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The long and sordid history of vtluu.net

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

Okay, not really long, nor sordid, but I did notice however that it’s been two years since I started hosting with Dreamhost and, according to the archives, two years next month since I moved vtluu.net over to DreamHost. Funny how I couldn’t even remember who I was using to host vtluu.net prior to that; I had to search my archived E-mail to figure out it was Your-Site.

Was Your-Site that bad that I’ve apparently repressed all memories of it? Probably not; nevertheless, that Your-Site seems still the sleepy little company it was two years ago and that DreamHost has grown and developed even in the same period of time says a lot of about the two.

Without sounding overly gushy, I couldn’t be happier with DreamHost. I think it’s their ability to anticipate everything that I want out of a hosting service. When I wanted to set up websites using Joomla and WordPress, they made that easy. When more recently I decided to move my E-mail hosting over to Google, they made that a breeze as well. Looking at their company info, I get the impression that their philosophy is to stay small, do one thing and do it well. I admire that kind of ambition—no fame-seeking, no Superbowl Ads… not what you’d expect from a company based in the heart of L.A.

Of course, business is business, and when it comes to the bottom line DreamHost has very competitively-priced service and a great referral bonus program, but here are a few other noteworthy items that make DreamHost stand out:

  • Their corporate blog, a genuinely interesting read.
  • Their environmentally-friendly approach (waste reduction, renewable energy, carbon-neutrality, etc.).
  • Their charitable efforts (e.g. matching donations); I’m a bit cynical about charitable contributions by corporations (i.e. why take my money and give some of it away when I could just give it away myself) but I nevertheless appreciate the effort.

Anyway, if you’re looking for a new/replacement web/domain hosting service, check out DreamHost (and kick a referral bonus my way) at this link: http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?225447.

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Goodbye YourSite, hello DreamHost

Saturday, October 28th, 2006

I finally got around to moving vtluu.net to the same DreamHost account I’ve been using to host Vital Motorsports. With that move, I may soon get around to “re-launching” vtluu.net as a WordPress or Joomla based website. The site is long overdue for a makeover; the tricky thing will be to migrate all my old Blog entries to the new software.

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New website coming along

Monday, October 2nd, 2006

I’ve made a fair bit of progress with the Vital Motorsports website. After a brief flirtation with MediaWiki, I decided it clearly wasn’t the right tool for the job. I then wasted a couple days designing a new website the “bad old” way—writing HTML and PHP code by hand—before my friend Bryan, a professional web designer, mentioned Joomla, a web-based “content management system” (CMS) tool for laying out, designing and publishing websites. Turned out it was exactly what I’d been looking for.

After getting Joomla up and running (which was super-easy using DreamHost’s “One-Click Install” tool) I quickly made a design by customizing (my HTML, CSS and PHP knowledge still have some use) an existing template, and then added some modules such as an event calendar and photo gallery. The process has been fairly pain-free.

Now the job is adding content. I’ve fleshed out parts of the site but there’s still plenty to be done. I’ve also started up my motorsports “blog” on the site, so hopefully I won’t be “polluting” vtluu.net with incessant car talk anymore (so what will I talk about?)…

Once things settle down with the new site, I’ll be applying what I learned to “re-launch” (that’s such a cliché) the vtluu.net website. I may end up using WordPress instead of Joomla for this website, since it’s more blog (how I hate that term) centric than my racing site.

What really boggles my mind is the complexity of Joomla and other web components. Fairly huge PHP scripts are needed to dynamically generate the contents of the Vital Motorsports web pages. I suspect that it takes about 10-20 times as much processing to serve up the front page of VitalMotorsports.com, compared to vtluu.net (which does use a little bit of PHP). I can definitely notice a bit of delay when loading the former. Mind you, the average web server now has 10-20 times as much processing bandwidth as the average server that was around back when I created vtluu.net; nevertheless I’m still amazed by the size and complexity of the building blocks used today. The web has come a long way since I built my first web page back in 1994.

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