In my last post I described I gave a primer outlining the differences between using shared hosting, having a full fat dedicated server to run your website on. I also explained why Virtual Private servers represent the best of these two worlds, and how finding a good affordable green host  was much harder than it really needs to be.

In this post, I'm going to outline what I'm looking for in a hosting company - to give an idea of what my priorities are when finding a host, and the reasons for my critieria. In the next post, I should have enough data back to share my final results.

The ideal host I'm looking for would:

1) Be based in the UK, or alternatively, the EU.

There are two main reasons for this:

1) Support -

Having someone speak the same language as you makes life much simpler when you have support questions. Having them exist in the same time zone also helps.

2) Data protection

Personal data is essentially radioactive - fairly harmless in small amounts, but when you collect and store it carelessly, losing track of it is increasingly dangerous, expensive. There is a strong temptation to store data with cheap hosting companies in the US, but in the EU data protection laws are far more stringent, with far more restrictions on what information can be passed on to third parties, so by storing data closer to home, you can argue that you are voluntarily subscribing to a much more rigorous legal framework than if you were choosing to store all your data in a region where privacy laws were weaker.

However, if you are storing your data in the US, you should be aware of the Safe Harbour agreement. You can think of as set of principles designed to emulate the EU data protection laws, which should provide some public statement of intent for the care you take with people's data. The thing is, organisations gain this status by self-certifying as Safe Harbour complaint, with no legal obligation for a third party to audit this status, so you're effectively asked to just take a company's word that they voluntarily take the same care with data as would be required by law over here in the EU. 

2) Source its power responsibly

The best case scenario for our hypothetical data centre is one that sources its power exclusively from renewable sources. By doing business with the company, we're helping grow the market for renewable energy, which desperately needs to happen. Sadly, there are very few companies who source their energy like this, b) there simply isn't much capacity in the UK right now. a) mainly because the idea of buying your power from the most expensive source possible when it's usually the single biggest cost of your company is financially quite a painful decision to make.

In this case, offsets to cancel out the unavoidable leftover emissions are basically unavoidable. Where they are used, offsets that go towards investing in renewable power are more attractive option, because they stop more coal fired power stations being built, so the carbon is saved straight away, compared to than simply planting trees in the hope that over the next 20 or so years, they'll eventually make up for the carbon dioxide that was pumped into the atmosphere today.

3) Uses the power that it does suck off the grid as efficiently as possible.

This isn't such a huge ask for a supplier; and the costs of power are simply so high, and the savings available are so obvious (40-50% savings in power aren't uncommon) that this step is happening by default. The degree that companies are doing so, and their willingness to openly discuss what steps they are taken are good indicators of how seriously they take this, and how well communication flows inside the company.

As a rule, if the company can coherently communicate internally about their own processes so that the customer facing staff can talk about what steps the company is taking on this, then they're likely to be able to provide support effectively too.

4) Use Open Source Software and actively support its use.

In 2009, when most of the web has been built on open standards and runs on open source software, I shouldn't really need to say why open source is generally a Good Thing. But when a hosting company actively invests and uses open source software themselves, they're much more likely to be able to provide meaningful support if something breaks, and have useful expertise on hand to troubleshoot. Finally, the other advantage of open source is that stops lock-in - if you aren't happy with service, you can simply move to another supplier, rather than being stuck using a proprietary product that can't be replicated elsewhere. This tends to mean suppliers compete on price, and customer service or sustainability, which are also Good Things.

Now that I've outlined what I'm looking for in a host, I can explain in the next post who we think is the best fit for these criteria, to spare some other poor soul of 3-4 weeks of research and emails.

For the last two weeks, I’ve been looking for a good reliable, green, well priced hosting company that offers virtual servers in or around the UK, and it’s been largely a fruitless, frustrating endeavor. But in order to really explain why I’m doing this in the first place, it helps to give a summary of what kinds of hosting is available.

A brief primer on web hosting

Up until fairly recently, there were two main kinds of web hosting you could buy to put a website on: shared hosting, or dedicated servers.

Shared Hosting

If you have your own personal website, the chances pretty high that you’re running on shared hosting.

When you bought shared hosting, what you did was effectively rent space on a computer that had loads of user accounts sharing it like, in the same way you might have a few different user accounts on a laptop that multiple people share. It’s a pretty cheap way of having use of a computer, but is has a few drawbacks, namely:

• You can’t treat it like your computer

  If some arbitrary IT security policy put on a computer by someone else has stopped you doing something you want to on a computer, you’ll know how frustrating this can be. In the days of simple html, this wasn’t so much of a problem; you just put html on a server, and that was about it. When you wanted to update the site, you would pay someone to write new code.

  However, it’s understandable to want to update your own website these days, and this frequently involves putting software on the server itself, like WordPress or Drupal, which dynamically create html to feed to browsers. It’s common to bump up against limits to stop you using more than your fair share of the server’s processing power, which usually results in your programs being killed off halfway through doing something, or your users’ unable to do more processor intensive things like attach large files.

  Also, if you’re looking to something slightly non-standard, like use a new web framework like Django or Ruby on Rails, these limits will stop you dead in your tracks.

• Everyone on the server shares the same limited resources.

  Conversely with shared hosting, when some other bright spark decides to something slightly non-standard, like use a new web framework like Django or Ruby on Rails, when they crash their program it can bring down your website too. Not great.

  Finally, if your host crams too many people onto a single server you end up with a ridiculously slow website, because you’re all fighting over the same resources. You’ll often have this on hosting offers than seem ridiculously cheap.

  Fees for shared hosting tend tend to correlate with how many people are being crammed onto each server, how much space is being offered, and what kind of bandwidth the sites use up, starting at less than a pound, and scaling upto around £25 per month. Companies know for bring shared hosting providers are Dreamhost, 1and1.co.uk, http://fasthosts.co.uk

Dedicated Servers

Dedicated, or private servers are servers that are totally dedicated for your use alone.

As you’d expect, they carry none of the problems that sharing have, but they’re usually much more expensive, and in many cases a pretty wasteful way of hosting a site unless you really need one. If you need one of these, you either can afford to pay someone to look after it for you, or you’ve been ripped off, or your website is so successful that there is nothing I could tell you that you don’t already know.

Prices for these start range from around £60, upwards.

The third way - the wonders of the VPS

In the last few years, companies like Slicehost and Linode have made a name form themselves by specialising in offering virtual private servers to customers. In a nutshell, a virtual private server offers you the benefits of control, and predictability of a dedicated server, but at a cost much closer to that of shared hosting.

When you rent a virtual private server, you share a physical server like with shared hosting, but each virtual machine runs in it’s own isolated sandbox, to stop what everyone gets upto on their machines affecting each other. This has a few advantages:

• Predictability

  That sandbox gives a reassuring degree of reliability, and fair minimum expectation of performance. Someone else being dugg or slasheddotted won’t affect your site.

• Control

  Because you have control over your environment, running slightly more exotic software like Rails or Django, or using a source control system like Git, is much much simpler. While these can sometimes be done with shared hosting, any long running processes that might run in the background will usually be killed off on shared hosting.

• Elasticity

  Virtual machines are no longer physical machines, but simply digital containers talking to hardware in an abstract sense, they take on a protean nature, that means they can be copied, resized, backed up and generally fiddled with in ways that you can’t with physical machines. If your site gets popular, you can resize the the server to make it respond to increased demand, and conversely, in a datacentre full of virtual machines, throttling back energy usage when demand drops is also possible.

• Portability

  The same qualities that make virtual machines elastic, also make them portable, and this has me really interested right now; it helps with testing, as you can have a container on your local machine, but also helps safeguard against being locked into one hosting company if you’re not happy with what they offer and makes it easier to move hosts more easily. This makes it possible to allow website owners to choose hosts based on factors like customer service, or how sustainably they are run, rather than worrying about if they’ll install the right version of Perl for you.

The starting rate virtual machines is around the £15 mark, scaling up depending on how much power you need.

Back to the point - where are the reliable green virtual private servers?

This post should have worked as halfway decent primer for explaining why virtual private servers are so desirable. In the next post, I’ll build on this to share the results of my trying to find a good green virtual hosting company in the UK, as I know I’m not the only one who’s looking around for this.

If you own an iPhone or iPod touch, you're curious about just how creative developers on the AppStore can be, you really should try out PushupFu - it's a great example of successfully applying computer game thinking to transform an existing, somewhat dull, if largely good for you activity, into a great little casual game.

Pushupfu seems to be loosely based on the the One hundred pushups program, helping you get fitter and stronger, by beginning a course of pushups every other day, where you start out with very gentle sets of 3 or 2 pushups, and increase these sets in intensity and duration, working your way up to the finale, where you end up cranking 100 pushups in one go, in an eye bulging, vein popping testosterone soaked display of machismo and sheer masculine potency, that make the Spartans from 300 look like total girls.

It's fair to say, that I'm not there yet.

But, I am enjoying the journey very much, and I think I have a few good ideas why. It's offering me plenty of the following game mechanisms that make doing a fairly mindless exercise much more appealing to the easily bored:

Instant feedback

You can see when you're doing well, straight away here. If you're on bad form, the app reprimand your for cheating, when you don't do a full pushup, or try to do it too fast - every time you do a pushup correctly, the electronic voice from the iphone counts up further - it's a little thing, but the constant feedback makes it much easier to stay motivated. Also, it stops you cheating yourself - when your body starts feeling heavy, it doesn't matter - you still have to keep form or you won't make it to the next milestone.

Tracking progression

Which brings us nicely to the next step - having something track your progress automatically is a godsend - it effectively turns the game into an RPG of sorts, with regular level ups. Having that sense of acheivemen, and grading each stage means that you're less keen on breaking the line, and even if you aren't able to crank out the pushups you need to make the next stage, there's always room for improvement for coming back again. The levelling system is also great for...

Competition

This seems to be one of the biggest selling points, and the thing that turns this from a training aid to a computer game - you can challenge people around the world to pushup battles, and whoever can do more pushups in one session walks away with bragging rights, climbing further up the public leaderboard, visible on GymFu. It's a nice idea, and well executed - displaying everyone's stats publicly puts adds an extra element of outside pressure that works as an excellent motivator!

More training needed

However, there are a few things with the app that do leave me wanting - the progression up the stages seems rather uneven, I've been able to breeze through the first four stages, but there's a massive spike in difficulty on the following stage, making it almost discouragingly hard.

Also, challenging people until recently had a really tight window to answer them with no outside notification. Thankfully this has been largely fixed now, and challenges end up in your email inbox as well now.

Finally, scrapping an accelerometer to your arm to measure pushups can sometimes give strange readings, especially when halfway through a set of pushups it starts to come loose; this ends up giving frustrating false positives. 

Finally, accidentally pressing the Apple home button gets you out of the app without saving any kind of progress - hitting this at the end of a set basically means you have to start from scratch again. Annoying, but not a deal breaker.

One of the nicer things about the App Store is how cheap the little apps are - trying out PushupFu costs about the same as a decent espresso, and I've got far more enjoyment out of PushupFu and most espresso's I've tried.

If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, I really recommend giving it a go.