Category: Hosting

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The Arabist

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes arabist.net:

The Arabist is dedicated to covering the politics and culture of the Arab world. It is published and maintained in Cairo, with contributions from journalists and researchers working in the region.

On the same hosting account are two additional popular blogs covering Arab culture and politics: Hatsheput, on women, society and academia; and 3arabawy, by Cairo-based journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy.

The Arabist came to Birdhouse looking for both WordPress expertise and bandwidth optimization assistance – we’ve been hard at work providing both.

Update: Five days after moving the sites over, many Egyptian ISPs are still pointing at the old host, which means the old “72 hours for global DNS updates” rule of thumb just ain’t true. The journalists are now trying to cover recent Egyptian riots, and many Egyptians aren’t able to see the updates. I’m getting hammered with requests to “do something,” but all I can do is to try and contact the Egyptian ISPs and ask them to please flush their DNS caches. No luck yet. Ah, the joys of running a hosting biz.

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Harvard Right To Serve

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes Harvard Right to Serve, a site promoting a student-developed program at Harvard University to put an end to the U.S. military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

“Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is perhaps the most discriminatory law in our country today. Since President Clinton signed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” into law in 1993 over 12,000 GLBT men and woman have been kicked out of the Armed forces because of their sexual orientation. The Harvard Right To Serve campaign is a student-led effort that seeks to end this injustice. From May 24-31, 30 students from Harvard University will embark a four city journey across America that will highlight the injustice of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” In each city one openly GLBT Harvard student will attempt to sign up for military service. When their desire to serve is rejected participants on the Harvard Right to Serve tour will sit-in at the recruitment station to highlight the injustice of denying a citizen the right to serve based solely on their sexual orientation.

Music: Jimmy Giuffre :: The Bird
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Apache, PHP Upgrades

PHP 4 is approaching EOL, and Birdhouse Hosting, like many hosts, has been in “pause” mode on the prospect of a PHP 5 upgrade for a while, cautious of the possibility of breaking customer scripts. We’ve also been running on Apache 1.3.x since forever. But after much research, finally decided it was safe to just go for it. Spent the afternoon and early evening compiling Apache 2.2.8 and PHP 5.2.5, all required modules, tweaking handlers, and taking care of a few post-upgrade burps. Everything seems to be running smoothly, with not a single customer complaint (let us know if you find anything not working!)

Stay tuned for a revamped hosting site and a new pricing structure in the coming months.

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Scalability Boot Camp

Loose notes from SXSW 2008 session “Scalability Boot Camp” with:

Blaine Cook Architect, Twitter Inc
Jakob Heuser Architect, Gaia Interactive
Alan Kasindorf MySQL DBA, SixApart
Sandy Jen Co-founder, Meebo
Kerry Miller Writer, passiveaggressivenotes.com

Good tips from diverse perspectives. Everyone on the panel admitted to having made huge scaling mistakes in the past, and to having learned critical lessons from real-world usage patterns.

Continue reading “Scalability Boot Camp”

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The Corny Crow Show

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes cornycrow.com, home of Corny the Crow and his ventriloquist friend Steve Cheney:

For 20 years Steve and his partner, “Corny Crow,” have presented their unique show for children and adults throughout Canada, from the east to west coast in the U.S. for fairs, festivals, schools and libraries. Either performing his hilarious show on stage or presenting his humor with a message to schools, Steve’s warmth and humor comes through in all his performances.

Music: Tortoise :: Tin Cans & Twine
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Chauncey Bailey Project

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes the Chauncey Bailey Project, investigating the death of, and continuing the work of, journalist Chauncey Bailey, who was recently murdered in the course of his reporting:

Bailey, the editor of the weekly Oakland Post, was murdered on Aug. 2 while reporting on a story regarding the suspicious activities of the Your Black Muslim Bakery. In an unusual collaboration, more than two dozen reporters, photographers and editors from print, broadcast and electronic media, and journalism students are launching the Chauncey Bailey Project – an investigative unit that will continue and expand on the reporting Bailey was pursuing when he was gunned down. Devaughndre Broussard, 19, a handyman for Your Black Muslim Bakery, has confessed to the crime, according to police, but many questions about the possible motive for the killing have yet to be answered.

Music: Robyn Hitchcock :: Shimmering Distant Love
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When Good Mail Goes Bad

Great way to wrap up a holiday: Agreed to take on a new Birdhouse client – a mid-size company who’s had a horrible email experience with their previous “top tier” provider. They had a dozen or so addresses; could we take them on? No problem. The old host had been storing a couple weeks worth of their mail, but there was no way to get it through to the mail exchanger for delivery. The old host agreed to relay it all to Birdhouse for processing.

That’s when things turned ugly.

Turns out the previous host didn’t have the basic common sense to discard mail to unknown addresses on the domain (it hasn’t been feasible to accept mail for unknown names, like balloon345@domain.com) for years. But they were not only accepting it all; they relayed it ALL to Birdhouse.

300,000 messages worth, 95% of which was theoretically discardable.

Unfortunately, discarding crap mail isn’t trivial when parsing a queue that large. Needless to say, things came to a grinding halt. Complicating matters was the fact that Birdhouse actually utilizes two mail queues: One for MailScanner, which pre-processes spam, and another for Exim, which is the actual mail transfer agent. The MailScanner queue was so large we couldn’t even get things out into the Exim queue. Exim documentation assumes a single queue, and MailScanner doesn’t offer the same range of queue management options that Exim does.

Which meant I got to script a solution, examining each messages on the pre-que to determine whether it was destined for a valid or invalid address, and dropping it if invalid.

The script is running now, but will take a while. All spectacularly unpleasant. Once again, wanting to skewer a spammer or two and painfully aware of how much of my time is consumed by fighting bad guys.

Progress updates on the Birdhouse System Status page.

Music: Andy Bey :: I Let a Sing Fo Out of My Heart
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Publishing Frontier

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes two great new media blogs:

pubfrontier.com: A raucous public discussion of the publishing revolution with an all-star list of contributors. “The goal of our site is to conduct provocative public discussion of the revolution that is happening in publishing and how it effects readers, society, economics, and fundamental values such as privacy.”

aliceinradioland.org: The blog portfolio of Pauline Bartolone — multimedia storyteller, radio producer and investigative reporter.

Music: Steve Coleman And Five Elements :: Twister
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101films.net

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes 101films.net, an informational site for an upcoming documentary film being made by a pair of J-School students.

This is the story of coming home from the war told through they eyes of veterans and their families – conveying the memories, flashbacks, and paranoia that continue to plague them long after the battle is over.

Music: The Hold Steady :: Citrus