hosting

Back in the late 90s there was a range of free website hosting options - geocities, angelfire and tripod are the big 3 I remember straight off the top of my head. The business model was pretty simple, you got a free site, albeit with a pretty crappy url, and the host got to inject ads into the page. The first "site" ever I ever built was hosted by tripod and is still up, I have forgotten the login details so it hasn't been updated for 11 years.

Of the 3 stars of this business model, angelfire and tripod are still offering an ad supported version along with ad free, fee for service upgrades, but geocities is dead. Today, the business model has evolved, you can get a free but ad supported blogs (see Blogger.com or wordpress.com), email services (see gMail, Yahoo or Microsoft) or project hosting (see sourceforge, xp-dev or CodePlex) along with many other online services. For personal stuff I think this is fine, and the same goes for small not for profit organisations. On the other hand if you run a business and want to appear professional, profitable and "up with technology", then you don't want your email address to be acme234789@hotmail.com, or your website to be acme-inc.freehostingco.com. It could be worse, you could be using an email address or hosting supplied by your ISP such as sxcsteve@bigpond.com and myisp.com.au/acme-inc. In the case of email, you can use google apps for domains and still look professional.

It is different if you are solely providing free (as in beer) content, such as video, news or a professional blog. This is a clear business model, fund free content via advertising, it has been used by print news, radio and television for decades. I also think it is fine for community based free/open source software projects to use it to get some additional revenue. It is different if you are a profit making business.

Not only does running ads on your site look unprofessional, you could be promoting the competition. Google targets their ads based on the content of the page. For example if you are a small shop and you have a page listing the types of products you offer, Google is likely to serve up ads on that page for those products. Do you really want an ad from a competitor showing up with "Cheap [item], free next day delivery"? How many high volume paying customers will you lose for that extra few dollars a month in Ad Sense revenue?

I find it more shocking on large corporate sites. Yes, they attract a lot of eye balls, but I pay my phone company enough money and they make large enough profits, that I shouldn't have to be subjected to ads on their corporate home page. It makes them look cheap. The same goes for smaller businesses.

In the case of a business blog, it should be part of your business website. If people find your blog and they like what they see, they are likely to click around your site to find out more about you. If you have your blog on blogger they are only likely to find other blog posts, and if you have a link to your business website, they will probably stop clicking once they hit your business site as it is completely different from your blog. If on the other hand it's all nicely integrated, your readers are able to move from your blog posts to your business content seamlessly - and so are more likely to become a customer, rather than another bounced visitor.

What are your options? Many hosts offer one click installers for setting up drupal, wordpress or other content management systems. With a bit of help from an online tutorial or 2 you should be able to get drupal up and running with a basic site and a theme from contrib. Sure it will look a bit cheap, but no worse than something on blogger. If you were to host it with dreamhost it is going to cost you around 120USD/130AUD for one year. Even if you have to pay someone to help you setup your CMS site, it will probably cost you less than 500USD in the first year for a basic setup. A basic setup will allow your business to project a professional image to the world. Add a professionally designed custom theme and site build for another 1850USD/2000AUD or so and you are set for a few years. Of course you will spend more if you want some to help with designing your information architecture, help with SEO, produce or proof content or suggest images etc. The investment is likely to pay for itself over that time in increased sales.

Aegir is an excellent way to manage multi site drupal instances, but sometimes it can be a bit too heavy. For example if you have a handful of sites, it can be overkill to deploy aegir. If there is an urgent security fix and you have a lot of sites (I am talking 100s if not 1000s) to patch, waiting for aegir to migrate and verify all of your sites can be a little too slow.

For these situations I have a little script which I use to do the heavy lifting. I keep in ~/bin/update-all-sites and it has a single purpose, to update all of my drupal instances with a single command. Just like aegir, my script leverages drush, but unlike aegir there is no parachute, so if something breaks during the upgrade you get to keep all of the pieces. If you use this script, I would recommend always backing up all of your databases first - just in case.

I keep my "platforms" in svn, so before running the script I run a svn switch or svn update depending on how major the update is. If you are using git or bzr, you would do something similar first. If you aren't using any form of version control - I feel sorry for your clients.

So here is the code, it should be pretty self explanatory - if not ask questions via the comments.


#!/bin/sh
# Update all drupal sites at once using drush - aka lazy person's aegir
#
# Written by Dave Hall
# Copyright (c) 2009 Dave Hall Consulting http://davehall.com.au
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
# modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
# as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
# of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
# Alternatively you may use and/or distribute it under the terms
# of the CC-BY-SA license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
# Change this to point to your instance of drush isn't in your path
DRUSH_CMD="drush"
if [ $# != 1 ]; then
    SCRIPT="`basename $0`"
    echo "Usage: $SCRIPT path-to-drupal-install"
    exit 1;
fi
SITES_PATH="$1"
PWD=$(pwd)
cd "$SITES_PATH/sites";
for site in `find ./ -maxdepth 1 -type d | cut -d/ -f2 | egrep -v '(.git|.bzr|.svn|all|^$)'`; do
    if [ -f "${site}/settings.php" ]; then
        echo updating $site
        $DRUSH_CMD updatedb -y -l $site
    fi
done
# Lets go back to where we started
cd "$PWD"


OK, so my script isn't any where as awesome as aegir, but if you are lazy (or in a hurry) it can come in handy. Most of the time you will probably still want to use aegir.

Notes:

Make sure you make the script executable (hint run chmod +x /path/to/update-all-sites)

If you don't have drush in your path, I would recommend you add it, but if you can't then change DRUSH_CMD="drush" to point to your instance of drush - such as DRUSH_CMD="/opt/drush/drush".

Thanks to Peter Lieverdink (aka cafuego) for suggesting the improved regex.

Some businesses have a strange way of promoting their services.

Many years ago I used webarama for hosting a small client site. I cancelled the service over 4 years ago as the client no longer needed the site. I didn't really have any problems with them that I can remember, but I won't be recommending them to anyone after they spammed me about a new anti spam service they were offering.

Dear Dave,

As part of our ongoing commitment to provide new features to clients we are pleased to announce the launch of our Anti Spam management interface for shared hosting clients, following on from the recent announcement of our free Anti Spam & Anti Virus system.

The My-Spam interface allows you to take control of your email, specifying custom spam scores, deletion of spam email and specifying white and blacklisted email addresses.
...

Maybe webarama need to familiarise themselves with the Australian Spam Act 2003 there is a good summary CAUBE.AU's website.

I will be emailing webarama a link to this post and will see what they have to say. Stay tuned.