Summary

The host for Juicy Studio pulled the plug due to bandwidth usage. The new Juicy Studio is hosted on an Apache server, and the scripts are slowly being converted from ASP to PHP.

Author: Gez Lemon

The original hosting company for Juicy Studio, http://myhosting.com, effectively kicked me out for using too much bandwidth. I know nothing about hosting, so asked for help in selecting a good host. I was absolutely amazed by the massive response I received, and am very grateful for everyone who sent an email with suggestions. There were so many, I'm still in the process of trying to reply to them all. In particular, I would like to extend a special thank you to the following people, whose generosity helped me through a difficult time (by surname in alphabetical order).

A few of the emails were from people in a similar situation to me, and asked if I would publish the host I finally choose. I finally chose Pair Networks, suggested by John Allsop. The bandwidth and hosting costs are very reasonable, and my experience with them so far has been very pleasant.

One of the things that became immediately obvious from the recommendations, was that Apache is a better platform for shared hosting than IIS. I think the reason for this is probably due to the memory leakage due to bad programming practices. It's good practice to release any memory allocated when creating objects on a server, but a lot of tutorials miss this out because it's taken care of automatically by the operating system. What they neglect to take into account is that the memory management process runs in a low-priority thread, and on a busy server, the low-priority thread doesn't get a look in. Eventually, the server doesn't have enough memory to operate, and resets itself, but not before a severe degradation in performance which can last a few hours. If all programmers on a shared server released their resources, there wouldn't be such a problem with IIS. I'm assuming that Apache is better at memory management than IIS.

Consequently, I've had to rewrite all scripts from ASP to PHP with MySQL. I've only had a very brief look at PHP in the past, so it's been an interesting learning curve. I'm slowly transferring the information from the old site to this one, but severe lack of time is causing a problem. I was away on holiday when Juicy Studio was halted by myhosting.com, and straight back to work when I returned home. This weekend has been the first opportunity to do anything, but I'm happy at least something is in place. I've ported over all tutorials written by someone else, and will begin to port other articles over during the week. Once that's done, I can get the services in place, and hopefully, things will be back to normal. As this is my first PHP site, there may well be problems. If you spot anything, please let me know.

Thank you to everyone who sent an email with an offer of help, it was very much appreciated.

Category: General.

Comments

  1. [new-host.php#comment1]

    Hi Gez,

    Its good to see you sorted your hosting issue as I was getting withdrawal symptoms.

    It would have been interesting to know how much bandwidth your site consumed.

    Fancy a drink?...I'll email you *smile*

    Regards
    Simon

    Posted by Simon on

  2. [new-host.php#comment2]

    Glad to see your back, I kept visiting in the hope that the site was up, you don't realise how much you rely upon something till it's not there (truism).
    best regards
    steve

    Posted by steve faulkner on

  3. [new-host.php#comment3]

    Its good to see you sorted your hosting issue as I was getting withdrawal symptoms.

    Cheers, Si *smile* I'll email you about that drink.

    Glad to see your back, I kept visiting in the hope that the site was up, you don't realise how much you rely upon something till it's not there (truism).

    Thank you for the kind words, Steve *smile* I don't think I realised how much I enjoyed running it until it disappeared. I'll have the services back as quickly as I can.

    Posted by Gez on

  4. [new-host.php#comment4]

    Hi Gez,

    Nice to see the site is up and running again *smile* And a new design too, very nice.

    Sad to see the tutorials have gone *sad*

    They were an excellent resource, are they gone forever?

    Posted by Gaz on

  5. [new-host.php#comment5]

    Welcome back Gez! Good to see you back up. If you need any help porting your ASP to PHP just shout. Dunno much about ASP, but I've been using PHP for, well, a long time. *wink* ~d

    Posted by Douglas Clifton on

  6. [new-host.php#comment6]

    Please bring back the vb tutorials

    Posted by Ian on

  8. [new-host.php#comment8]

    Glad to see it is finally sorted!

    Does this move to php mean we are likely to see a few php tutorials in the near future...

    Posted by Rich Pedley on

  9. [new-host.php#comment9]

    Guess who's back! Gez is back! Yaaaay!!
    Thank god I had major 'gap in education' feeling for those weeks... good stuff Gez

    Posted by john danson on

  10. [new-host.php#comment10]

    Sad to see the tutorials have gone :-(

    They were an excellent resource, are they gone forever?

    I don't intend to have a tutorial area, but I will be bringing anything that was useful back over time.

    Welcome back Gez! Good to see you back up. If you need any help porting your ASP to PHP just shout. Dunno much about ASP, but I've been using PHP for, well, a long time. ;-) ~d

    Thank you, Doug. I hope you don't end up regretting that, but I could do with some help to resolve a character encoding issue I've encountered :-)

    Onwards on forwards; good luck with the conversion to PHP.

    Thank you, Robert. Fingers-crossed, it's been fairly straight forward so far.

    Glad to see it is finally sorted!

    Does this move to php mean we are likely to see a few php tutorials in the near future...

    Thanks, Rich. If I do anything useful with PHP, I'll definitely write about it.

    Guess who's back! Gez is back! Yaaaay!!

    Thank god I had major 'gap in education' feeling for those weeks... good stuff Gez

    Thanks, John - it's good to be back, I was starting to get withdrawal symptoms :-)

    Posted by Gez on

  11. [new-host.php#comment11]

    Jez,

    I am delighted you have sorted out the hosting problems. It was very frustrating not to have my favorite reference. Best of luck.

    Lou Smith

    Posted by Lou Smith on

  13. [new-host.php#comment13]

    Nice to see you back Gez - says something about the power of feeds though. I've been aimlessly clicking the RSS feed I had for you with no joy and today I just thought I'd visit the site proper and here you are back up! With an Atom feed ;o)

    Posted by Kev on

  14. [new-host.php#comment14]

    Nice to see you back Gez - ihave been trying endlessly to go through ur tutorial section thanks ur back,but there is no tutorial section, it ishelpful to people like us so please start it again...
    hoping to see tutorial in near future..

    thanks

    Posted by Prakash on

  15. [new-host.php#comment15]

    hi,gez thanks u are back,please give us tutorial section it is very helpful

    thanks

    Posted by Adavikolanu V.R.Sai Prakash on

  16. [new-host.php#comment16]

    Hi Gez, welcome back.

    I can start pointing the unenlightened to Juicy Studio again, YIPEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

    Posted by Mike Abbott on

  17. [new-host.php#comment17]

    Nice to see you back Gez - says something about the power of feeds though. I've been aimlessly clicking the RSS feed I had for you with no joy and today I just thought I'd visit the site proper and here you are back up! With an Atom feed ;o)

    Thanks, Kev. I've just spotted a mistake in the Atom feed (none of the URLs point to trhe right place, so quite serious), but can't do anything about it until I get back from work. It's frustrating *smile*

    Thank you Prakash, and Adavikolanu. I will be bringing content back into the website, but there won't be a tutorial section.

    Hi Gez, welcome back.

    Hi Mike, and thank you *smile*

    Posted by Gez on

  18. [new-host.php#comment18]

    Hi Gez,

    Good to see you back in business! We've missed you, man!

    Jon

    Posted by dotjay on

  19. [new-host.php#comment19]

    Hi Gez,

    Your ASP tutorial, in particular was the best introduction to ASP I have ever read, not just int terms of language but also in terms of structure. Helped me when I was just starting out.

    I have a friend who a) would very much like to learn ASP and I recommended your tutorial not knowing you weren't planning to re host it so he b) is offering to host your tutorials on his own server if you'll send them to him/us. Drop me a line if you're interested.

    Cheers.

    Posted by Leo Stableford on

  20. [new-host.php#comment20]

    Hi Gez,

    I have noticed your ECMA Script is missing from the article list for the drop down menu and the other scripts you produced.

    Will you be bringing back these scripts? And still continue support for the DOM?

    Cheers Gaz

    Posted by Gaz on

  21. [new-host.php#comment21]

    Hey, where did all the tutorials go? =(

    The MySQL and PHP tutorials on the old server were a great help for me. Ah, well. Good luck with the new host.

    Posted by Alex on

  22. [new-host.php#comment22]

    Hi,

    It's so nice to see you again. You know, the VB tutorial is my favorite and I've benefit a lot from it. Thanks.

    Posted by J Wallace on

  23. [new-host.php#comment23]

    But..., where is it now ? Pls give a clue.

    Posted by J Wallace on

  24. [new-host.php#comment24]

    I'm still in the process of moving content over - it's likely to take a while.

    The ECMAScript menu is filed under scripting.

    Posted by Gez on

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