Web/Tech

The Story of The New New New Web Hosting Provider

by

I have had numerous hosting providers in the past 25 years. Do I date myself by saying that? It is the truth I guess. I have hosted a website in one form or another for easily over 20 years. Trying to think of them I cannot recall all the providers I have used. I have had full service web providers. I have hosted my own. Way back when I first started out I even used free sites like Geocities or hosting via my AOL account. Yes I had one of those. I have had dedicated service providers for just mail and blog. And probably for a while I might have done nothing other than simply used Gmail. Over two years ago I moved to a provider siteground.co.uk. They hosted my blog, some email domains of mine that are not on Protonmail and any odd and end webiste I put up. For what they offer it is probably overkill for me. I signed up because the previous provider I had Hostpoint.sh contract was up. Hostpoint was on the expensive side.  They were a great provider for what they offered. The cost benefit for me did not make it economically sensible to continue to use them.  Siteground had a really good deal so i signed up for a 3 year contract with them. For me three years is like a lifetime. I never used to like 1 to 2 year mobile phone contracts. The deal was too good to pass up so I signed for that term.

Now as I write this I have less than 6 months on my site ground contract I looked at how much the renewal cost will be for my hosting. Without the deal the prices it is about triple what I was spending. I have had zero problems with Siteground. Like Hostpoint they have been a fantastic hosting provider. My challenge is for what I use them for the price they’re charging just seems ridiculous. I could host a site myself at home if I wanted to sort out mail relaying. I do not want to so I started looking for alternative providers. Oddly most hosting providers are not very cheap.  yeah $5-$15 (£3-£12) or so sounds inexpensive however it adds up over the year. Most of the good ones are on the higher end of that range.

Giving up on the relitivly expensive consumer proivders I ended up looking at lowednbox.com for deals for a VPS.  If you do not know a VPS is. a Virtual Private Server. So basically a virtual machines at a hosting provider. A friend showed me the lowendbox site ages ago and i really didn’t bother looking into a VPS.  I was doing too much with my Raspberry Pi’s so did not want to pay for any remote systems.  Now however a cheap (£1-£3) a month VPS (Virtual Private Server) might just do it for me.  Most of what is offered at the £1 range may not be enough RAM for my needs however for slightly more or basically £15-£23 a year i can get a pretty decent virtual server that i could replicate most of what i get from a provider. In my search I even found a provider that does shared hosting (what most people get as webhosting) for $1.50 a month.

I wasn’t sure what i wanted so i picked up two seperate deals (3 if you could a VPS i got for a VPN project that i may write about another time) from lowendbox.com.  I got the cheap $1.5 a month shared hosting as well as a VPS for a year for £22.  Even with both providers I am paying 25% of what i would have paid if i renewed siteground.

After a bunch of trial and error with the cheap shared hosting provider and the VPS I settled on the VPS. While I was figuring out what to do and realised the $1.50 a month basic provider didn’t seem to be working out I approached the situation a bit differently. My VPS can support my website pretty easily. Even if there is a reliability issue the website doesn’t need to be up 99.99% of the time like email kinda needs to be. That meant I could decouple my mail hosting from my website if I could do it cheaply enough. I went about trying to find an email only hosting provider. The problem was just like with regular hosting everyone offered really cheap introductory rates and then the price was much higher. With email only hosting providers it was kind of funny since the price they were offering I could buy a cheap complete hosting package for the same amount of money. I then continue to look for relatively easy to maintain out of the box email applications so I could possibly host a dedicated email VPS. That was proving problematic.

In my research around hosting my own mail on a dedicated VPS I stumbled across someone reviewing a relatively inexpensive email hosting provider. Their annual plans that offered more than what I needed were pretty cheap. What was even more interesting was the fact that they offered a lifetime plan that was only slightly more limited than the annual offering I was looking at. That lifetime plan options was also more than enough for my needs. It was approximately three years worth of hosting upfront to get the lifetime plan however the company seemed to be around for a while and pretty stable. I assume that I could at least get a return on my investment in the first three years. If I am lucky I won’t have to worry about paying for mail hosting for a while beyond that. The email provider was MXRoute.

I set up a few of the email domains that are use already and the system has been pretty stable. The final cut over was moving the mail domain my mum uses and that I sometimes use. The move was pretty easy. The only challenge was setting up mum up while she is in the US and I am in the UK. The fix was getting her to use GMAIL. She had a GMAIL account she previously used already. I just directed her GMAIL account to pull from her old hosting provider I had. I then switched her over to gmail in two FaceTime sessions with her. Then once GMAIL was working I simply changed the POP account settings in GMAIL web for her and migrated the MX records of the domain. Overall there was not may issues.

With mail sorted I went back to the VPS I setup and got my blog setup. I decided to use Yunohost for the VPS. it is an app that sits on top of Debian that lets me administer the server and install other apps pretty easy. it had a one click install for WordPress (what I use for the blog) as well as many other applications. After playing around with the setup for a while I decided to move the blog over and hope for the best. I found a plugin that pretty easily migrated the blog from one instance of WordPress to another. I then changed my DNS and everything moved over pretty well. I am finishing writing this in on 6-April, exactly one month from when I moved over to my VPS. So far things are working fine. Only thing different for me and the old provider so far is that I need to remember to monthly take a backup of the site in case I break something.

Overall my VPS is costing me £24 a year. If I kept site ground that price would not cover 2 months on the regular priced plan I would have to move to when my contract runs out. Now lets hope I do not mess up my setup since I only have myself and friends to fix it vs a provider!

Editing note I wrote this in Feb 2021 and agave been slow to post. Funny enough even though I change my tech setup a lot this post is still accurate a year and a half later.

My Never Ending Qwest for the Perfect Task App

by

Some would say i am a pretty organized person. I sometimes it doesn’t feel like that, however most of the time I would say i am generally pretty organized compared to most people I know. My problem has sometimes been my tracking of what i need to do has gotten too complex.

For several years I had been trying (and sometimes succeeding) at following the Getting Things Done approach to taking care of my actions. I had been using a web service called Remember The Milk to do that. I have written about it a few times in the past.  RTM has iPhone and iPad apps that made it easy to take my actions lists with me and edit them offline. I was content using it for several years but sometimes I dabbled with other systems trying to find something better. I never really found anything and always ended up back with RTM.

Back in 2014 I started implementing a kanban approach to some procedures we do at work. Reading up on kanban has gotten me to think adopt some of the concepts to my personal life.  That line of thinking got me to branch out from RTM. A big part of kanban is visualizing your work. RTM just generates basic lists. I tried having several lists to denote different steps on a personal kanban system but it was lacking a lot of the visual element when i couldn’t see all the steps at the same time. I also had challenges with sorting projects in RTM. I could create them but that required a smart list for each project. That caused me to have a ton of different smart lists that i had to look at in order to see my tasks. RTM also had a limitation in that they didn’t offer sub tasks for a task so in order to group several actions together i had to create a project even if it was small and could be represented by one “card” and several sub tasks.

In searching for several different options I came across Trello. After testing and playing around with several similar applications I settled on  moving my work and personal task management to Trello. Since the summer of 2014 my use of Trello has exploded. Not only do I use it for personal and work boards. I track meeting agendas in it. At one point we had a training schedule at work using it. For personal projects such as planning for vacation we use it. I have a board for places we want to try or like to go to for lunch at work. The board I like to show as an example of how to use it when people ask is my Mixology board. There I clipped from the web recipes of mixed drinks that I want to learn or have already mastered creating. I try to share a few family boards with my wife however she is not as big on task organization as I am.

The biggest drawback to Trello originally was the fact that there mobile applications didn’t really handle off-line synchronization. In the past year however they’ve added that functionality so while I’m on the subway I am able to update a board or individual cards and they sync up to the cloud when I get network signal. There are some small limitations to this however not something that has prevented me from using it. Things like checklists don’t load when you open the card without network signal.

I’ve been happy to pay the five dollars or so a month in their Trello Gold subscription. I almost want to pay for the full $15 a month professional plan however no one else I interact with does that so functionality would be limited.

In the several years that I’ve been using Trello (I didn’t realize it has been over 3 already) I have tried to look for alternatives. Not because I’m unhappy, just because I’m always looking for the next great option. Folks at work have used the GIT task board. I have played with Microsoft office 365’s  task boards and neither of them come close to ease-of-use or functionality. So for now Trello it is.  Until at least Atlassian messes it up now that they own it. Here’s to hoping they don’t.

Pi Net is Live

by

At 19:28 Local time today My Pi Net node Epsilon came online at my friends house and started syncing with the rest of the network.  This is the first remote node in my private cloud network. This note was built using a raspberry pi 2 and a 1 TB USB hard drive that I had lying around. For my data replication I am using BitTorrent Sync 2.x. In order to get the Pi working I had to learn a bit of Linux. This is the first major milestone in my project to ensure my personal data is backed up offsite from my apartment using a secured private cloud and not leveraging any potentially insecure public clouds.

Next up in building out this network will be a second off-site location. I need to finish setting up second Pi and have that node live to have the network be complete.

My Personal Private vs Public Cloud Debate

by

I have been pondering my 321 Backup strategy for several months now.  Even before I had a near catastrophic issue with my Sinology DiskStation back in April I knew I wanted a more robust data management plan for my personal files.  I had been using the Sinology Cloud Station software but in my original configuration I was limited since all my data centered around my apartment.  This is convenient but not the safest approach.  I also only really had 2 copies of most of my data.  A really rock solid strategy has 3 copies across 2 sites, and if possible different media types.  I knew i wasn’t doing things good enough.

One solution I toyed around with was BitTorrent Sync.  Back in March I tried it out and had big problems with the UI on my desktop and the web interface on my DiskStation not loading regularly.  I didn’t feel the solution was ready for me to use yet.  I wasn’t confident in the Cloud Station software anymore since I ran into a data integrity issue with it in March.  I had uploaded photos I took in march and noticed that they hadn’t gotten to my Diskstation when they were saying they were syncing off my Desktop.  To make things more confusing the files were syncing to my laptop but not the Diskstation.

That problem lead me to the BitTorrent Sync option and the decision to upgrade to a beta version of the Synology software.  That in turn lead me to some problems I had an my near fatal event with the Diskstation.  So basically in a mission to solve my backup strategy problem i caused an event that a better backup strategy would have solved.

My near loss of all my data on the DiskStation was my wake up call that I needed to really figure some working solution out.  After I recovered (barely) from that incident I focused large amounts of time on solving data strategy.

After my trust was shaken with the Cloud Station data integrity problems I experienced I began to look at public cloud solutions.  I am very concerned about security so I discounted many public cloud providers.  Dropbox, and pretty much any American based solution is just not trustworthy with todays laws.  Dropbox employee’s can even get into your files if they need to regardless of the safeguards they claim to have I do not want anyone being able to get into my stuff unless I let them in.  That security concern lead me to MEGA.  They weren’t US based and they don’t have a way into your data.  Their plans were more expensive than most cloud providers however their 2TB plan more than covered my needs.

One downside was that MEGA didn’t have any built in backup solution for the Diskstation.  That meant I could backup my data to the cloud but the Diskstation wouldn’t be my main data source.  I could still use it as a home server but not the home of my data.  I wasn’t really pleased about that however I couldn’t really find an alternative that worked.  So earlier this spring I jumped into using MEGA as my cloud sync / backup solution.  It had a lot of what i wanted but it wasn’t perfect. It was the best of what was available that worked for me.

I spend a few weeks seeding and confirming my data was correct in MEGA before trying to make a sync copy onto my Laptop.  That was when I ran into issues.  What i noticed was after a while syncing files I would get to a point were the MEGA agent would freeze.  Sometimes after only 70-100 files downloaded.  I would restart the agent and it would do the same thing and copy a few more files and then stop.  I couldn’t really figure it out.  I tried reinstalling, putting the agent on another machine, checking their online help but i was unsuccessful at finding a solution.  This was an issue on top of a general annoyance I had were it would take 5-10 minutes for my admin page on the MEGA site to load.  I don’t know what it was doing but in any browser (chrome, firefox, or safari) i would have the same issue.  that wasn’t a show stopper however add to it that i can’t download a replica of my data onto my laptop I was very concerned.

After a week of tinkering I gave up and had no choice but to revert my decision and go back to Cloud Station software by Synology.  I didn’t want to bother calling MEGA.  I had a confidence issue and even if they could fix the issue in 10 minutes with my level of technical knowledge and online tools i should be able to figure it out.  If i can’t i have concerns about their service.  It wasnt like my problem was complex.  The system just stopped syncing data after a few files.

I wasn’t pleased however MEGA was never the perfect solution for me.  I knew that going into it but thought i could make it work.  In the end I couldn’t so I went back to Diskstation as my primary data store and used Cloud Station to sync.  I kept an eye on the data i synced to make sure i didnt have a repeat issue.  My plan to build another DiskStation and leave it with a friend was back on the table.  That was until about a week ago.

I don’t know what got me to look at BitTorrent Sync again however I installed it again.  I knew they were actively releasing newer versions so I had hoped that what happened the last time was an issue that was solved after a few months.  I was pleasantly surprised to see after some brief testing that the UI display issues appeared to be solved.  I slowly over a few days turned off syncing via Cloud Station and enabled BitTorrent Sync.  I made backups before my changes just in case.  The UI consistently worked on the desktop.  For the web interface on the DiskStation what i learned was first safari wasn’t so great for it.  Second that clearing my cookies for the site typically solved the issue.  With that issue resolved I moved most of my shares over to the BitTorrent Sync app within a week.  I was originally going to try out the system for 30 days and then decide if i wanted to pay for the Pro version.  After going over the 10 share limit for the trial i opted to pay for the 1 year Pro for $39.

As of right now I have my desktop, DiskStation NAS and laptop all replicating data with the new Sync software.  I am at a steady state like were i was back in March.  This steady state took a lot of research and trial and error however now is the harder part.  Now I need to finish this project and meet my objective of a true private cloud with data located in multiple locations.

Using BitTorrent Sync gives me a few options I didn’t have with the Synology centric Cloud Station.  My remote backup locations do not need to have a DiskStation.  I have two old Mac Mini’s that I could provision with external hard drives and drop them in remote locations.  That was my original idea at least. Now I am thinking bolder and cheaper.  If I am successful I will have a prototype to talk about soon.

Raspberry Pi Cloud Node Prototype

by

The first phase of my BitTorrent Sync project is mainly complete.  I now have the Sync software running on my Diskstation, Mac Mini desktop and my Macbook Pro laptop.  I have replaced my Sinology Cloud Station app and all files are kept up to date using BitTorrent Sync.  That change gets me to a point were I was before with Cloud Station.  I have access to all my files everywhere however I do not have a complete backup solution since most of the data is only current in two places.  Those places are 15 feet from each other and not really giving me much disaster recovery.

The next phase of my backup / cloud strategy is to have offsite copies of my data or large parts of my data in case of anything happening at home.  I originally planned to do this with a 2nd Sinology Diskstation somewhere.  The costs were very high and that solution limited me to one other location.  When I was thinking of using Cloud Station software from Sinology that solution made sense, however now that I got BitTorrent Sync to work I have other options.
Raspberry Pi & Drive

is bit torrent sync my answer to sync situation

My Evolving Use of Cloud Storage

by

Last year I canceled my pay Drobo subscription. I still have the service but with a lot less storage. At the time I wanted to build my own “cloud” storage system.  In reality I wanted to take my data at home and make it syncable via the internet like a cloud storage provider to my devices were ever i was.  Originally I bought a Transporter that I had hopes would take a 1TB drive and let me sync data to my computers.  That dream lasted about a week.  Their sync software was problimatic for me.  Instead I opted for a Synology NAS DS412+.  The added app’s functionality and redundant storage allowed me to move all my data to the Synology and no longer rely on my aging Drobo(s) as my primary storage system.  The Synology also allowed me to move some multimedia functions i did on my mac mini off to the NAS.  So far I have been very happy.  The Synology Cloud Sync app gives me Dropbox like functionality with my personal stuff.  The other file access options the Synology offers gives me access to all my data.  To do that with any other provider would be prohibitivly expensive because of the amount of data stored on the NAS.

The timeing for this change to self hosting my data was perfect.  I couldn’t realistically do what I am doing now earlier because when I had Time Warner my upload speeds were horrible (1.5mb).  After I moved to Fios my upload speeds jumped to between 25-35mb.  I have no problems using the Synology.

The problem with the Synology is that as much as the NAS itself is designed to last and has some drive resiliance in it, I do not have an offsite backup.  I used to copy my data manually for a while but now a days that is not a good idea.  it is also not feasable with the amount of data i have now.

After leaving Dropbox I read more and more about the potential issues with public cloud providers.  Such as Dropbox knows what you upload and wont keep a duplicate copy of a file of music if others have it.  That means they can (and i believe they have) removed content if there is a DMCA request.  I am also increasingly uneasy about US based hosting providers and the easy the government can get access to data.  I am not a criminal and don’t really have anything to hide in what I am storing however those are not reasons why I should be ok with the ease of government access to my data.  I will talk about that more in another post.  In relation to cloud storage I am glad I do not use Dropbox, however I put myself in the same situation with another provider.

Because I have so much data and I need to really be thinking about a 321 backup sceme I started using Crashplan and Amazon Glacial.  Crashplan I recently canceled because I was having problems with my copy of data on my Drobo that i would sync to Crashplan.  The crashplan app kept thinking that the drobo was disconnected and would keep creating new copies of my data.  When it takes weeks to sync a backup using crashplan having a new copy get created every so often is not good.  With that issue and the fact that the Crashplan Synology app caused my Synology to perform super slow to the point that I uninstalled it I gave up on Crashplan and canceled it.

Amazon Glacial has been good so far.  The challanges with Glacial is that the cost per month varries by how much i use it.  It is also much more expensive than Crashplan for the amount of data i have.  Another challange is getting data out is expensive in the event of a major issue.  Thankfully i havent had to worry about that yet but it is a concern.  The most current concern I have is that Amazon is a US based company and my data is hosted on US servers.  For now I am living with that risk.  My rational side says I dont do anything to warrent the government to want my data however I would rather that not even be an option.

One alternative to Dropbox I have been looking at is Mega.NZ.  They don’t have any access to my data once it is uploaded.  They offer 50gig free.  It is good to replace dropbox for some files i have and to give my most important stuff an offsite backup but it is not enough to backup my music, videos, and photos.  Their 1tb option is doable for me but even that isn’t enough to backup everything.  For now I will continue with Glacial as my backup.  I am investigating working with a friend or two to replica sync our Synologies between each other.  The cost of that may not be worth it but it is an interesting idea.

I Finally Killed Off Google Doc’s

by

I have finally succeeded in killing off any remaining documents i had hosted in my personal google account.  This action was a bit harder than i expected it would be.  I won’t go into further details on a public post due to security concerns however i am glad that I was able to go through and move everything i still needed and delete everything I didn’t need.  Exporting data was easy to an offline file but moving things that others still needed to collaborate on was a challenge and requires giving out new URL’s unless i was moving the document to someone else in the same google work domain.  I wasn’t doing that so it was challanging.

This milestone was one of the last I need before I can delete my remaining google app’s id that i used to use as my main account.  The last milestone may be the most difficult but that will be the topic of another post, Android Apps.

 

Partial Goodbye Google

by

Today I took the next step in my exodus from Google services.  I deleted my old @powerz.org mail domain from Google Apps.  I had used it for several years before retiring it for a newer one about a year ago.  With my mail backed up elsewhere and after I finally got all of the services dependent on the domain moved I was able to delete my account.  it felt good, however my other Google Apps Domain is more of a challenge.  I still use some of the google doc’s associated with it and figuring out an alternative is my current challange.

My Sudden Allergic Reaction to All Things Google

by

I have recently had a technical dilemma.  I have been a user of many Google services over the years.  I have several Google Apps for Work domains.  I post private videos of my family on Youtube.  I have loved Google Voice long before Google owned it.  For most of the time I have used their services I have know there have been some questions about what they do with all the data collected.  From day one of Gmail you knew they were looking at your mail to give you ad’s.  At the time I brushed it off, especially since i didn’t really start using gmail for a few years after it came out.  After I did the lingering security questions were still there but because they provide services that really work well I didn’t question anything nor did I really care.  The cool aid was great.

The problem I am facing recently is I have read more specifically about what data Google collects and how long they store it.  Or rather how they don’t really say how long they store it.  There are many discussions on the topic, here, here, here, and many other places.  After reading a lot on the topic and talking with a few people I work with more knowledgeable on the subject than I am I decided the great user experience wan’t worth all I was giving them.

If was to move providers I needed first an email provider.  2nd I needed to stop using Google Voice.

Until very recently that was no small feat.  I didn’t want to rely on my mobile alone.  That is why I ported my mobile number to Google Voice in the first place.  Thankfully as good timing would have it the new IOS software offers wifi calling and handoff to computers for calls.  This is not nearly a replacement for google voice for me, but it made it easy to move back to one mobile for everything since as long as I had WIFI I know my number would work.  With my new iPhone 6 I would be able to solve my Google Voice dependency.  Next up of course is the bigger issue, my email hosting.  If just picking anyone I would have gone with Office 365 or some other cloud offering.  The problem was as I kept talking to people and reading more I have to say I wasn’t too happy with the US governments tactic’s on getting access to people’s accounts.  After that statement I know people are going to say if you don’t have anything to hide, why would you worry.  Well I don’t have anything to hide, but that’s not the point.  I would rather not know my government could relatively easily get access to my stuff with a court order that apparently happens more often than you would like.  I don’t think I am being paranoid guy about this.  To me it feels more like ignorance is bliss.  Since I do know how creepy stuff is apparently now a days I don’t just want to leave Google mail I want to ensure my data is safe where ever i put it.

I thought about my own server.  I just don’t want to deal with it.  The super secure Swiss email hosting provider was too expensive.  I opted for a well known general web hosting provider in Switzerland were data privacy laws are much more strict than in the US.

Next up for me is to goto the T-Moble store and port my number.  After that it is lots of mail copying to my new provider.

Xmarks

by

For years I tried (and generally succeeded) to use the same computer at home and at work. At my current job I have a company laptop that is different than my home computer. This presented a problem with managing my browser bookmarks that I hadn’t had in years. I also need to use Internet Explorer for work stuff but I like to use Firefox whenever I can. Switching between the two setups was a bit frustrating. I recently downloaded Xmarks. It solved the issue of syncing bookmarks between browsers and computers. I liked how easy it was to setup and use I already have it on all my computers. I am liking web sites / applications that let me take my data with me on whatever computer I want and everything is synced up!