Tech Review

A bitter-sweet sign

Yesterday, as the electorate waited with bated breath for my New Hampshire thoughts, the Bluehost server sending this blog your way went the way of Bill Richardson. It was very frustrating, but comes with the territory when you choose shared hosting. As its name implies, in shared hosting, one server hosts and divides its attention (CPU cycles) time between several completely separate domains. This arrangement is sufficient for most users. It's also much more economical- $6.95 per month compared to upwards of $30.00 for a dedicated server.

However, as is characteristic of the free market, you get what you pay for. I don't want to sound like one of Oprah's "Women who hate being beautiful" shows, but a few times throughout the day, Asymmetric is popular enough to exceed its CPU quota, resulting in the screen above. One day, when people dugg this post to the Digg front page, Asymmetric was unusable for almost two days.

So, yesterday, Asymmetric was cruising along, putting up some pretty good numbers, when my co-serverists and I brought our particular rack to its knees. For about 18 hours, the nation couldn't access my trenchant commentary and sober analysis, resulting in spontaneous riots and looting.

It's not a super-easy process moving domains, so I'll stick with Bluehost for another year and hope they get some quad-cores.

I still recommend Bluehost, but if you plan on being the next Daily Kos, you may want to start with a dedicated server.