For a client I was asked today to run some of our software on S3/Cloudfront. Amazon released Cloudfront as beta a few days ago, but as this client is releasing a new, media rich, platform this week, it seemed only smart to at least test it out.
If Cloudfront wouldn’t work as expected for now (because of it’s beta status), we could always move to using S3 urls until the Cloudfront release.
Starting to use S3 from our own CDN (Infiniscale) seemed quite simple; I simply had to rewrite the file/directory drivers of our frame to support S3/Cloudfront. As I have no idea how to support direct authentication to Amazon urls (if that is even possible), I made a Cloudfront driver instead of an S3 driver, as the client is ok with full access to all files, no authentication.
Jeff Bezos (of Amazon) is one of my favorite gurus. The guy has charisma, vision and is very smart. He was, on many occasions ahead of his time and it proved to be very lucrative on all (as far as I know) of them.
Having said that, I must say I’m an avid hardware and hosting freak. I run more than 200 servers in different locations around the world and a lot of those servers I built with my bare hands (yep, I risk the static electricity stuff; you don’t look quite so cool putting in dimms with a little bracelet on; never went wrong so far. knock-on-wood).
I run mostly Debian on my systems (Etch or Sarge) and it usually runs fine. We don’t have many hardware breakdowns (buy expensive hardware; it really is better) and be nice to your systems; don’t overload them, use monitoring etc. Problem is, small sites sometimes grow big and then the scaling thing starts. Although we don’t sell cheap hosting accounts, we don’t have resources to buy SANs, solid hardware load balancers etc. We do everything with open source software and it works, mostly.
When you are a hardworking individual, paying for your own servers, tweaking your sites etc to make ends meet, it is really frustrating seeing people abuse your hard work.
Although you take basic measures to prevent hackers from misusing your site in a lot of ways, they always find new and faster ways to get on top. The easier your site is to use for real users, the easier it is for spammers to get in.
What drives these people? Do they tell their parents; ‘look ma, pa, I have a cool job, I f*ck people over and make a few cents with it for some unethical person on the other side of the world!’? Or do they keep it quiet and no-one, not even their spouses know about their profession?
2007 is almost over. This year was a great year for the free hosting market (read my earlier post about that here; mostly outdated information!); thousands of new freehosts saw the light and most of them went into the blackness of going broke in the same year. So what happened? Why did so many people start and stop with this business of freehosting and is it, as so many people in forums tell us, really dead?
Read on to see these questions answered. And I’ll tell you how can make a lot of money with free hosting here and now too.
Exactly a year ago I was introduced to the concept of web proxies. Well, the concept was not new; I know what proxies and what they do, but I wasn’t aware that people were actually making web proxies to make money.
A proxy like this, is used by users around the world to browse websites anonymously from their office, school or home. Usually they do this to hide their ip address or to be able to browse sites which are blocked by firewalls and so on.
Our Newsletter:
Loading...