Today Fujifilm announced a pretty sweet looking ‘Real 3D’ camera, so need for glasses. This stunning camera doesn’t just do 3D video it also does 3D still pictures and 2D pictures and video and unlike it’s predecessor, the W1, the W3 shoots 720p stereoscopic HD video perfect for YouTube 3D.
Recently my site was running very slow mainly due to the load my old server was under serving around 30-40 page requests a minute across a number of sites. This would lead to time out errors when some of the sites posted new content, advertisers been put off and visitor numbers falling. While I was always working to decease the server load by caching and side loading images from other servers this eventually hit a limit as well.
After hitting limit after limit I decided to move all the sites to a new hosting provider, Rackspace. With the Rackspace Cloud I am able to scale the sites automatically at low cost to well beyond what I in vision using, or at least by the time I get there Rackspace would of increased it’s infrastructure allowing me to continue growing without doing a thing. And that is the beauty of the cloud, auto scaling with massive amounts of power on tap and ready when you are.
I chose Rackspace as they have the 2nd largest cloud in the world, plus they are amongst the cheapest and have a proven track record. GDGT’s live blog is hosted on the Rackspace Cloud and during their live blog of the WWDC ’09 keynote they hit 4.3 million page views without skipping a beat, I won’t be getting that kind of traffic but knowing my host can handle that is comforting.
So far I have noticed a considerable speed increase after switching most of the sites I host over. When they advertise “fanatical Support” they really do mean it, I spent about 25 minutes in a live season talking to one of their sales people, and they weren’t all about selling Rackspace service. They suggested Amazon’s EC2 might be better for my needs, however I’d already ruled them out on price after some prototyping I did on there earlier in the year. We went through my needs and what I currently use and in the end we agreed the service was what I needed. Signing up took only 5 minutes, again in the live chat as I already had a Rackspace account.
Since signing up and moving my sites over I have used the ‘fanatical’ support again this time after moving this site across I couldn’t access the WordPress admin. The person I spoke to identified the problem as been the amount of memory allocated to PHP on my server and increased it for me, and then going on to show me how to do this myself via the .htaccess file. He also went on to show me how to increase the file upload size limits (default is 2MB).
To host sites on Rackspace Cloud you need to transfer your domain to them ($10) or change your name servers, ether way Rackspace will be handling all the DNS for the domain. I chose to change my name servers as I have domains they aren’t able to transfer. The DNS management interface is fast, quick and easy to use, I had my CNAMEs and MX records for Google Apps set up in under 2 minutes as oppose to the 10 minutes this takes with Godaddy’s DNS manager. While Rackspace also provide email for every domain you host with them I didn’t use it because all my data is already with Google.
The control panel while simple provides all the information you need, keeping you up to date with how many cycles, how much disk space/bandwidth you’ve used as well as allowing you to add more sites in less then a minute and database even quicker. While there is no one click install of popular applications like most shared hosts offer you can normally install applications manually, and often quicker thanks to the speed everything works at.
The Rackspace service is aimed at more professional users with large sites that need power and reliability, if that’s you I defiantly recommend their services, I will be posting some tips and how-to’s in the future as I move and create more sites over there.
Just a quick note, that over the next month or so I am going to be changing cache settings, trying content delivery networks and other things to try and improve the recently slow speeds of the site. This is will involve down time, sometimes even slower page load times, out of date pages and missing images and files but it will all be worth it in the end.
If you experience problems with site chances are I know about it and you should try again in 5 or 10 minutes. Thank you for your understanding.
Update (10/08/10): Over the night and into this morning the site was moved to a new provider, The Rackspace Cloud, who should be able to handle any traffic spikes and scale with me as my sites grow. I will provide a full review with reasons behind my diction soon. The content delivery network has yet to be implemented however the page load times are greatly improved and the network may not be needed.
Recently, with a number of active projects, my current GTD task management system Things wasn’t cutting it. I needed something with more structure and filters.
With 3 or 4 active projects each with hundreds of actions and sub projects with even more actions Things was become cluttered and more of a hindrance then a help so I turned to OmniFocus.
OmniFocus a much more power and expensive system, costing $79.95 for the Mac client, is based around the idea of projects and context allowing you to focus in on only the tasks you can do. For example when I’m at my desk at home I’m not interested in anything for work or at the supermarket so I can hide them with the click of a button and only show the things I can do.
This brings with the ability to be truly the only system needed for task management in both home, work and business. The powerful sync via MobileMe, Bonjour or any WebDAV server allowing over the air sync with other Macs, iPhones and iPads without the applications have to be running on the same network.
OmniFocus also has a iPhone and iPad app which both follow the same steep pricing structure as the Mac app costing £12 and £24 respectively. But what you get for your money is well worth it.
The iPad app is well designed and offers all the features of the desktop counter part, well at least I haven’t found anything to be missing. Where as the iPhone app as you may expect offers the basics and a bit more but if you are mobile and away from your Mac a a lot like I am you’ll need one if not both of these. Both the iPhone and iPad apps sync over the air so your almost alway update everywhere you go.
Do I recommend OmniFocus. Yes despite is steep pricing it is worth it to anyone that wants or needs a task manager and I even recommend it over Things unless the price is an issue for you I’d recommend OmniFocus every time.
