Calling all nerds (in WA)
Posted by Jacques Chester on Sunday, July 15, 2007
Regular readers of my hand-wringing contributions in the “Site News” category will know that Club Troppo is a nomadic blog. It moves from pasture and pasture seeking ever fatter server pickings. Then it gets bigger and has to move again.
I have previously foreshadowed the possibility of hosting Club Troppo on a server in my possession, offsetting the costs through advertising. It’s since been put to me that a better option might be to appeal for help to UWA (my future alma mater): if we can park a server inside UWA’s computing infrastructure we solve many issues at a stroke.
So I’m looking for someone who works there, or who can hook us up. I’d be very happy to ditch our advertising. Perhaps we could put up a UWA badge somewhere and some suitably fawning acknowledgments in strategic positions. In any case it would make my life infinitely easier and the site overall much faster and more featuresome. Since Club Troppo is one of the “Terrible Trio” of Australian political blogging, perhaps some glory would rebound to Australia’s most remote sandstone university.
Anyone?
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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 15th, 2007 at 2:45 PM and filed under Site News.
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Jacques - Your Google ads are promoting Swinburne, so yes UWA may not be attracted by that feature:)
Posted on 15-Jul-07 at 4:46 pm | PermalinkJacques - how big a server do you actually need? I just can’t understand how a site like club troppo which receives less than 100 updates / day and can server entirely static pages the rest of the time requires anything more than a small VPS…
You can get a decent one for about $20 / month and avoid the potential nightmare of hosting with people who don’t do it professionally…
Posted on 15-Jul-07 at 5:17 pm | PermalinkJohn;
We are with a small VPS. I’m not asking the university to do the full-service thing. I just need a spot on a rack somewhere.
Posted on 15-Jul-07 at 7:56 pm | PermalinkJacques - I know you’ve talked about this in a few other places, but why doesn’t caching work?
You can serve 10’s of gigabytes of static content off a Pentium 100, what is it about wordpress which sucks cycles?
Posted on 15-Jul-07 at 10:08 pm | PermalinkJohnZ;
We have very aggressive caching as it is. MySQL query caching, plus APC opcode and data caching, plus an APC module for WP inbuilt caching, plus the WP-Cache plugin, plus tuned kernel file caching.
I can still make the site crawl if I make any more than 6 simultaneous requests.
We get the equivalent of 250Mhz. For what Wordpress does it’s just not enough grunt. In testing my own server - an Athlon XP of a few years vintage - can blast out hundreds of requests per second without breaking a sweat.
Wordpress sucks cycles because the coders who write it refuse to embrace PHP5 improvements and because every plugin of any interest runs monster joins against any pair of big tables it can find.
Posted on 16-Jul-07 at 1:45 am | PermalinkJacques,
Posted on 16-Jul-07 at 12:07 pm | PermalinkSorry - not up with UWA people, but Perth iX run a large number of servers in WA and may be able to help. I have a good mate there - if you want to chat with him let me know on my email address.
Otherwise - I feel we should organise a blogger meet up while you are here.
Andrew;
I’m not sure what your email address is, but mine is jacques@chester.id.au .
I don’t know if a dedicated colo mob would take us on. We certainly couldn’t afford it, I suspect - colo anywhere is expensive stuff.
As for a blogger meet, I guess it could be the go. I wanted to go to the Matilda Bay Brewery before it closes.
Posted on 16-Jul-07 at 1:27 pm | Permalinkterrible trio???
Clearly, I’ve missed something. Question being, just what have I missed out on by missing whatever it is I’ve missed.
Posted on 16-Jul-07 at 5:21 pm | PermalinkSteve Edwards is probably your man. He doesn’t work for UWA any more but I’m sure he knows a lot of people who still do.
Posted on 16-Jul-07 at 6:07 pm | PermalinkBannerman,
I think the terrible trio would be Troppo, Larvatus Prodeo and Catallaxy - they are certainly my trio.
Posted on 16-Jul-07 at 7:49 pm | PermalinkHi, I run server infrastructure for the Faculty of Arts at UWA, and I used to be in charge of IT security for the whole university.
Internet Access at UWA is through AARNet, which is $35/gb of traffic. I really doubt you’ll get anywhere on campus to host a random box for you. Students get a small amount of webspace with unlimited traffic, so you might want to look into that. But I suggest you look at one of the $20 VPS hosts, like vpsland.com for it.
Best Regards,
Posted on 17-Jul-07 at 10:26 pm | PermalinkAlex.
Alex;
Thanks for getting in touch. I’ve also talked to James Andrewatha and it looks like we could host Club Troppo inside the UCC’s setup, which I think sidesteps the AARNet billing issue.
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