Category: Blogging

Only One 2011 Resolution: Catching Up on my Eternal Backlog

Clog with Backseat

  1. Backlog I said, not BackClogged…However this photo with two of my travel blogging and Twitter buddies, Darren Cronian (@Travelrants) with Kayt Sukel (@TravelSavvyKayt) in the Clog’s backseat, is symptomatic for my eternal backlog. May 14, 2010, I had organized a small Travel Tweetup in The Hague and the Keukenhof with two additional travel bloggers. I even haven’t reported about it properly. Only by the date the photo has I can remember the date of the fine day we had. And I do have a couple of great photos yet to share of that day…and tons of other photos to address as well..
  2. My 2010 sole New Year’s resolution was finalizing the move from a static site to a dynamic site for Haagsche Suites. Even that is not finalized yet.
  3. I have around 300 draft posts spread over 2 blogs. So the first step in decreasing the numer is sharing these links of one of my oldest draft posts still viable and maybe worthwhile to browse: Being Peter pointed me to Blog Council Org, what is now Social Media Org a sort of platform for blogging fortune 500 companies.

Happy 2011 to all of my readers!

Migrating to a VPS Cloud Solution

VPS logo "in tha cloud"

After migrating to Westhost, two months ago, I’ve been looking at the performance of this site. Luckily the visitors have been coming back slowly, but gradually. Thank you all!

However I was not content with the load time. In addition, in the future I want to deploy the photos via a CDN (Content Delivery Network) so I’ve decided to migrate to VPS Net Cloud Hosting. I can assure you this is not for the faint hearted. More to follow after the migration has been completed..

I would like to thank the people at Westhost for their patience and support. If your site is not as heavy as this one (in combination with my other projects) Westhost is the hosting provider to be. I’ve left hosting of one project with them anyway.

During the two months hosted there, there were only 12 minutes of downtime. With my former hosting company I have experience hours of downtime…..

Lessons Learned

A cloud hosted VPS is a Virtual Private server that operates in a cloud. The difference from a normal VPS is that when one data centre goes down another center takes over from it. As VPS says it:

Our VPS cloud architecture is designed from the ground up with redundancy at its core. A traditional server always has a single point of failure; a hard drive, a power supply, a power outage. Our virtual private server cloud uses a RAID 10 SAN system, powered by Cisco network hardware, allowing virtual machines to be quickly moved to new hardware in the event of a failure.

This is the site as at VPS Net

Again it is a matter of a lot of commercial and or technical talk and things they don’t tell you.

  1. Neither Yoast, nor VPS, tell you the learning curve is so steep that you should not try to set up your own VPS if you only have a scanty knowledge of Cpanel and how DNS work like I had. If for instance, if you are a bit familiar with Cpanel already, be warned that a VPS Cpanel and a User Cpanel are two completely different matters, let it be trying to understand their inter operability.
  2. Somehow I miss an article at VPS that describes what the maintenance of your own setup precisely could entail. In other words VPS should give more insight what managed hosting precisely does.
  3. VPS has a wiki that only gives some scanty information. Be sure, before you head over to VPS, you have read and re read their entire features, their entire wiki their entire faq and their entire blog.
    Especially from the blog you should read:

    • Moving to the Cloud: Creating your first account in cPanel
    • Moving to the Cloud: Your First ISP Manager
    • VPS.NET 8/20/2010 Weekly Update Introduction of Jumpbox. An out of the box VPS WordPress installation. May work if you have one Blog, may not work if you have several blogs…
    • Using VPS.NET’s DNS Servers with the cPanel DNS Plugin..This confuses me no end! (see 5 below)
  4. When migrating servers in shared hosting you usually get a temporary name to access your site via a browser. It is not easy to see how to get such access in VPS. The advantage is that you don’t start repairing a migrated WordPress installation using the temporary name and break al the links to your photos….If I would have known 2 months ago that you can buy a month of managed service from VPS including a setup fee and thereafter can cancel the managed hosting and go on with self hosting, then I would not have migrated to Westhost. I would have jumped into the VPS hosting right away. It would have saved me days and nights of work. The trick is that in one way or another you should have your own IP number. With your own IP number you are less likely to install your WordPress blog on a temporary address. If your not savvy with .htaccess and MySQL, you’re likely to end up like me spending days and nights of manually adjusting urls of your photos. The migration of my 2 main sites only cost 2 to 3 hours. After they were migrated they seemed perfectly in order.
  5. All in all the managed migration went reasonably quick and well. However I had chosen to flip the DNS at my registrars after the migration. That cost me another two days and many tickets getting it resolved.
    A nifty tool to remember is this What’s My DNS which helps you seeing the propagation of your DNS servers.
    I have domains registered at 4 instances: 3 servers of my ex host and 1 server at Westhost. One of my questions is: VPS makes it not clear whether you should transfer the registration of your domains to VPS or not. What are the advantages and what the disadvantages? Another question is. If it is advised to transfer a domain from your current registrar to VPS, where can you do that on VPS’s site?
  6. Things VPS could should clarify in addition to other issues mentioned before:
    • VPS suggests you can try it out for yourself when you buy a node for one day for $, but it is not clear that if you want to check it out with CPanel, you’ll have to buy a Cpanel licence for a whole month ?…
    • If you have setup a server with a paid license for for instance Cpanel, you shut it down and you start a new server with Cpanel…you get another bill for Cpanel…
    • Comparing VPS with Westhost now, I noticed that their online chat response times and ticket response times are slower than Westhost’s. I assume that this is because the VPS peeps are maybe more in the clouds that the down to earth Westhost peeps….
  7. Finally I’m not yet sure the load time has become faster after the migration… [Update: at December 8, 2010 the propagation of the DNS servers seems complete and I measure a nifty 2.5 @ 3 secs as opposed to 8 or more secs, but this is Europe]

Last edited by GJE on December 8, 2010 at 4:48 pm

Josiah Mackenzie at BTO

Buy Tourism Online 2010 – Josiah Mackenzie presentation

View more PowerPoint from josiahmackenzie

Josiah Mackenzie at BTO

It was a busy week on the travel and social media front. First I would like to share with you the keynote of my blogging friend Josiah McKenzie @Hmarketinghelp of Hotel Marketing Strategies. at the Buy Tourism Online (BTO) conference in Florence. It’s an instructive introduction for hoteliers why and how they should be involved in social media.

Update

Originally I’d embedded a great video here, but that sadly disappeared. Hence I’ve embedded Josiah’s slideshow.

Last edited by GJE on March 13, 2012 at 12:57 pm

My Impressions from a Thought Provoking TBCamp10

The TBCamp10 After Party was best

The TBCamp10 After Party was best!

I’ve attended TBCamp10 with my camera that some people envy. They probably don’t know the actual weight of the darn thing when hanging from your shoulder all day.

  1. Darren (of Travel Rants) was able to secure the help of a very nice lady to hand out name tags which were new for the event. Mind you, he had single handedly printed the lot as almost single handedly he has succeeded to create the third edition of this event. Thank you Darren for organizing it again.
  2. What I have missed in preparation of the venue is:
    A) A list of attendants. Darren has given a link to a list that seems having disappeared.
    B) An introduction to the speakers.
    Why is that important to me? Then I’m more able to mind map those who are attending.
    On the other hand this is not so bad because now, as usual, I let my camera is find its own interesting people.
  3. When I entered the venue I was met by a welcoming warm sound wall of conversation. Travel bloggers do relate!
  4. The venue was huge. Approximately 130 to 150 bloggers and PR types and hangers on around and about. Not until after the venue I realized there were many of high profile types. Off course with such a huge group it is not easy to relate to all who I would have liked to relate to.
  5. Amazingly Kevin (of Tnooz) got the posse totally quiet as a good moderator. He introduced the sponsors and the speakers. After that everybody was amazingly quiet during the speeches certainly when taking into consideration how chatty and outspoken bunch travel bloggers usually are.
  6. What also amazed me that 2/3 of the attendants rushed out as soon as the last speaker had stopped. That was at around 9.30 far before the anticipated 11.00 PM closing. These people didn’t grasp the whole idea of the venue: Getting to know each other better irl…..
  7. Being concentrated more on catching the people with my camera, I hardly paid attention to the discussions, but am glad some people published what they said and thankful to be able to read back some tweets.
  8. I have the impression this is a very British event. Although I’m reasonably well versed in the English language, some of the discussions are too fast for me and maybe a bit insiderish… Brits remain Brits, they can discuss in circles and they are masters of the understatement.
  9. Avatars do matter! especially at such venues. If you enter a room full of people you haven’t met irl, it is always helpful to relate a person to their twitter account or their blog. Therefor I’ll illustrate this by giving away prices here for those who are most true to their avatar.
  10. Sadly loads of people were there I would have liked to communicate with…well maybe next time
  11. What I hope will happen is a nice roundup from various people who attended. After Sales service for an event is also very important.
  12. Oh yes, as usual, I got carried away…, before I forget: Why was the event Thought Provoking?
    1. Of all people attending only one raised his hand when asked “Who makes more than UK pnd 1,000.- per month from his blog?”. (I know of some who were not attending among one who was tweeting from her HQ as if she was attending)
    2. Traditional Printed Press is experimenting with paid travel content and proudly announcing they have approximately 100 K paying customers…(but see a former competitor comment below) .
    3. Travel bloggers do relate and I feel at home with them!
    4. Buddy Press is not where it should be…whenever I’ll create a community I’ll be going to use the paid Ning thingy
    5. The after party in the Beduin bar was best…luckily the taxi driver found my personal B&B back for me.
    6. Online communications almost only mobile…a year ago almost unthinkable

Okay publishing it to be fast… Will be fleshing it out to be complete… soon…also as usual:-)…but first uploading the 300 something photos….[update: here they are via Fluidr ]

Check out these:

Last edited by GJE on November 13, 2010 at 00:20 AM

Where are They Hosting?


During my research into a reliable web hosting alternative I had discovered Wikipopia (formerly Serversiders), but Wikipopia disappeared since and I found similar tools at Whoishostingthis and Whois Domaintools

So I’ve checked a couple of sites randomly to see where they are being hosted:

(Random) Updates

  • The reason I’m sharing this with you is that there are several pitfalls in the hosting trajectory. One of them is Load Time. With firebug I’ve tested the load speed of several sites mentioned above and am not really impressed. Some SEO guru claimed that every 500 miliseconds your site loads faster, your conversion betters 20%. So my focus currently is on load time.
  • I also found out that my Dutch hosting company is a reseller rather than a dedicated hosting company.
  • WordPress itself recommends hosting hosting companies. Plus recently it introduced Vip Hosting, only for the happy few.
  • Mashable and Techcrunch show load times up to 20 seconds! How come they keep being successful?
  • Booking.com, the online OTA (=On Line Travel Agent) has an amazingly short load time, less than 3 seconds. Moreover It feels slick. Same with Tripadvisor, the online review company about 2 seconds…
  • I prefer my blogs to be photo rich. Problem that causes is long load times. Since Happy Hotelier is now hosted in the US, while it used to be hosted in The Netherlands I all of a sudden see my page load time doubled or tripped. Probably because each tiny little file has to cross the Atlantic Exchange.
    I’m considering upgrading my hosting package to virtual cloud hosting, but that may be too expensive.. Another way is deploying images over a free or paid CDN (Content Delivery Network). But you could also consider to trim your blog in other ways. I’ve found some great posts in that respect:

    1. Speed Up WordPress – Ultimate Guide to make Sites Super Fast
    2. 38 Ways to optimize and speed your WordPress Blog
    3. It would have saved me tons of time if I had known this little trick on beforehand: Host Images in Subdomain

    .

Last edited by GJE on December 5, 2016