Lessons from Hosting a Website

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:46:29 GMT

You might have noticed that the getahead.org domain has been replaced by directwebremoting.org. There’s a story behind it ...

3 years ago when DWR started to be successful, I bought 2 identical servers, built them identically with the latest Debian, and latest Drupal, bought some hosting space for one of the servers and kept the other at home as a backup with a nightly rsync, and thought I was doing a good job of managing a website.

The first thing to go wrong was Drupal dropping support for several of the modules that we were using: the theme engine, and the wiki module. So we were stuck on an old version of Drupal unless we spent lots of time recreating the themes and updating all the content. Lesson: 3rd party modules are OK but don't depend on them in a big way.

We realized we needed to upgrade, but it was a big job and when I began talking to the Dojo Foundation about them hosting DWR and talking to SitePen about me working for them, it seemed sensible to do the upgrade when we moved to Dojo Foundation hardware.

Then the backup died. Is it just me or does everyone assume that the live server will die first? We hoped that we could get everything onto the new hardware before the live server died.

The bad news is, but if you buy identical bits of hardware, then there is a good chance that they will have identical failings. That proved to be true in our case and we ended up with a huge rush to get everything moved to new servers, which included a fair bit of downtime. Sorry if it affected you.

I’m not sure if this is a reason to buy different hardware, where do you stop after all? Do you insist on different copper vendors for the power cable? The lesson is - if you discover a hardware fault in some part of a live site, the same thing is likely to happen to other identical hardware.

The good news is that the DWR website is now back on new hardware and a new URL. http://directwebremoting.org/dwr/. We’ve tried really hard to ensure we’ve got re-directs for all URLs, but please give us a shout if you notice that anything is 404ing.

Laptop Warranty Scams

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 09:59:05 GMT

Do you buy an extended warranty when you buy a new laptop? I think there might be good reasons for buying - and with Dell, at least, there might be a warranty scam.

Outside of computers, electrical stores push extended warranties quite hard (at least they do in the UK, I can't say I've bought a Hi-Fi, etc in the US). Clearly they do this because they make money from it and this means that for most people, the extended warranty will be a loosing proposition.

However I strongly suspect that laptops are different - I always buy extended warranties on laptops and I've never lost out so far; the extended warranty has always cost me less than repair costs.

I accept that I'm not statistically significant, so I'd be interested in your comments. I'm also aware that manufacturers must do the sums, and on the face of it you'd expect that they wouldn't be giving handouts. But hang on...

If extended warranties were a win for the laptop retailers, you'd expect then to push them harder, but in my experience they don't, and this really tells when your warranty runs out. My experience of both Dell and others of Apple is that neither of them remind you when your warranty has run out. You have to remember yourself. It's almost as if they don't want you to take them up on the offer.

Maybe laptop manufacturers have to offer extended warranties or their goods look shoddy. And they charge the most they can, but if they charge too much, their goods look like they are expected to break.

So for many manufacturers the extended warranty is a loss leader. They charge what they can, but they are never going to cover their costs.

To some extent Apple looks bad compared to Dell - it costs around 50% to insure a MacBookPro than it does for an Inspiron. Are Inspirons really that much more reliable? Maybe Dell want you to think so. Maybe Apple feel they can charge more for offering you a Genius in a black t-shirt. Either way, you should probably always buy extended warranties.

But there's more. I think there's a scam with Dell warranties.

My Inspiron recently refused to boot. Again. (To date, I've had the screen and motherboard replaced - maybe I'm up for another motherboard)

I checked the extended warranty site to discover that my warranty had run out without warning. However, I was allowed to buy another one! So it appears that you can wait until your laptop breaks and then purchase an extended warranty. If your laptop doesn't break then you win. If it does break then you get the fix for the cost of the extended warranty.

Apple seems to be wise to this - they don't allow you to buy an extended warranty once the original has timed out. Is this a scam against Dell?

Joe Walker - hardware tag

Lessons from Hosting a Website

Laptop Warranty Scams