised, even though my own test weren’t awesome, the weekly average shows that they perform pretty well, so kudos to InternetBS for a solid DNS Service.
| Europe Avg | Monitoring Avg | Monitoring Spike | Uptime | Location | |
| freedns1.registrar-servers.com | 95.5 | 78 | 200 | 100% | FAIL |
| freedns2.registrar-servers.com | 95.5 | 82 | 188 | 100% | FAIL |
| freedns3.registrar-servers.com | 178 | 72 | 187 | 100% | Germany |
Notes: Good Control Panel, Complete DNS Functions.
Restrictions: None.
Comments: My last and least used domain registrar was surprising, not only do they provide DNS services for free to anyone, but the performance was outstanding, they clearly know what they are doing, this is one of the best candidates to this point, excellent job.
| Europe Avg | Monitoring Avg | Monitoring Spike | Uptime | Location | |
| ns1.cloudns.net | 60 | 86 | 190 | 100% | FAIL |
| ns2.cloudns.net | 160.5 | 88 | 242 | 100% | USA, TX |
| ns3.cloudns.net | 112.5 | 72 | 233 | 100% | Bulgaria |
Notes: Good Control Panel, Complete DNS Functions.
Restrictions: Free for only 3 Domains.
Comments: Cloudns has a good panel and a pretty good DNS performance, even tough a bit weird, clearly their ns1 performs awesomely well, while the other 2 are a bit more weak, also hosting DNS in Bulgaria is just plain weird, you should keep DNS near major backbone transit facilities, that’s what i think.
| Europe Avg | Monitoring Avg | Monitoring Spike | Uptime | Location | |
| ns1.he.net | 232.5 | 119 | 265 | 100% | USA, CA |
| ns2.he.net | 229 | 196 | 740 | 100% | USA, CA |
| ns3.he.net | 234 | 194 | 712 | 100% | USA, CA |
Notes: Average Control Panel, Complete DNS Functions.
Restrictions: None.
Comments: Hurricane is kinda horrible in everything, clearly putting all their DNS servers in their facilities in California, doesn’t help little old me half way across the world or anybody else for that matter.
PointHQ DNS (No Longer Recomended!)
| Europe Avg | Monitoring Avg | Monitoring Spike | Uptime | Location | |
| dns1.pointhq.com | 63 | 111 | 242 | 100% | FAIL |
| dns2.pointhq.com | 133.5 | 110 | 238 | 100% | FAIL |
| dns3.pointhq.com | 228.5 | 92 | 210 | 100% | FAIL |
| dns4.pointhq.com | 63.5 | 96 | 225 | 100% | FAIL |
| dns5.pointhq.com | 67 | 73 | 186 | 100% | FAIL |
Notes: Good Control Panel, Complete DNS Functions.
Restrictions: Free for only 10 zones.
Comments: PointHQ has some servers closer, some server further away, still pretty good performance overall, but i wonder, normally a browser checks the first nameserver or it just chooses randomly, so you want a excellent first nameserver performance and then good performance from all the secondary ones, with PointHQ we don’t have that, if my browser checks dns3 im gonna have to wait 3 times more than if i was lucky and it choose dns4, so yeah, its ok i guess.
Update: Yeah its now fully paid! And they kinda screwed their users, so i would skip this one!
| Europe Avg | Monitoring Avg | Monitoring Spike | Uptime | Location | |
| ns0.xname.org | 83 | 79 | 302 | 100% | France, Paris |
| ns1.xname.org | 69 | 106 | 336 | 100% | France, Roubaix |
| ns2.xname.org | 109.5 | 118 | 311 | 100% | France, Villeneuve |
Notes: Good Control Panel, Complete DNS functions.
Restrictions: None.
Comments: Xname has been around for some time, and it shows, in a good way, they have some great performance, and i find it even more remarkable because all their DNS is in France, but USA monitoring still was quick, that just shows that you don’t need to put DNS servers across the world to give good performance, good job.
| Europe Avg | Monitoring Avg | Monitoring Spike | Uptime | Location | |
| carl.ns.cloudflare.com | 175.5 | 70 | 235 | 100% | FAIL |
| sue.ns.cloudflare.com | 178.5 | 65 | 173 | 100% | FAIL |
| lady.ns.cloudflare.com | 178 | 71 | 203 | 100% | FAIL |
| todd.ns.cloudflare.com | 176.5 | 93 | 245 | 100% | FAIL |
Notes: Basic Options, Lacks DNS Functions.
Restrictions: None.
Comments: What is cloudflare doing here? well cloudflare can also host you DNS, you can disable their CDN system, so basically you can use it as a pure DNS host, that’s why its here, so i have to say its weird, on my personal tests it goes from blazing fast 62 to 284 that’s why it has that average, also their system is probably a distributed one, as it doesn’t matter what dns server i point to, it will always reach the same place, probably they are leveraging their own CDN for their DNS hosting, and that’s a good thing, check the weekly average, that’s some impressive performance, with cloudns and namecheap with close results, probably cause all 3 are leveraging some sort of CDN cloud system as well, still it seems inconsistent at times and the lack of full DNS features, kinda kills it from the start, but still something to watch out for the future.
Conclusion
So what am i going to use, well most likely ill go with Namecheap and maybe Xname or Cloudns as backups, Namecheap clearly has a combination of full features and outstanding DNS performance, and also a namebrand you can trust with something as important as DNS.
As a sidenote, good job everyone, 100% UPTIME!!! YAY!!! (i include myself on this, so *pat pat* on the back) also i know this review is a bit unfair, DNS is more than these checks, and everyone can have a bad day, you just need a DDOS on one of the nameservers and bye bye average, also there are tons of providers missing, but i choose these ones according to popularity and namebrand, since that makes this choice of providers a bit more trustworthy, still i think this is a good broad view of them and good enough for me to make my choice.
Well this isn’t a rant just about facebook comments as to the facebook API in general, I’ve learned this the hard way, you should never ever, EVER EVER put any part of your site under someone elses control, that means that hosted software or software as a service, regarding websites is a big NONO, only completely internet illiterates should go that route, cause its a very tricky one.
Lets say that my hosting provider goes down, or bankrupts, or decides my site is ugly, well that sucks, but i can move my site elsewhere, even if they shut me down in the middle of the night without any warning, i have my offsite backups, i can move on, it could take some hours or days, but its not the endgame, same goes for any of my domains, even if someone steals them or the government decides that a site about anime panties could burn children’s eyes, i would lose traffic, but i can always move to another domain, see no single point of failure, there is a fail-safe for all my work.
Now with facebook you are relinquishing control of your comments, login, data, for the sake of easiness and more widespread promotion, so what happens when facebook bans your site, or decides to change/end the API and you are left with nothing or at least a big headache, cause your users are not your users, your comments are not your comments, they are facebook’s, and they decides what is best for them, not for your site.
Also facebook as a kinda personal social effect on people, by basically forcing you to be yourself and not a nickname or handle, and transmitting to your friends pretty much everything you say, it breeds a different kind of internet user, one that instead of honest or idiotic commenting, you have a bland audience, that says stuff as much about the subject as about what they think their friends would want them to say, its vanity commenting, and for that shit, you can just stay inside facebook’s walls.
I don’t think what you get from facebook is all that great, the conversations are bland and it detracts most of the time, you get a bland looking comment box and bland people talking on it about bland things, were is the awesome juice?, trolling most of the times is comedy genius, like when techcrunch put facebook comments and said it was the best thing evah!, well i guess not, cause they went back to their old comment system, ill say it again, when you put your data in someone elses pocket you lose value and in the case of facebook comments you lose value and gain boring banal conversations instead, winwin? not really.
Anyways don’t get me wrong, its not just facebook, the disqus, intensedebates and cocomment of the world, with the rare exception, like if its a temporary page or comments are not the focus, just a add-on for help or faq, yeah then its a somewhat good idea to outsource, but for all other cases, naaa the shinny extras you get, don’t pay for the fact that what you create from their own is out of your hands.
Well there is an exception, the “like button”, but i view that as any other “share me” button, maybe it has better hits than most, but nothing completely awesome or mandatory, you can as easily turn it off, with no impact to your site ^_^ .o( may
Well it goes a little like this, i wanted to create a gallery for buriko, cause even though i love updating buriko with cutie japanese girls, it was kinda a drag for user to search on it and find the girls they wanted, so i decided to create a gallery for buriko, however that proved to be a bit tricky and weird, when i wanted something easy and simple ^_^
Sooo like a lot of my sites, this one is a spinoff of a shortlived buriko remake, its a simple and easy to use japanese idol gallery, its called gomenasai (means “im sorry” in japanese), anyone can register and upload their favorite girls and well browse away ^^ its simple, easy and cute, i hope everyone likes it hehehhe.
As a sidenote buriko will focus now on single posts and high quality images (its going to be a mix of automated crawling and random posts) ^_^ enjoy
Yeah more wordpress plugin talk, but since 1/3 of all S2R sites are powered one way or another by wordpress, its kinda something i deal with, so why am i moving away from the caching wonder kid W3 Total Cache to the old school WP Super Cache, well mostly after a few weeks of testing, i found that although both do a excellent job there are some basic strong points and weak points on both of them:
Soooo, what does this mean, first it means both are really good, but also that even after a lot of tweaking and reading a lot about its settings, its still a difficult process to push W3 Total Cache to use its potential, i have several different servers with different software running (Apache and Nginx, with different plugins and caching addons), and W3 Total Cache kinda feels a bit hit and miss, sometimes its wonderful sometimes it isn’t, while the “Keep it Simple Stupid” approach of WP Super Cache always brings good performance.
Also the fact that i tend to make tweaks and improve the code and performance both of the sites and server, WP Super Cache kinda gives me the best combination of rock solid performance and ease of use, while with W3 Total Cache i have to worry about a lot of different things to have it work properly, so therefore im moving away from W3 Total Cache to WP Super Cache ^_^’
S2R > Humm got a new donations page, better contacts and slightly better txt.
Hostcult > Hey hey its this site heheeh, just added some like facebook, twitter and such buttons, for easier promotion and likability, also cleaned up and added a bit to the contacts / about page.
Fiendish > Cleaned the layout, added random quotes, for moar awesomeness ^^.
Neechan > Merged the requests board into the main board, plus some tweaks with performance, should run super smooth now ^-^.