hank@tardis:~$ wget -S http://www.ralree.com
--2009-06-30 09:52:13--  http://www.ralree.com/
Resolving www.ralree.com... 74.54.115.108
Connecting to www.ralree.com|74.54.115.108|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
 HTTP/1.1 200 OK
 Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:49:54 GMT
 Server: Apache/2.2.11 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.11 OpenSSL/0.9.7a Phusion_Passenger/2.1.3
   mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635
 X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.8
 X-Pingback: http://www.ralree.com/newblog/xmlrpc.php
 Last-Modified: Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:49:21 GMT
 X-Content-Security-Policy: allow self; img-src *; object-src *.ralree.com
  *.ralree.info; script-src *.ralree.com *.ralree.info pagead2.googlesyndication.com
  friendfeed.com; style-src *.ralree.com *.ralree.info
 Content-Length: 57457
 Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100
 Connection: Keep-Alive
 Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

As you can see, my content security policy is sent as an HTTP header on all HTTP responses from my site.  I basically stole an example from this page.  I’ve attached it in the .htaccess file in my site’s root, before everything else in there, like so:

<IfModule mod_headers.c>
Header set X-Content-Security-Policy "allow self; img-src *; object-src *.ralree.com *.ralree.info; script-src *.ralree.com *.ralree.info pagead2.googlesyndication.com friendfeed.com; style-src *.ralree.com *.ralree.info"
</IfModule>

I highly recommend everyone with commenting activated on their blog enable this, since XSS is a serious pain.  This seems to work very well on Site5, where mod_headers was simply enabled out of the box.

They might put you on a nice new server for this deal, but this is what I was put on over a year ago:

• Quad processor Xeon 5150 2.00GHz, 4MB cache per processor
• 4GB RAM and 8GB of swap
• load average: 3.54, 4.64, 3.90

Pingdom has analyzed Site5 and some other hosting companies recently. Here is a graph of its growth compared to other hosts:

As you can see, Site5 is a very slowly growing company that offers a great quaiity of service for a wonderful price.

Also, their domains are only $8.88/year, which isn’t too bad really. You can find $6 other places, but it’s pretty tough and those places can be shady… The plan also comes with unlimited subdomains, which is a feature I’ve really enjoyed (I have over 20). They take very little time to set up. I currently have 5 domains names hosted on my plan with Site5, 3 of which I registered through them. I’ve done speed testing in the past.

The best part is there is no risk, and I know that sounds like bull, but I’m telling the truth. You just cancel within 60 days, and they refund your money. If you want any kind of shared hosting, these are the guys to get it from.

$5 = 750GB Space, 7.5TB per month transfer

This is unbeatable – some of the best hosting ever

I use it for this site. If you need hosting, look no further.

For more technical information, read some of my other posts on Site5 hosting:

Site5 promo code for October

Site5’s Limited-Time 750GB/7.5TB offer!

Site5’s 5 dollar hosting deal gets better again

Site5 Doubles $5 Deal!

The Site5 deal just got better. Join now!

Site5 has been great hosting. The site you’re browsing now uses it. I bought this deal when it was 55GB of storage, 5TB of bandwidth, and 55 domain pointers. Now it’s 750GB, 7.5TB, and Unlimited domain pointers. It’s great Linux-based hosting that is Ruby and Rails friendly. They have support for every PHP application out there, as well as a great forum and wiki that can help you with just about any issue you have.

Here are some other posts I’ve made about it:

This one is from when they tripled their deal about a month ago. There is a bandwidth test in there that shows me getting 1.86 MEGABYTES per second transfer from them. They are not a slow host.

This one is from when they doubled the deal.

OK – I’m usually pretty critical in general, but this is the best hosting I’ve ever found, and it’s 3 times better than when I bought it, and it’s still the same price! So, you should click the image above and go sign up. These guys give you great support – I’ve contacted them numerous times and always had my problem solved within just a few minutes. I’ve noticed my site down once, and as soon as I emailed them, it was back up again. This blog is running Mephisto, a Ruby on Rails application, and it’s FAST! I barely ever see the kind of quick response from websites like I see from mine.

Features

• Full Ruby on Rails support. They have updated gems for you to use, but also allow you to keep your own gem repository in your home directory.
• Ready-to-go web applications with one-click installs
• Awesome tech support
• Very extensive wiki and forum where you can find out how to do anything you want with your account
• 165GB of storage!
• 5TB of bandwidth per month – which is great for transferring large files. I’ve never had a problem with the transfer speed, either.
• 165 domain pointers – This allows me to host all my domains with them. They have a great system for buying domains that I’ve used quite a bit too.
• Shell access
• Free setup!
• 60-day money back guarantee – If you don’t like it, you get all your bones back. How cool is that?

Benchmark

I have 16Mbit internet at home, and I decided just now to test the bandwidth of my site. Here are the results:

hank@rofl:/tmp$ wget -O /dev/null http://ralree.info/videos/grad.mp4
--00:50:57--  http://ralree.info/videos/grad.mp4
           => `/dev/null'
Resolving ralree.info... 70.47.124.108
Connecting to ralree.info|70.47.124.108|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 63,744,460 (61M) [audio/mp4]

100%[====================================>] 63,744,460     1.92M/s    ETA 00:00

00:51:30 (1.86 MB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [63744460/63744460]

Yes, folks, thats 1.86 MEGABYTES per second.

My Maximum at 16Mbit is 2 Megabytes/second, meaning this completely maxed out my connection.

I used to be a Dreamhost customer, and it sucked. It sucked really bad. I’m so glad I switched. Compare the features to any other plan you can find for $5/month. This is as good as it gets.

110 GB Storage

5 TB of bandwidth allowance per month

110 Domain Pointers

Free Setup

Ruby on Rails Friendly

I am currently using this plan for this blog, and am extremely happy with it after coming over from Dreamhost.

Sign up now!

My current host is Site5. I have gems set up in my home directory, and I have rails 1.2.2 installed as a gem. I tried using it, but just ended up freezing edge rails because I ran into some trouble. I created a db, subdomain, and .htaccess entry for the site. Then, I actually checked it out:

svn co http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/mephisto/trunk mephisto

Then, I created config/database.yml. Here’s a template you can use:

development:
  adapter: mysql
  database: mephisto
  username: meph
  password: <new-pw>
  host: localhost

production:
  adapter: mysql
  database: mephisto
  username: meph
  password: <new-pw>
  host: localhost

typo:
  adapter: mysql
  database: typo
  username: typo
  password: <typo-pass>
  host: localhost

Next, I installed tzinfo as a gem to my home directory, and froze it in the project root:

gem install tzinfo
cd mephisto
rake gems:freeze GEM=tzinfo

Finally, it’s time to fill the database with stuff:

rake db:bootstrap

Now that that’s done, for CGI and FastCGI to work, we need a .htaccess file in public:

AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi
AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
Options +FollowSymLinks +ExecCGI

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^$ index.html [QSA]
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [QSA]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.cgi [QSA,L]

ErrorDocument 500 "<h2>Application error</h2>Rails application failed to start properly"

Notice I left it as dispatch.cgi. It’s up to you, but while I was still converting I left it like this since it didn’t want to run with FastCGI.

Let’s make sure log and public can be read and, if need be, written to:

chmod -R 755 public log

And finally, the moment we’ve all be waiting for:

script/runner "Mephisto.convert_from :typo" -e production

This connects to the Typo database and runs a converter script in Mephisto’s vendor/plugins/ directory. It takes all the attributes Typo articles and users and comments had and converts them to Mephisto form. Rockin’.

Old Typo Woes

I did this with Typo trunk v1246 with migration level 55. If you are at a similar Typo state, then you may definitely want to continue reading as the next steps I took will be necessary for you as well.

First of all, I saw that my Markdown with SmartyPants formatting was not being interpreted at all! This was, of course, easy to fix because Mephisto is awesome:

./script/console
# Don't do this unless you ALWAYS used Markdown with SmartyPants
# Refer to vendor/plugins/filtered_column if you use Textile or straight up Markdown
# It's just a different a.filter= line below.
Article.find(:all).each {|a|a.filter='smartypants_filter';a.save};1

What this does is find all the Mephisto articles and set their filter to Markdown with SmartyPants. The 1 on the end just prevents it from spewing every article to the console.

Now here’s where I ran into some trouble. Typo has changed its Tag storage technique at least twice, and the way my tags happened to be stored is as follows:

articles
 - id
articles_tags
 - article_id
 - tag_id
tags
 - id
 - name

Someone else had posted a small loop to cure another type of Typo tagging scheme, where there was just one tag grouping string per article. I ran that. Don’t do that.

I noticed that each one of my articles only had one tag, which made me a sad monkey. To remedy this, I wrote a small loop to find all the tags of a Typo article and set them up for the same article in Mephisto. Now, since the id’s on articles and tags are not kept constant in the conversion scripts, this was a bit tricky. Luckily, I never have duplicate permalinks (I guess that means I’m creative…).

First, you have to enable the Typo converter in the console. I did this by adding these 2 lines to the bottom of vendor/plugins/mephisto_converters/init.rb:

require "converters/base"
require "converters/typo"

Then, it’s simply a case of the following:

./script/console
# Remove All Mephisto Taggings as to not make dupes
Tagging.find(:all).each{|t|t.destroy}
# Loop through every Typo article
#    Find the associated Mephisto article
#    Loop through all the Typo Tags
#      Append each tag to the Mephisto tag array
Typo::Article.find(:all).each do |ta|
  a = Article.find_by_permalink(ta.permalink)
  ta.tags(true).collect{|b|b.name}.each do |tag|
    a.tags(true) << Tag.find_by_name(tag)
  end
end

Don’t forget to remove the requires you put into init.rb above. Once you do that, you should have a nicely running Typo -> Mephisto conversion. Congratulations!