Technical

Free hosting: a quick look at x10Hosting

Free webhosting: sounds gimmicky and risky, right? Deliberately concocted to dupe and ensnare the miserly and unwary? Nearly a decade ago while I shopped for hosting companies to serve small business websites, I would have definitely scoffed at the notion of free hosting; I mean it was a scam, am I right? But in today’s ever-changing competitive hosting market, it’s considered savvy marketing and standard practice. For companies offering free hosting (like free domains were a scant few years ago), the service represents the proverbial foot in the door, a chance to pry open the wallets of potential customers.

Because moving out to a rural suburb forced a downgrade in my internet access speeds, self-hosting became problematic. Reliability of my home connection was a constant concern, and the blogging itch became too incessant to put off for much longer while I played in a Linux and Webmin/Virtualmin sandbox.

So as a consumer, I had already ticked off some boxes as to my needs since I already had my website backed up in cPanel, MySQL and WP exports. I was also bringing my own domain (registered at Sitelutions), and I had plenty of experience in web server administration and web design that didn’t require a 1-click solution.

Primary traits to determine my ideal hosting company were: Linux/Apache environment, cPanel administration, storage space and FTP access, PHP/MySQL for WordPress installs, forced ads, server location, and to a lesser degree, CPU/bandwidth limits and support options.

x10hostingEnter x10Hosting. For photo-heavy blogs, storage space is critical. A full backup of epicureasian.com and its garden subdomain weighs in the vicinity of 2GB, a size that most free hosts do not accommodate. Storage space isn’t front page marketing for x10Hosting; I had to sift through their site and community forum for the actual storage limits. Third party reviews of x10Hosting indicated unlimited storage, but x10Hosting restricts individual file sizes and the types of files stored on their servers per their TOS.  Unmetered disk space must also be requested after certain benchmarks have been surpassed.

After hurdling over some of the barriers of accessing the account (namely getting my account suspended after inactivity, initial storage being capped at 512MB), my experience in setting up a website and administering it was relatively painless and trouble-free. A solid and responsive community forum was key to my selecting x10Hosting for my website’s current home. The ability to switch cPanel themes from x10-branded to the original cPanel 11 skin made the migration seamless. English-speaking support, live status reporting, and a server located in the US (apparently in Tilton, NH) also relieved my anxieties over dealing with international hosting.

If I had a few quibbles with x10Hosting, I would have to argue that the 30-day login requirement is my biggest one. But self-hosting always ingrained in me the habit of checking my admin panel regularly. Another complaint would be the stale information about upgrades posted on their site. My positive experience with the free hosting so far encouraged me to commit to and pay for upgraded support, but it seems x10Hosting disabled this portal to reorganize and relaunch their offerings at a later date. PHP and MySQL limits also may put the brakes on any development work I might want to dabble in, since that might exceed x10Hosting’s restrictions. And caps on email, ftp, and domain accounts, though reasonable, seem lower than some of the competition. With no uptime guarantees and no automatic backups, it’s always a risk that I will lose access to my current content if I’m not vigilant with monitoring. But at this price point, my experience with  x10Hosting’s free product trumps my previous relationships with shared hosting services.

After setting up my account in December 2015, I am pleased to report that my site runs has run without disruption or performance issues so far, and therefore I recommend x10Hosting to anybody looking for an entry point into free webhosting.

Drogo, Furkids

There Was Something About Drogo

It’s been  2 weeks since we made the decision to end our FIP-afflicted kitty’s life. PTS, put to sleep, entered our vocabulary of life’s acronyms. While the melancholy of our sudden loss did not collapse into life-disrupting despondency like I originally feared, the stab/twinge/shock of sorrow occasionally arrives unannounced, unbidden. Whether it be during the long commute to and from home, or during some idle conversation or distraction, or maybe just flipping aimlessly through the digital photo album and resurrecting an old memory, I am suddenly seized with sadness due to the emptiness he left in our lives.

I’ve cared for and fostered many a furkid in my life. All were bundles of joy and unique personalities. But there were a handful of them that entered my life that struck me as “special”, extraordinary, and unforgettable. Utterly incomparable and regrettably, lamentably, mortal; these were the souls who showed more compassion, devotion, presence, and dare I say, more humanity than any animal or human I’ve known. And, of course, as with everything and everyone you come to love so dearly, they will inevitably break your heart.

It began when we first beheld him that day at the adoption fair, he already displayed a receptiveness, openness to human contact. I will never forget the day my man picked him up and cradled him on his shoulder: Dutch (as he was named at the time) looked like he belonged there. We walked away from the fair, from the store, thinking it was just a passing fancy–weren’t they all adorably cute at that age? How better to snag the unwary hearts of potential fur-parents!

Within an hour we were back to adopt Drogo and Conan, and suddenly, irrevocably, they were our kids. We had incremented our family by two within the span of an afternoon. In the weeks and months that followed, I became absorbed with parenthood, (even though we’d soon adopt another furkid). Furbabies are different, requiring more rigorous attention and therefore filling up our memories with more interactions with them. During these periods of learning and growth, Drogo and Conan’s personalities became evident markers of who they would become as adults.

Already Drogo distinguished himself for his curiosity, courage, initiative and affability. He was the explorer and the lover all in one fuzzy bundle. He possessed pleasant communication skills, an ease with new situations, demonstrating an assertiveness that his kitten-brother lacked. He was the first out of safe haven, to explore his new surrounds, to meet his canine and feline siblings, and engage in new discoveries. He was an opportunistic rogue, daring to scale forbidden counters in search of hidden treats or toys, or deftly robbing the dog bowls for canine kibble. He tested the limits of his world almost calculatingly, with a patience and intuitiveness beyond his years. And after all his (mis)adventuring was done, he’d come to us for a cuddle and comfort,  and seemed delighted with our company above all else.

He was a good conversationalist, a champion purring machine, and a fan of tummy rubs. He excelled at fetching and recovery, so perfectly did he place the retrieved toy in my hand or lap, that I couldn’t imagine how he learned such a thing–certainly I never trained him. He bonded with us in such a short time; he followed me around when I readied for work in the mornings; he waited for me at the door when I got home at night. He seemed accepting of my after-work decompression routine, he’d patiently wait for me after workouts, then settled into my lap as I wrapped up my evening.

It was this sweet temper, this agreeableness, maybe some form of worship that obviously endeared him to us, and made his loss even more profound. He will be quite simply be sorely missed.

Speculative, Technical

2016 On the Radar and Integrating Social Presence

Back on the net again, thanks to free hosting at x10hosting.com. Looking back at previous posts, I realized I remained inactive on this blog for all of 2014 and 2015. In 2015, I retired from dedicated server support and backed up all my blogs for storage. The backups lingered on in cloud and offline storage while I toyed with the notion of self-hosting my own server (which I came close to settling on via Webmin/Virtualmin).

Unfortunately, I moved to a semi-rural  ‘burb of Denton where the ISP options were DSL and a ‘roided version of DSL that AT&T claims to be fiber (the much hyped Uverse Internet, except it’s underwhelmingly slow). How I miss the days of fiber-to-the-curb with Verizon FIOS. I’ll save my Uverse rant for another post when the service goes offline again.

I was not too scarce when it came to my internet presence. Along with Yelp and fitness tracking apps, I launched into the Instagram and Tumblr spaces (sorry, no Facebook or Twitter for me). I also managed to hack a Google+ profile of sorts using my YouTube identity, wrangled a Flickr account into usefulness, and rarely added to my network on LinkedIn.

Okay, maybe I confess I (re)started up Tumblr, G+ and Flickr only very recently after puzzling out how to rope together all my social identities into a cohesive narrative.

The secret is in the nascent field of integrative and automation apps bursting onto the scene. Some call it ETL, some refer to it as IaaS or PaaS. For my personal use, I wanted to yoke all my personal data streams under ideally one dashboard, push or repost my data without having to touch multiple platforms.

Web services such as IFTTT and Buffer offer free push/pull automation useful in the personal space. Obviously the potential for business is greater and more profitable, such that services like Zapier, bip.io, itDuzzit and CloudWork are in big demand. The possibilities of what these integrative services can do are limitless. StackStorm for example is an open-source project to watch. For more reading, check out this post.

One particular arena in which integration and automation is rapidly evolving is the fitness and health app industry, where many hardware and software data are connected via multiple APIs, collected and digested onto just as many platforms. The notion of fleshing out your online identity with data pumped from these sources is staggering! GPS enabled devices made it possible to track your physical whereabouts; health/fitness data aggregates and publicizes your current vitals. Again, the future is an open book with regards to the direction these services and applications can take us.

WordPress itself has grown into a mature platform that I haven’t fully explored all its recent capabilities. I plan on addressing this when I determinethe new look and direction of this blog/personal portal.

Fitness

Tragic start to 2016

My January goals were confounded by some unfortunate happenstances:

 

 

Needless to say, I didn’t make my January goals, and February is off to a rocky, late start.

I’m scaling back my goals for the month of February. Here are the objectives:

 

  • lose 5# in February
  • stay within calorie budget for 1 week (7 days straight)
  • ramp up to 10k steps daily 
  • ramp up to 4×5 assisted pullups daily
  • ramp up to 4×5 squats/pushups daily 

 

February is also a great time to plan gardening projects. The man and I are working on some ideas on small scale landscape work for 2016.

 

Drogo, Furkids

2/1 Monday

I had a very rough night and I am convinced that we are prolonging Drogo’s life artificially. I dread waking up in the AM because I fear to see him pass in the night. The man and I had some half-sleep conversations of bringing this to the end; we just don’t see any more progress and we don’t his last days to be full of suffering and misery.

Dropped him in his crate, he went #1 in litter. Spent most of the day on the bed.

10a 10mL Hills a/d, 1mL prednisolone

Let him outside in the backyard, he explored the patio between rest breaks. He was definitely alert to the new environment but his energy didn’t allow him to explore his surrounds fully..

Made a few calls, Dr Cowser concurred that PTS was the humane option. We scheduled an appointment at Eldorado Animal Hospital due to distance and affordability.

Drogo was put to the final sleep on Monday afternoon. The procedure was quick and painless, perhaps too abrupt. Many tears were shed as even at the last minutes of his life, Drogo displayed vestiges of his old self, meowing incessantly for reassurance and rolling on his back to allow his tummy to be rubbed.

This was one of the most heartbreaking days of my/our lives.