http://biowiki.sudosu.net

(I’m keeping the shitty first draft to myself, at least for now.)

(As it turns out, xkcd doesn’t mind when you use their content in a blog. See “Can we print xkcd in our magazine/newspaper/other publication?“)

I’ll be continuing this at the URL they suggested, and I’ll update this post.

I’ve been being bugged by legions of rabid fans to post these. (By “legions” I actually mean one person. And he isn’t rabid.) So I’m happy to have these up on the web! I think there are a few more stuck in folders on random hard drives — I’ll try and dig those up shortly.

I have no experience with Media Temple. But Grid-Server seems like one of the brilliant ideas that are obvious once someone else invents them. Oh sure, other people have done redundant web hosting before. Thousands of little guys plus Google, Amazon, Yahoo, MySpace, etc. are dividing web-hosting duties between many computers such that if one goes, down, the others can keep the website running.

But no commercial webhosting company I’m aware of currently offers grid-based hosting. This leads to outages and slowness for clients. DreamHost has had a number of recent problems. To their credit, they are quite open and honest about what went wrong. But there’s also a constant parade of announcements of servers going down for 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there for RAM upgrades, hardware replacements, etc.

There is NO REASON I can think of why my website, even at DreamHost’s low prices, should be dependent on ONE database server, ONE web server, and ONE file server. Any one of them goes down; my website goes down.

Creating a grid of dozens of computers, each of which can shuffle around websites to balance load or handle failures is not an easy task. It would take me loads of research before I was even ready to begin that sort of project, and I’d have to hire a team of people to do it. It’s a big deal.

On the other hand, it’s been proven that this sort of thing is possible. It’s not like we need basic research or feasibility studies. You can hire people who know how to do this if you’re willing to pay for it.

It’s not like this should be a tough decision for DreamHost. One of the primary benefits of this technology is to eliminate problems with over- and under-selling. The host has a pool of resources that can be grown incrementally, as resource use grows, without worrying about the growth rates of individual sites.

Sites have fewer worries about going down, both from the Slashdot / Digg effect, and from hardware failure or misconfiguration at the hosting company.

So why isn’t DreamHost doing this? My hope is that they’re already working on it — but I wish they’d let us know.

UPDATE June 9, 2007: This site is now hosted at NearlyFreeSpeech.net. So far, I love them. (An unfortunate truism of web hosting is that all hosts are great until they start to suck.) I’ve eventually been disappointed with every host I’ve tried. I host both personal and business websites; so far, pair.com and nearlyfreespeech.net are the only hosts on my “not sucking yet” list.

For now, I’m just making the edits. I think I’ll have a “cooling off period” just after I post where I’ll make any changes I feel are needed — and if I make changes long after a post is published, I’ll mark those changes on the post. We’ll see how it works out.