Haloscan is down again:
I’m working on the server scripts so for around 1 hour comments will be unavailable.
That was definitely more than an hour ago. I don’t understand why they go down for maintainence so often.
I’ll probably regret this later, but because of these frequent outages of the comments, I was thinking of getting some webspace and using Movable Type. Being a poor student and all, I went ahead and put both Paypal and Amazon donation buttons on the left. Feel free to donate. Or not. Thanks.
zack – check out enetation.co.uk, much more reliable (and free).
Movable Type is free too, it’s the webhosting that costs money
well-you could host it at your university couldn’t you? find an old dusty computer in the corner of your lab
also, webhosting is cheap, you can get decent stuff for $5/month. i pay $7/month for 400 MB of space, 8 GIG bandwidth and PHP/MySQL & perl*.
of course, if you visit my site, you know that it isn’t exactly 99.99% uptime but that’s why it’s $7/month-the extra 30 or 40 others spend is for the last .09%-99.9% is good for a hobby….
good luck.
* you might be able to pay as little as $3/month, all you need is perl really for MT. also-i get about unique 390 visits per day (being a little conservative, according to my other site meter it is more like 450) and move about 2.5 GIG month….
Last week I upgraded my plan due to a recent surge in traffic, but my previous plan would easily cover the traffic mentioned here; it was $9.99 a month. I agree with Razib; you can get the features for less, but you also may compromise on stability. Or you may find limits on the number of server resources you can use (MT can be pretty resource-intensive at times). My personal experience has been that if you want both the features and the comfort of knowing your site and your blogging system will always be up and running, you won’t get it for much less than $10 a month.
i disagree that MT is resource intensive though, i generates .html files periodically when you ‘rebuild,’ but the only dynamic element is when you are making changes. this excludes the possibility of PHP extensions and what not that execute every time someone loads a page-though i can’t see what you would need that for….
Razib: Regarding hosting it on a university computer, I can’t do it on a random machine because of firewall & policies etc. If I do it on my personal machine, the computer gods at my school might get angry.
I actually like Al-Muhajabah’s previous plan. It has 20GB bandwidth which is good since I plan on posting more photographs.
Aziz: Thanks. In terms of features and aesthetics I like Haloscan better than enetation, but I might have to switch because of reliability.
Razib – MT can be pretty resource intensive during the rebuilds. At one time last fall, I was having a major problem with the webhost’s “reaper” killing off my rebuilds for taking up too many resources. Fortunately they seem to have made some changes when they upgraded their servers a few months ago. I still occasionally see the problem when comments are being posted, but not nearly as much as before.
I spend a lot of time in the MT support forums and this is an issue that comes up regularly.
al-muh, good to know. prolly cuz they do it as “CGI,” which has to start a new process all the time. JSP/servlets would fix that since the servlet is technically the same one all the time, but well, it tends to wack out a lot too.
good luck zack. 20 GIG bandwith? i just steal bandwidth from images.google.com