30 Aug

Formula E – Electric Race Cars

I’m looking forward to electric race cars in Formula E though might be weird not hearing the noise of the petrol engines as they whizz past. Interesting they are planning to change cars when the batteries run out, would have thought they could just change batteries which would seem a more logical choice if they want the technology to eventually move to standard vehicles.

Also street circuits are  planned, in Formula 1 street circuits tend to be less exciting due to fewer overtaking opportunities, though this year has been an exception – don’t want Formula E to be dull!

More details in this article from BBC News http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19402383Read the rest

23 Aug

Network Solutions Hosting Costs

Just had a 3 year renewal invoice for a shared host account from Network Solutions and the cost was $411. We have a number of hosting accounts with many companies and this is one of the most expensive I’ve heard of for shared Linux hosting. I found somewhere to host the site for $22 for two years. This saves $126 per year in hosting – $252 for two years and if extrapolated to 3 years it saves a whooping $378 over three years.

Host Server RackSo I moved the site (took less than one hour) and went to cancel the account with Network Solutions.… Read the rest

03 Aug

Moving your Website to Amazon EC2

We recently transitioned our website from a VPS (virtual private server) to the Amazon AWS cloud environment. Benefits include more control of your server and usually less cost. The major drawback is you need to run the server yourself so some basic Unix knowledge is necessary.

The transition itself was very straight forward consisting of the following steps:

  • Purchase Amazon EC2 large instance, this provides enough CPUs and memory to run a full LAMP environment (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP). If you don’t need a database then using a medium will work OK.
  • Ensure you provision enough disk space for your software, database and for backups.
Read the rest