Thrust VPS experience: 3 weeks in

Up until recently I have been using Shared hosts for a few websites I have cooking. They provide a cheap, simple service which is great, but the fact that every time I want to set up a site I have to pay for it became a bit expensive and restrictive. I just wanted to do what I do at work, set a new virtual directory and drop the files in, and point the domain to that server. But obviously a dedicated server can end up expensive. So I started looking at VPS (Virtual Private Servers) which is basically a shared box, but you get your own installation of Windows or Linux to control as you like. Now, this can also get expensive and I was seriously considering £200-£300 a year for not brilliant specs.

So I Tweeted asking whether anyone had any suggestions. A few minutes later, a reply came in from a new startup called ThrustVPS. I went over to the website which, avast! a rare jewel, was a nice site. The prices were good and they supported both Windows and Linux servers. So I signed up. I didn’t pay much attention to how good support would be, how good the service would be. It was really a bit of a gamble. That gamble paid off. Here’s a quick rundown:

Support
I had a few issues at first. I emailed support, and 10 minutes later I had a reply with a solution straight away. In fact, a couple of times this has happened and each time it was resolved quickly, even when my question ended up well outside the scope of what they should be helping me with.

Service
Connection, speed and the reliability of the servers is excellent so far. I went for the Mystic plan for my Windows box, and Aquatic for the Linux box.

I recommend these guys highly, they are still small, they have servers in the US (west and east coasts) and the UK. I got a Windows install and have just got a lower end Linux install for my more PHP, Python, Rails projects. I’ll eventually move my blogs over there once I have a bit more time.

Cables Cables Cables

Just a little tip for y’all. If you buy a new printer with no cable, need a charger for your phone, need a USB cable for your phone, need an ethernet cable, it’s best to shop about. A question I get asked a lot is “I went to buy a printer cable the other day at PC World, and it was £13, should it cost that much?”. The straight answer is no. A USB printer cable should be quit cheap. In fact, I recently wanted to buy a new charger for my phone. I went to the Carphone Warehouse and it was £19!

So where should you look? Well, the answer is ebay, it’s quite obvious, but not obvious to all. You can then buy a printer cable for about £3, a charger for about £5, and ethernet cables, they will do made to order for a fraction of the price and more like how much you should be paying for cables. Those prices include delivery and are the top prices really.

If you can wait a day or 2, I’d recommend it this way.

2 kinds of support

It really is amazing what a difference to a service technical support makes and whether the team actually know what they are talking about. Recently I have had to contact 2 company support teams. One for Netgear, the other for Be Internet.

I contacted Netgear because my router was playing up. I wrote full details of the issue and what I had tried to fix the issue. A day later I received a message to reset my router etc. in fact, I was run through exactly what I had said I had done over about 7 messages before they misdiagnosed the issue and blamed it on my homeplug adaptors which the router wasn’t finding. In this case, they didn’t even try to read my initial message, but took me through the script they had and came up with an issue so wrong, as a normal user, I would have ended up with the router still faulty and sending back a second set of homeplug adaptors. I ended up having to suggest it was the router and they replaced it, as it was still under warranty (the adaptors were not) I received a new one, and it’s all good now.

Fast forward to this weekend. My broadband went down. A rare issue for my provider Be. I had forgotten I’d requested a change in my service requiring a different setup on my router. I called, waited a short time, then I got a chirpy Czech (I think) man who had read my message that my router wouldn’t get an IP address. I confessed that I did not have the original Be router, but one made by Netgear. He replied “we don’t support that router, but I know it well, so I can guide you”. See the difference? He went off piste! He actually surfs the internet and uses the products! In about 2 minutes I was back up and running. No ignoring my email and asking me whether my router was on, he’d done his homework before he diagnosed and fixed the issue. And they are consistently like this!

There are a lot of people out there who know how to use a product, and it’s this which makes the difference, not the quality of the script, because that 5% of the time when there really is an issue, you may need to actually know what you are talking about.

Multitask? Pah! You'll just complain

While I’m on the iPad tip. I wanted to get the multi-tasking issue off my chest. It plagues the iPad, iPhone, and soon the Windows Phone 7 I own none of these but want to take an unbiased view.

I agree with Apple (and really, Microsoft) though. GASP! I do though. Any good product manager or developer has to consider at least 1 thing about the user. The user is stupid. I don’t mean in a bad way, I mean, they don’t know how to use the product as well as they would. It makes for better product development. The iPad has, apparently, amazing battery life. Now, take your average user. They open Spotify, they open the Word processor, they open the browser, they open their Mail app. They keep doing this, and never close anything. That kind of behaviour is just dandy on a usual PC or Mac, the processor and RAM are ample. They can do this. On a mobile device, it isn’t so good, yet. The processor will be using all this and the battery will just die. I haven’t even started on the badly written apps that some guy with a Mac decided to try on his weekend to make a quid or two.

So if multi tasking was enabled. The user would be saying “since that latest update, the battery lasts 2 hours, it’s a crap product”. So either way, Apple and Windows Phone 7 can’t win.

However, there is a thing here. As my good friend and life mentor Mr Mathias Hellquist once told me. “Keep it Simple. If there is a way of faking it, fake it well and make it look like it’s working”. At a tech day by Microsoft I went to today, they really showed this. The new Windows phone OS is really damn nice. What they do is they don’t multi task, but they pause an application when the user opens another, they then allow it to stay in a state to receive notifications, taking up much less resources (and I think the iPhone does the same as well). It’s great, it looks like the process is running in the background, but really, it’s just faked. Excellent.

I think, even more than this, the developer should be able to opt to run one application in the background, e.g. an audio application. They could register as an audio app, then the user could only run 1 audio app at a time in the background. The device could then run a few categories that the user may want, but only have one of that category running. It still tricks the user, but they could listen to audio while emailing their someone else. It’s also as close to multi tasking without the potentially hundreds of apps (or even tens) running at the same time.

Anyway, until devices are more powerful, we have to put up with less multitasking, the iPhone, Windows Phone 7 (which, by the way, is really very nice. Microsoft gone and done good! Ground up re-builds always mean some serious work has gone in) and the iPad are all powerful, but they are not laptops with anything like the same power. My Android phone frequently runs out of battery and slows down to a crawl if I run multiple apps (Spotify and email simultaneously). It’s a great phone, but it is early days, and I know this, unfortunately, the general non-tech user just wants their stuff to work and don’t know/care about the ins and outs of it.

iPad about

Ok, so everyone is talking about this blasted iPad now. It’s been named the everything killer, the new world, the way cultures should have been in the beginning. lovely. The one quote I’ve had trouble with is “the ipad is for the normal stupid, non-techy user”. I have to say, I disagree. Ok, it is simple to use. It is a cut down OS, less to go wrong. I understand that. But I like to speak to normal, non-techy users about tech. My girlfriend and some of my best friends are a fairly good test bed, though they all understand tech a lot more than your average person still.

Now, if I said to a lot of these users “you’ll be able to read the newspaper on the bus with it”, they’ll come back with. “Yeah, but I can buy the newspaper for £1, that would make me have to buy 300 newspapers, then a new iPad would be out by then”. It’s the same if I said that you can read books, view films. They can buy a book, they can watch a film on their existing laptop. And I have to say, I don’t disagree with them. No one can explain to a normal user that the iPad is just sexy and it has a screen like they would to me. The average user wants function. Like their laptop which keeps on crashing, but it works with that trailer site they watch because their laptop has Flash. They can use word while listening to, I dunno, something cool on Spotify.

So take these semi tech users. Now take the older part of the population, who have no idea how all this works, and to them, an iPad is a new sanitary towel. Can we convince them? I’d like to see you try. No, I think the iPad is something I will buy because I know that I read RSS feeds every morning before embarking on my bus journey to work. Wouldn’t it be good to read RSS feeds on the bus? Yes. I could do it on my phone, but the screen is too small. I would like to just have a bigger screen. And I will justify it in some way, but it if it isn’t too much and I enjoy it But I don’t buy the idea that it is for the average man on the street who isn’t a techy because $500 or whatever the price is (for just the one without the 3G, which I reckon is essential, 3G will have extra cost there buddy) can buy you a good load of other stuff. For me, I want one ‘cos it’s nice, and it has a screen, and screens to me are like crack!

Hardware acceleration coming to the web

I surf the web possibly a little too much. I love discovering new things. I read blogs from comics and programming to ones about Georgian London. Flash and other animation/video tools on the web, though, can be quite expensive on my laptop (and possibly desktop, but really I don’t hear the fan spinning up). The issue, up till now has partially been Flash, as Steve Jobs puts it, being buggy and slow. But the other part is because the main computer processor alone has been used for rendering.

The issue with that is that while you have your browser of choice open and various other programmes, the processor (CPU) is used more intensively. You can generally afford it, but it can slow down your machine somewhat. It is especially difficult to know that happens when you have a decent graphics card (GPU) just sitting there doing very little (it’ll be used mainly for gaming, but not really so much for general surfing). GPUs are also easier to upgrade than a CPU.

More recently. Silverlight, Flash and in future versions, your browser have started supporting hardware acceleration, so instead of your main computer’s CPU heating up. Some of the graphical tasks can be farmed out to the GPU. It’s exciting because it means a faster browsing experience, which everyone loves, but also developers (and let’s not forget designers) can now go a little more nuts with sites and will be able to produce more exciting user experiences (hopefully not too exciting, we all still like browsing speed, obvously).

My reborn site

Well this weekend I spent a day rewriting my website. Seems a little brash for something which gets minimal visits, especially when I really can’t design well. But over the years it has been a canvas to just build something. Although it has looked the same since 2002 it has been re-written numerous times. from using tables, inline PHP to full CSS and OO PHP. This time round I decided to do it differently.

As a .net developer, PHP seemed a little like I really should actually use .net for my site. I used that and the new HTML 5 and CSS3. If this makes sense to you, no worries. These are the latest technologies. Some browsers don’t even support them yet. Basically, HTML and CSS3 has moved leaps and bounds from being a bit tricky to add design ideas like drop shadows and rounded corners, even forms are changing. And the best part is, if you are using an older browser, it should display nicely, just without a few of the nice bits.

In conclusion, I love HTML 5 and CSS3, they’re like the technologies that developers have been waiting for and the internet now seems bright and ready for some really impressive designs (web designer pending of course).