Drupal is used on many thousands of websites, but a recent convert to Drupal is The Economist. The Economist is now using Drupal 6 to serve the vast majority of content pages to its primary web site, economist.com. Drupal powers the homepage, along with all articles, channels, comments, and more.
The site is incredibly busy – over 100,000 stories and a Posting rate exceeding a comment per minute. It also boasts 20-30 million page views per month with 3-4 millon unique visitors over the same period.
The Economist has a large varied dataset and moving from the previous system (based on ColdFusion and Oracle) was no easy task. They hired a specialist company called Cyrve who’ve written and open-sourced a Drupal module to enable migrations of existing complex databases to Drupal. Read more about the migration, or check out Drupal Hosting from 2020Media.
The IPv6 Matrix project, proudly supported and hosted by 2020Media, was featured in a presentation at London INET this week. The ISOC project looks at the entire internet for take up of next generation IPv6 addresses. IPv4 addresses are due to run out in under a year so adoption of IPv6 addresses is crucial to the future growth of the internet.
INET London
INET is a worldwide set of conferences looking at the future of the internet. Opportunities, threats and challenges to business were examined and discussed by the participants. Matthew Ford, technology program manager from the Internet Society spoke about the current state of internet penetration and how ISPs are constantly increasing capacity to keep up with demand. The big 6 ISPs who account for 94% of UK broadband services now use an arsenal of technological techniques to manage, control, and limit their users internet use. These include traffic shaping, deep packet inspection, acceptable use policies (AUP) and limits hidden deep in their terms and conditions.
2020Media’s broadband has clear up-front quotas on bandwidth use, no deep packet inspection or traffic shaping, and a clear indication of the line speed you can expect. View our broadband site for more information.
Other comments of interest included one likening the internet to the large banks – “too big to fail”. The internet is now such a essential part of the way services are delivered to the public that it is now considered essential infrastructure. ISOC warned that in the future the freedoms and accessability of the entire internet we have now, may not exist. Their Future Scenarios videos demonstrate some of the problems we are internet users and providers may face.
One of the hardest choices is who to host your lovingly crafted Joomla site.
Whilst there are certain hosts that you should avoid at all costs (see ‘unlimited hosting’), professionals would be advised to skip the generic hosts and use a specialised hosting company instead
Joomla hosting requires a certain environment on the server and a host that is geared up to meeting these requirements is obviously a good thing. They will check that all the necessary components and versions meet the published specification by Joomla so that each Joomla installation is seamless.
Customer service
Regardless of how nice a generic hosting company might be, at heart they have only 2 major concerns
keep the server running (regardless of performance).
make sure you’re paying your bill on time.
While the second rule applies to every hosting company (although smaller hosting companies are likely to be more flexible on this), if you are having issues with your Joomla site, chances are you’re on your own for support (as they are not liable for your software).
A specialized host will be concerned with performance issues, and will have experts available to help fix your site or give you advice on how to improve performance.
Do your research
You wouldn’t take on a member of staff without checking them out, so take a few minutes to do the same for a prospective host. Have they had bad reviews? What sort of uptime* have they had?
Read through their support status pages, if they publish them publicly. I recently looked at http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/ from DreamHost, a large US webhost.I was quite surprised to see almost daily problems reported, and the length of time if took for some to be resolved: “The server is currently being restored via backups and could take a few days for this to complete.” * Are they sending the backups via carrier pigeon? The flippant style also grates – if this was my data, this sort of comment wouldn’t help me explain it to my boss:
” Bad memory has been replaced with thoughts candy and double rainbows. Austin is back up and running. Sorry for the downtime.”
Buy 'unlimited' and your website could be restricted without notice if it gets flooded with visitors
It’s a promise we’ve all heard time and again. Web hosting companies are offering “unlimited” hosting for mere pennies a month.
The truth about “unlimited” hosting is that it is actually very limited. If you read the fine print on any unlimited contract, you’ll find that a variety of restrictions are placed on the account, including, in many cases, bans on providing streaming media, image hosting or other bandwidth/storage-intense activities.
“we do not support the use of our hosting services for personal file storage or back-up purposes and the use of your hosting account for that purpose is prohibited.”*. Because the limits are ‘soft’ limits it means the host can apply them at any time, without warning. http://randydeluxe.com/just-yappin/an-open-letter-to-bluehost/
In short, your use of the server is only “unlimited” as long as it doesn’t cause a problem and, if it does, you may find that your site goes dark.
Choosing a Host Summary
Even though choosing a specialized host is on average more expensive than a generic host, you will find the environment and support superior to the average hosting company. Of course this does not just apply to Joomla. 2020Media also supports content managements systems like Drupal and WordPress with the same fanatical attention to detail. Please Contact Us if you’d like to find out more.
Another meeting of the Joomla London User Group took place yesterday in London. The user group is now 2 years old and is attended by about 10 people each monthly meeting.
A useful tip mentioned this meeting was about extending Joomla through the many add-ons available. The central place for find Joomla add-ons is the JED (Joomla Extensions Directory). This directory lists both commercial and free extensions. There are often several extenstions that tackle the same need so it can be hard to know which would be best. We advise that you check the views and reviews show in JED very carefully – if there only a few this can mean that the extension is not particularly popular and may lead to the developer abandoning it. It’s also worth looking at the ‘last updated’ date next to ‘Views’. Not all extensions need updates of course, but if an add-on has a recent update it’s a sign of an active project.
Joomla Extensions Directory
Some of the user group had been experimenting with Joomla 1.6, the tenth beta of which had just been released. They said there is still a way to go, and there a certain issues that remain unresolved. Clearly the final release isn’t going to appear just yet.
The user group meets on the 3rd Tuesday of each month and you can find out more on their website.
Finally, Joomla!Day 2010 is taking place in Ipswitch, Suffolk from Saturday, 30th October to Sunday, 31st October 2010 inclusive.
Joomla hosting requires a certain environment on the server and 2020Media’s Joomla hosting is designed to deliver exactly the right specification for all Joomla websites.
The UK Amazon Kindle plopped into our letter box this week and we’ve been trying it out. The first thing we did was try out the built in web browser, and we’re happy to report the 2020Media customer portal works just fine. A special add-on to Joomla reformats the pages for mobile devices.
The second thing was look for games 🙂 A couple of games have been launched, but the Kindle has a built in game – the venerable Minesweeper.
To start the minesweeper game on the Kindle, go to the home menu and then press the Alt, Shift, and M key simultaneously.
News, tips and reviews from one of Britain's leading web hosting companies
Read through their support status pages, if they publish them publicly. I recently looked at 
