Archive for category Site Development
Another Year, Another Migration
Posted by Ryan in Site Development, Technology on October 11, 2011
If you’ve read my blog before, you know that last December I performed the tedious task of moving my website from GoDaddy to Bluehost. Well this year, I’m doing it again.
I haven’t had any issues with Bluehost. In fact having unlimited bandwidth and space for around the same cost as my GoDaddy account and not having to wait 15+ minutes for a settings change was great. But now, I decided that I wanted to do more. I wanted to be able to have full control of a virtual machine that I could do more than just web hosting. A system where I could run test scripts, host dns, host email, and do anything else that I can think of. The best part, it is actually cheaper than than shared hosting through BlueHost.
I had tried another VPS (Virtual Private Server) host in the past, but suffered terrible lag and the worst customer support I had ever encountered. An example of that can be seen here.
I was lucky enough to find a new company out of Chicago that is serving awesome VPS’s at affordable prices. At $4.95/month I am getting 512MB of RAM, 50GB of storage, and 2TB of Dedicated Bandwidth per month. These VPSs all currently run linux, and I have Debian 6 on mine. So what is this company you ask? Binary Computer Solutions. If you are interested in getting a VPSs, help me out and order via this link. https://customer.binarycpu.com/?affid=8.
Ok, so what do you have running on your VPS so far?
- Apache2 Web Server
- BIND9 DNS Server
- Postfix Smtp
My server is acting as the nameserver for Rychannel.com and a couple other sites that I host. It was quite interesting to figure out how to set BIND’s Primary Zones. My Postfix setup acts as a forwarder to another email account not hosted on the server. My Apache2 setup is currently hosting websites for 3 different domains.
Any questions or comments? Leave them in the comment section and I will be sure to respond.
Links
Posted by Ryan in Personal, Site Development on March 18, 2009
I’ve had several comments regarding the use of the Course Links in the side bar. These are current classes that I am enrolled in at the University of Northern Iowa. The main reason for most of the links on this site are for my convenience.
So all of the links in the side bar are there because I go to those sites a lot, need them for work, or need them for class.
Warm weather and Cacti… in Iowa?
Posted by Ryan in Personal, Site Development on March 11, 2009
Looking at the weather forecast and it looks like St. Patrick’s Day is going to have a high of 50 and no snow. Thats not even the best part. The warmer weather is supposedly rolling in this Friday with temps in the 40s. Ok, ok, I know I’m not a weather man, but this is great news for us UNI students who finally get to have Spring Break next week.
Other than the weather, I really don’t have any great or important news for today, except I think I have finally finished my page on the installation of Cacti. Alright, most of you are probably going, “What the hell is Cacti?” You normal non-tech people may just want to ignore this.
Cacti is an RRD based monitoring solution. It uses SNMP to collect data from network devices such as computers, switches, routers, etc. and creates graphs based on the data it collects.
So some of you may have already noticed the “Cacti wiki” page and have been wondering, how am I suppose to add info to the wiki about Cacti if I don’t have editing access. Well, if you feel you need to add or change something on the wiki, register with the site and send me an email with what you want to add or change. Then I will make you a Wiki contributor, or if you just want to send me the additions I can add them my self. Registering with RyChannel.com will not mean you will get spammed all the time. I will probably never email you unless you email me first or I have a legit question to ask you about something you have contributed.
Rychannel.com Development
Posted by Ryan in Site Development on March 8, 2009
Rychannel.com has grown a little since its initial deployment after Christmas 08. It has gone from a totally homemade HTML site to something a little more professional looking. I’m not quite sure where I want my site to go. So I guess I will just have to start with me. Not that I have an ego or anything. I’m just not as creative when it comes to the web development experience that is required when setting up an HTML site. Before switching to the current WordPress install, I was considering Joomla.
So I made up my mind on whether to use Joomla or WordPress. To me, joomla just seemed a bit on the complicated side. Joomla is a great piece of software, if you want to take the time to learn it. I know some people that have created great looking sites, using joomla. If you think otherwise, I’m sorry. So far the wordpress setup process has been really easy. I’m not sure if I’m set on the current theme though. It seems with the current two column theme I will be filling the right column with widgets in no time. Readers will be scrolling way down to the bottom of the page just to see some of my other links. This isn’t my first wordpress blog that I’ve setup but it probably has the most effort put into it. My last wordpress has a very “Vistaish” look to it. Being a mac user, I didn’t think that was appropriate. Some of you may be familier with the featured WordPress “Pixed.” I very neat theme but like I said before, too vistaish.
Maybe I can figure out how to create my own theme. However I am not an artist by any means and much rather have someone else do the creative work. 
If there are other Widgets that you can recommend I would be more than happy to try them out.