I am falling asleep trying to draw right now, so instead of killing myself, I think I’m going to finish up the comic first thing in the morning (most of you probably won’t even notice; it’ll only be a couple hours late). I had to take care of my sick girlfriend earlier tonight, which took away the time I was going to draw. The good news is she’s feeling a bit better. Thanks for understanding. ;)
Blog
Project Wonderful Ads on Old Red Pen
There’s a new advertising opportunity on Old Red Pen. Project Wonderful allows me to offer ads for as low as free and to display them in my RSS feed as well. Project Wonderful has a very unique system for advertising, based on an infinite auction. This ensures that rates are always fair. It’s easy to sign up, so why not give it a try?
DreamHost
When I launched Old Red Pen, I chose GoDaddy for one reason only: it was cheap. Once I started the process of deploying my Ruby on Rails-based site onto their servers, I immediately regretted my decision. But at that point, I had already paid for a year of hosting, so I was reluctant to go looking again.
It took a lot of finaggling to get Rails running correctly on GoDaddy’s servers at the root level (why would anyone want to run an application in anything but a subdirectory, right?), and their support knew nothing about Rails. Once it was finally running, it was slow. FastCGI is a bit of a misnomer. Sure, it’s faster than just CGI, but it’s really just a lot of CGI processes running at once. Sometimes I’d see load times approaching a full minute. Yeah, bad news.
Then a friend mentioned a sale at DreamHost. The sale was actually good enough that it didn’t matter that I had already paid for a year of GoDaddy hosting a month and a half prior. So I bit.
And then another two months passed.
And GoDaddy got slower and slower. And then I had a several hour outage during the middle of the day after I had posted a link to the site on StumbleUpon. 10% of the clicks were making it through to my site. I called GoDaddy, and they fixed it, but that night I begain working toward migrating my site to DreamHost.
There are always gotchas in deployments, but most of them this time around were me forgetting stupid things I already knew. DreamHost’s control panel is gorgeous and funny and well-designed (in stark contrast to GoDaddy’s complicated, incohesive and ugly series of different panels).
And the major benefit to hosting my Ruby on Rails application on DreamHost is that it uses Passenger—with a click of a button! Passenger is a much better way of running Ruby on Rails. And not even having to set up was even nicer.
In conclusion, DreamHost kicks the pants off GoDaddy. If I’ve convinced you, and you’re interested in getting your own DreamHost account, I’d greatly appreciate it if you would use me as your referral. And actually, to make it worth it for you, sign up with the promo code OLDREDPEN, and you’ll get a free domain registration for life, and $20 off any hosting plan (will show up at checkout).
Whoops...
Well, the comic’s getting postponed until tomorrow. I didn’t get to finish it before I had to run off to a bachelor party. I’ll post it tomorrow, I promise.
Late Comic
So I know I said I’d try my hardest not to post a comic late, but today’s is going to be late again.
I had to put in a few extra hours at work today to finish a project before going on vacation, and by the time I was done, I was too burnt out to do anything but pack and head out.
I brought my equipment with me, and I should be able to borrow my sister’s laptop to draw and put up a comic before the end of the day.
So, sorry again for the late comic. I’ll work on posting early in the future.
