Time to check out linux
My website is toast again. I've got to get my machine back off its knees, but the bigger issue is that hosting at home is crap for a couple of reasons; firstly, my outgoing bandwith is 64K, which isn't too bad for web pages but makes downloading crappy for users (I've been hosting files for download on a friend's machine until recently, but that seems to have fallen through so I'm stuck there too), and secondly I don't run a professional 24x7 computer facility in my study, so my machine is down more often than not. Also, the machine my website is (was) on is actually my daughter's machine, running xp pro, so it doesn't allow multiple web sites and just isn't a server.
Anyway, all that leads me to look at web hosting possibilities outside my own home network, and see that the Linux based solutions are *far* cheaper than the windows based ones. I guess those license fees are killers. I'm becoming ever more heavily immersed in .net based software development professionally, and am thinking that I may be able to to my personal sites as asp.net apps running on linux, using either mono or grasshopper as the first two options that I've become aware of.
Looking at hosts, the best looking one I've found so far is these guys at grokthis.net. They seem to have mono available on the advanced plans, and it's only $19.95/month for 768mb of space or $29.95/month for 1.5gb. I'll keep looking and see if I can find better, but that seems absolutely reasonably, it comes with mysql I think (so I've got a database) very cool.
My aim, as is implied above, is to be able to use my existing .net developing skills (which are improving over time as I work more with it) to build my sites on Linux. With the above plan, I've got asp.net with a database, and a pretty good amount of space to host my music, the little utilities I write, etc etc. Mental note: I must check that they allow .mp3, .exe, and .zip files!
Maybe an alternative is to use grasshopper, which converts a project from .net to j2ee, and then look for a linux host that supports j2ee? Sounds a bit funkier, but I wont know until I check it out.
To that end, I'm pursuing the following investigations:
1 - Download and install a linux distro on a VMWare machine, get it working happily. I might look at Debian first, only because the grokthis.net machines run Debian distros.
2 - Get a web server working on the linux box. Apache I guess.
3 - Get mono working on the linux box, in conjunction with the next step...
4 - Write a small asp.net app (under windows) that does some kind of processing, and see if I can get it to work on the linux box. No database access at this stage, that looks to be the bit that's going to be tricky
5 - Now get the app to do database access. I'm probably going to target mysql, but that's going to be tough unless there is a mysql for windows. Maybe there is? Otherwise, I need to find out if mysql can be on another box, and I can talk to it from windows. Hmm.
If I can come out positive on all these steps, I'll be bloody happy! If I hit significant roadblocks, I might try the grasshopper route as an alternative.
So, hopefully I'll get around to blogging all this as I go, to keep a record of my investigations and the results, which might turn out to be useful to someone else one day!
Anyway, all that leads me to look at web hosting possibilities outside my own home network, and see that the Linux based solutions are *far* cheaper than the windows based ones. I guess those license fees are killers. I'm becoming ever more heavily immersed in .net based software development professionally, and am thinking that I may be able to to my personal sites as asp.net apps running on linux, using either mono or grasshopper as the first two options that I've become aware of.
Looking at hosts, the best looking one I've found so far is these guys at grokthis.net. They seem to have mono available on the advanced plans, and it's only $19.95/month for 768mb of space or $29.95/month for 1.5gb. I'll keep looking and see if I can find better, but that seems absolutely reasonably, it comes with mysql I think (so I've got a database) very cool.
My aim, as is implied above, is to be able to use my existing .net developing skills (which are improving over time as I work more with it) to build my sites on Linux. With the above plan, I've got asp.net with a database, and a pretty good amount of space to host my music, the little utilities I write, etc etc. Mental note: I must check that they allow .mp3, .exe, and .zip files!
Maybe an alternative is to use grasshopper, which converts a project from .net to j2ee, and then look for a linux host that supports j2ee? Sounds a bit funkier, but I wont know until I check it out.
To that end, I'm pursuing the following investigations:
1 - Download and install a linux distro on a VMWare machine, get it working happily. I might look at Debian first, only because the grokthis.net machines run Debian distros.
2 - Get a web server working on the linux box. Apache I guess.
3 - Get mono working on the linux box, in conjunction with the next step...
4 - Write a small asp.net app (under windows) that does some kind of processing, and see if I can get it to work on the linux box. No database access at this stage, that looks to be the bit that's going to be tricky
5 - Now get the app to do database access. I'm probably going to target mysql, but that's going to be tough unless there is a mysql for windows. Maybe there is? Otherwise, I need to find out if mysql can be on another box, and I can talk to it from windows. Hmm.
If I can come out positive on all these steps, I'll be bloody happy! If I hit significant roadblocks, I might try the grasshopper route as an alternative.
So, hopefully I'll get around to blogging all this as I go, to keep a record of my investigations and the results, which might turn out to be useful to someone else one day!
posted by Unknown at 9:03 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home