every 5 weeks

A key part to doing a project like this is to having access to affordable, yet reliable hosting for the sites.

The sites are currently split between Site5, and Mediatemple.

Of the two hosts I’ve been happier with Site5’s performance and reliability.

I have a shared host account with Site5. There has only been 1 unscheduled outage in the 9 months I’ve been with them, and that only lasted about 20 minutes. One of my earlier sites made it to the Digg homepage, and performed admirably under the load.

MediaTemple has been okay, with a significant number of unscheduled outages in the 6 months I’ve been with them. To be fair they have been making a pretty large transition from their shared hosting configuration to the Grid Server environment. It’s difficult to foresee all the problems that may arise, but I feel they could have done a little better. They spent a significant amount of time beta testing the Grid Server, but seems like they didn’t put it under real world usage. When I say real world, I mean the load and usage they intended when they migrated their clients over. They do have another upgrade planned for the Grid Server, in the first week of March, which they claim will solve many of the problems they have been seeing.

I have been looking into Mosso, which seems to be a perfect setup for anyone looking to do large scale reseller hosting, which doesn’t quite fit my needs.

MediaTemple would be my preferred host if they weren’t having growing pains with the Grid Server, so I may reserve judgment until next month, but if you asked me now I’d recommend Site5.

There has been a lot of buzz lately about how quickly and easily you can build websites in Ruby on Rails, so why did I decide to stick to LAMP?

My primary concern was deployment and scaling. Clearly I was going to have a large number of websites to host at the end of this project (even more than I host already), and I was worried about the resources required to host that many ROR sites.

Although ROR claims to boost your productivity over other platforms, with the development of Fraction I’ve found that I’m just as if not more productive in PHP than I am with Rails. Many of the things in ROR that make your more productive (MVC, ActiveRecord, Templating to name a few) can be and are available in the LAMP environment.

ROR does allow you to get a prototype of your website up very fast, but to produce a complete production ready websites takes just as long as with LAMP.

Don’t get me wrong, I like ROR and what it has to offer, but for this project LAMP is a better fit. I prefer to use the right tool for the job, not the one that has the most buzz in the blogosphere.

With a growing network of sites, being able to centrally manage the ads (even if most of them are Goolge Adsense) was becoming more important.

After looking around at the available options, I found they where either way to complicated for what I needed, or just too simple. Nothing seemed to exist in between.

So I am building an Ad-Serving platform, to help me manage all the ads for my sites. I expect to start testing the platform next week to iron out all the little bugs, and improve performance under real usage.

The platform will not be one of the projects to be released, more something to help me run the sites that will. After all, if I have a way to quickly and easily manage ads the more time I have to build websites.

Open ID has been in the news a lot recently, first Microsoft and then AOL supporting the scheme in big ways.

Every 5 Weeks is not quite a large as either of those companies, but I’m considering using Open ID for the remainder of the sites that require user login.

Before I commit, I thought I’d throw it out to my potential users, is it really a pain to have to create new logins for each of these websites? Remember Open ID only solves the problem of identifying yourself, you’d still potentially have to select screen names — unless you’d like your OpenID displayed in the website. You would off course be exempt from the whole email verification process.

Update: Kevin Rose of Digg.com announced that Digg would also be supporting Open ID later this year, the bandwagon is getting pretty crowded.

Please share your thoughts in the comments…

Some people have asked about the Fraction Framework, what exactly is it and why should I use it?

Well first off you can’t use it … yet. A public release of Fraction is a long ways off, although some people outside of myself have seen it, so they can confirm its not vaporware.

Fraction is a framework for those that build using LAMP, the PHP variety. Fraction aims to make website development quick and fun, to help keep designers and developers stay off each other toes, and to keep server load down.

To achieve these goals Fraction makes use of techniques found in many established frameworks, such as: ActiveRecord, MVC, and DRY.

Fraction borrows heavily from two frameworks: Ruby on Rails, and Fusebox. Fraction brings together what I think is the best features of both of these frameworks, and mixes in a little from others I’ve seen in my development days.