4 ms·

Okay, sure, instead your new job is to play security and sysadmin for the DigitalOcean containers for all the small local business Wordpress sites for say $10 a

by larzang 12y ago

Okay, sure, instead your new job is to play security and sysadmin for the DigitalOcean containers for all the small local business Wordpress sites for say $10 an hour. Shared Hosting has many downsides, but it still fills an incredibly important niche for businesses for whom a web presence beyond a Facebook page is needed but real managed hosting is completely out of their price range.

batou 12y ago
A million times this. Also some regularly missed advantages of shared hosting are that its usually available in the same country as you, is portable unlike PaaS solutions, doesn't require lots of legwork and tends to come with a shit ton of bandwidth up front meaning no per-Gb costs which can ramp pretty quickly.
pbhjpbhj 12y ago
Lol, I'm in the middle of doing this - moving from shared hosting to a DO droplet. It is painful. Setting up the server isn't so bad but email is a nightmare. Unfortunately the large email providers are moving to block a lot of smaller servers it seems which might make it harder in the future at present using an SPF seems to get mails through. DO of course have a Wordpress appliance which makes it pretty easy to set up, if you can manage Wordpress you can do it, so long as you're not concerned with getting in to the details of security of your droplet. It's probably no less secure than a lot of virtual hosting arrangements with 777 access on content folders and such. [If anyone wants a free $10 credit for DO then feel free to message me.]
- karlshea 12y ago
  I've been having all my clients sign up for a Mandrill account for sending email since it's so unbelievably cheap (usually free) and it completely fixes the email problem.
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    Ah, free for up to 12k emails, or something close - looking at this now. Thanks for the tip. One thing I have noticed is their terms preclude the sending of material under Fair Use terms of copyright law ... but I'm assuming that is a mistake. >"You represent and warrant that you either own or have permission to use all of the material in your Emails." // Fair use isn't permission, nor ownership, it is statutory right of use though. They bring in Spamhaus' definition of spam too, which on first reading appears to be self-contradictory - requiring each message sent to be explicitly requested. Taken by the letter this would mean I couldn't, for example, send out a message to a group of customers with whom I had a standing relationship to let them know of a change to terms & conditions, for example, without explicit consent. That means anticipating every email. Catchall phrases like "agree to receive all email" wouldn't work as the customer "has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still-revocable permission for it to be sent". Indeed "still-revocable" permission means that as soon as a mass email is sent it becomes spam regardless, it's no longer revocable. There are other problems too - verifiable opt in means an alternate system needs to be used for the verification emails. In turn that means that any email I send to multiple recipients puts me in breech of Mandrill's T&Cs. Mandrill have a circular reference from the Terms "You retain ownership of the materials you upload to the Service. We may use or disclose your materials only as we describe in these Terms and our Privacy Policy." and in the Privacy Policy: >"Information You Provide to Us: When you register to use the Services, communicate with our customer service team, send us an email, or post on our blog, you’re giving us information that we collect. That information may include your IP address, name, physical address, email address, phone number, credit card information, and other details like gender, occupation, and other demographic information. By giving us this information, you consent to your information being collected, used, disclosed, and stored by us, only as described in our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy." In short the policies allow them to harvest data from emails sent with the service and to use it as they wish. They go as far as to intimate that because they do use the message data internally that the service is not for personal email. There's also a clause Terms 5.f that allows doxing and combining the info with your account data. The "protections" for selling of your info with the business don't work as there are standard "we can alter this agreement unilaterally" conditions. tl;dr law - it's complicated. This service is absolutely not for "personal" emails however.
    - 12y ago
- thaumaturgy 12y ago
  FWIW I've been seeing an increase of spam from DigitalOcean networks recently -- over the last couple of months or so -- and that's probably going to bleed over into the RBLs and other countermeasure systems that larger mail services use.

by larzang 12y ago

batou 12y ago

A million times this. Also some regularly missed advantages of shared hosting are that its usually available in the same country as you, is portable unlike PaaS solutions, doesn't require lots of legwork and tends to come with a shit ton of bandwidth up front meaning no per-Gb costs which can ramp pretty quickly.

pbhjpbhj 12y ago

Lol, I'm in the middle of doing this - moving from shared hosting to a DO droplet. It is painful. Setting up the server isn't so bad but email is a nightmare. Unfortunately the large email providers are moving to block a lot of smaller servers it seems which might make it harder in the future at present using an SPF seems to get mails through. DO of course have a Wordpress appliance which makes it pretty easy to set up, if you can manage Wordpress you can do it, so long as you're not concerned with getting in to the details of security of your droplet. It's probably no less secure than a lot of virtual hosting arrangements with 777 access on content folders and such. [If anyone wants a free $10 credit for DO then feel free to message me.]

karlshea 12y ago
I've been having all my clients sign up for a Mandrill account for sending email since it's so unbelievably cheap (usually free) and it completely fixes the email problem.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  Ah, free for up to 12k emails, or something close - looking at this now. Thanks for the tip. One thing I have noticed is their terms preclude the sending of material under Fair Use terms of copyright law ... but I'm assuming that is a mistake. >"You represent and warrant that you either own or have permission to use all of the material in your Emails." // Fair use isn't permission, nor ownership, it is statutory right of use though. They bring in Spamhaus' definition of spam too, which on first reading appears to be self-contradictory - requiring each message sent to be explicitly requested. Taken by the letter this would mean I couldn't, for example, send out a message to a group of customers with whom I had a standing relationship to let them know of a change to terms & conditions, for example, without explicit consent. That means anticipating every email. Catchall phrases like "agree to receive all email" wouldn't work as the customer "has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still-revocable permission for it to be sent". Indeed "still-revocable" permission means that as soon as a mass email is sent it becomes spam regardless, it's no longer revocable. There are other problems too - verifiable opt in means an alternate system needs to be used for the verification emails. In turn that means that any email I send to multiple recipients puts me in breech of Mandrill's T&Cs. Mandrill have a circular reference from the Terms "You retain ownership of the materials you upload to the Service. We may use or disclose your materials only as we describe in these Terms and our Privacy Policy." and in the Privacy Policy: >"Information You Provide to Us: When you register to use the Services, communicate with our customer service team, send us an email, or post on our blog, you’re giving us information that we collect. That information may include your IP address, name, physical address, email address, phone number, credit card information, and other details like gender, occupation, and other demographic information. By giving us this information, you consent to your information being collected, used, disclosed, and stored by us, only as described in our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy." In short the policies allow them to harvest data from emails sent with the service and to use it as they wish. They go as far as to intimate that because they do use the message data internally that the service is not for personal email. There's also a clause Terms 5.f that allows doxing and combining the info with your account data. The "protections" for selling of your info with the business don't work as there are standard "we can alter this agreement unilaterally" conditions. tl;dr law - it's complicated. This service is absolutely not for "personal" emails however.
  - 12y ago
thaumaturgy 12y ago
FWIW I've been seeing an increase of spam from DigitalOcean networks recently -- over the last couple of months or so -- and that's probably going to bleed over into the RBLs and other countermeasure systems that larger mail services use.