New Website Coming Soon...

Category: Random | 4 Comments | 7th April 2008

Well it's been a busy week for me. I have recently decided to switch my host. Currently this site is hosted with Heart Internet. Now don't get me wrong, Heart Internet are great hosts, well most of the time... I have to say at this point that their customer service is second to none! Its Awesome!

Anyway, the reason for a switch. I have been developing some new sites, one of them was mentioned in a previous post - dictionaryoffilm.com another is the recently created riggoceanracing.co.uk. In order for the domain names to be used with heart, you either have to set them to forward to a folder on the main domain e.g jdpictures.co.uk/riggoceanracing/ or buy a seperate hosting package which is rather costly.

Another problem with Heart Internet is that the package I use is a shared server - this means that my site is hosted on a server with some other sites - my friend Jonny's site sprayfly.com is hosted on the same server, but we have different accounts. This is fine, until lots of people access your site at once. If your site suddenly uses a lot of bandwidth, it can basically jam up the server and Heart Internet will suspend the site so that other sites hosted on that server are not affected. This is a good safety measure, but it's exactly what happened to jdpictures a while back - I think a whole load of students in a computer room in a school in the south of England all tried to watch a video at the same time and over the course of 15 mins my site had a massive spike loading. Heart suspended my account and quite rightly so.

I was doing a little digging and came across a hosting company called Media Temple. They run a service called a Grid Service. This technology hosts your site over a grid of servers, so if the site is suddenly visited by thousands of visitors, the site is dynamically hosted over more servers. This means an account will never be suspended because of a bandwidth spike! Awesome!

Gosh I am waffling a bit now! To cut a long story short, jdpictures is moving to across to Media Temple. But it is currently running on a rather bloated installation of wordpress. Now wordpress is a fantastic cms and blogging solution but its not as good as a custom built site could be!

I learnt a lot from creating riggoceanracing.co.uk the first mysql based site I have built from the ground up, so the new jdpictures site will be amazing. Its going to use some of the latest web technologies - spry, mootools, and other javascript frameworks to make a rich user friendly dynamic site that will put it light years ahead of any other film studio!

Watch this space...

4 Comments so far...

Jonathan Lumb
07.04.2008 / 10pm

Looks like the move has gone smoothly then (I'm assuming this is now on Media Temple and not on heart). I look forward to seeing more posts on your blog soon - as well as seeing the new website design you are working on. Didn't realise you are now getting deep down and dirty with PHP/MySQL... I wish I had the time! Sigh...

Jacob Deane
09.04.2008 / 12am

This site is still on heart. As I said I am completely rebuilding and getting rid of wordpress. Although hopefully you wont realise! Jonny: If you want to check out what I am doing check the development url for jdpictures.co.uk at Media Temple!

Jonathan Lumb
14.04.2008 / 2am

So... you're not even going to keep wordpress for the actual 'blog' section of your site then?

Jacob Deane
14.04.2008 / 3pm

Nope. I am recreating the blog exactly as it was, comments and all, but it will be much easier to tweak to my exact needs! I think I can get my entire site to run on 3 sql tables which is considerably neater than wordpress! All my pages are much smaller as there is no rubbish left by plugins for other pages - I don't need to load the contact form code for any page other than the contact page, so why should I? The result should be a super light, super quick totally custom built monster of a website! There will be a lot of new cool features and the whole site will be even more dynamic than before. On wordpress I had to manually create front page items for each new film and I had to manually type the code to make the flvs play - now it is all completely dynamic I just add the film to the database! The same approach goes to the news articles although this was pretty good on wordpress!

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