Posts Tagged rankbuzzard

Odd crashes lead to easy Linode upgrade

June 22, 2009 at 5:00 pm · Filed under rankbuzzard.com ·Tagged , ,

I’m hosting RankBuzzard on a virtual server hosted at Linode.  I initially signed up with their least expensive offering of $20/month.

This weekend I started observing some mysterious crashes on the server.  First I saw some failed queries into the Postgres database which stores RankBuzzard’s Django models.  Then, as I was investigating the cause of these errors, my Emacs quit with a simple “Killed” message.  Odd for sure.

I wondered if RankBuzzard’s database had outgrown the minimal 360MB allocated to my Linode 360 VPS.  After some basic resource checks that confirmed my suspicion, I decided to upgrade to a Linode 720.  The entire upgrade process, from filing a support ticket to clicking reload on RankBuzzard’s main page, took under 30 minutes.

All I had to do was:

  1. Submit a ticket requesting the upgrade,
  2. Shutdown my virtual server,
  3. Click a button that kicked off the migration process,
  4. Boot up the new virtual server.

The entire process was flawless.

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First version of RankBuzzard.com

April 14, 2009 at 4:02 pm · Filed under rankbuzzard.com ·Tagged , , , , ,

I spent the holiday weekend implementing a website using the Django web framework.  In just a few days, I managed to put together a fully functional website that displays Google Hot Trends data and collects user comments.  The general point might be described as “Why are these searches popular?”  You can see the results at RankBuzzard.com.

I last built a public website roughly 4 years ago, when I wrote imwatching.net (which is no longer up).  At a broad level, the two websites are similar.  Both collect time series data, put it in a database, and present it via HTML.  I built imwatching.net using a collection of perl scripts that used the CGI module.  I had no ORM.  I had to build my own user management logic.  I had no templating system.  As a result, it took me at least 3 or 4 times as long to develop imwatching.net.  The end result also wasn’t nearly as tidy and well structured as my implementation of RankBuzzard.com.

What’s more, I hosted imwatching.net on a dedicated server that I rented from serverbeach.com for roughly $100/month.  Although I was happy with the quality of the server, the $100/month cost ultimately caused me to close the site.  Now I’m paying $20/month for a virtual server at linode.com.  Although it’s not a direct comparison, I’m been very happy so far with the service at linode.com.

Hopefully some people will find RankBuzzard interesting, informative, and fun.  I have several ideas for how to improve it, and I plan on adding to it when I find the free time over the next few weeks.

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