Corvus Consulting

This post is 95% guaranteed to be uninteresting unless unless you’re curious about mish-mash hosting setups for small sites, and why you might have gotten a bounced email in the last couple weeks.

The hosting provider I’d been using, Planet Argon, had sent notice about a restructuring of services that would have put my hosting costs from the dramatically affordable $50/year to $60/month. They’re going after bigger fish. And that’s fine, I wish them well.

“Where should I host the customized Typo that is the Corvus website?” I submitted to Twitter. I got a handful of suggestions, and Slicehost ended up being the best option at their $20/month level, giving 10gb of storage and 100gb of bandwidth. Ample for my needs, and affordable.

Slicehost lets you create virtual machines: you choose the flavour of Linux and web server, and it’s yours to dress up as you see fit. I created my machine (my slice as Slicehost calls them) in all of 3 minutes. With some help from a Adam, a Rails developer I’ve worked with, the blog was totally recreated and running nicely. This was all according to what I expected from previous hosting experiences.

Then came the bit that was new to me: email servers don’t come with the slices, in the same way that they don’t come with a fresh Linux box. That’s in your court, but before knowing that I pulled the plug on Planet Argon. Doh!, and a few bounced emails. Apologies if that happened to you.

Adam suggested running the Corvus email through Google Apps for Business, where GMail does the sending and receiving but everything appears as my domain. It’s not that hard to set up, but it is more involved than the usual POP and SMTP settings. Though a bit of extra work, this setup brings definite advantages compared with running my own mail server. Adam explained that each email server is a mini-front ripe for attack by spammers, and as such needs ongoing management:

While I understand it’s a few more steps, having to deal with your own setup can be a real nightmare. SSH’ing in and seeing your server crippled by 100,000 emails routed through your IP isn’t a pleasant situation (and your domain will end up on a blacklist, too). Sure, this can be prevented with a proper installation and constant upkeep, but the spammers tend to find a way. Putting that responsibility in Google’s hands gives us more time for creative tasks. That is, unless you enjoy installing and maintaining sendmail, qmail, pop3 and smtp dameons, spam assasin, etc… the list goes on.

I can’t put it better than that. For my needs, the Google Apps offering is free, which is actually very generous and appreciated.

So the personal stack for a self-managed web presence and email ends up being:

Slicehost (the ‘hardware’, OS, web server and pipe to the Internets)
• Ruby on Rails
• Typo (the RoR-based blog platform
• Google Apps for Business
• MarsEdit and OS-X Mail, for publishing and communicating

The cost of doing all this has been very affordable, and breaks down like so:

• Slicehost – $20/month,
• Ruby on Rails and Typo – free
• MarsEdit (1-time purchase) – $30
• Typo customization and design – about $2500

You really can do quite a lot with just a few inexpensive or flat-out free pieces. Though many days are a struggle to get what we want out of the web, it’s good to take note every so often of how accessible some previously tougher things have become.