If you’re using Ansible to maintain server configurations, you’re probably quite aware that speed is not something often used to describe Ansible. But I recently came across a plugin that had an amazing 82% performance improvement. And it took a single command and two lines in the ansible.cfg. The plugin is Mitogen, more specifically Mitogen […]

I’ve been using MailChimp for my Riddles and Brain Teasers site for the past five years. When I first started, it was free. Then it bumped up and leveled out at $50/month. I was okay with that. The price began another ascent when the list reached 5,000 subscribers. It leveled off at $75/month and I […]

I was benchmarking nginx on a Vultr server and the test ran great, over 17K requests per second, but after a little over 20K requests, nginx would just halt. Memory and CPU usage were nowhere near the limit, and eventually Apache Bench got a timeout. This error occurred over and over again in /var/log/kern.log as […]

As a follow up to my post on cheap SSL certificates, I learned that the certificate wasn’t the reason I was getting an A- on the Qualys SSL Labs test. But after a few configuration changes, I achieved the coveted A+ grade. First, find out your current grade by entering your web site here. If […]

First off, if you already run an SSL-enabled server, update your SSL certificates immediately. You can use this tool to see if your site is vulnerable to HeartBleed, a serious issue in OpenSSL. If you want to enable SSL for your web site or to spend less for your SSL certificates, read on. There are […]

Choosing the right domain is simple in theory, but difficult in practice. You want a short, memorable, easy to say domain. When you think of one that meets those requirements, 9 times out of 10 it’s already taken. When you find one that’s available, you’re not sure it adequately conveys the essence of your web […]

WhoisHostingThis has a search plugin and bookmarklet to make it easy to find out what web host a site is using. Just visit a site and click the bookmarklet. I prefer having the bookmarklet open the results on the same page instead of opening a new one. If you feel the same way, here’s the […]

With virtual hosting, a single IP address can host dozens of domains, and it can be interesting to find out what other domains are being hosted on the same server. Windows live search lets you use the ip: prefix to search for all the domains on a given IP address. For example, yahoo.com resolves to […]

I’ve been looking at web hosting alternatives for a while now for some potential web site ideas I’ve had. I went with Bluehost and have been reasonably pleased, but I don’t like how they handle multiple domains. Since they have a 30-day grace period, I’ve been thinking about canceling and switching to a new web […]