TechAdvice: HAstaff/Seanchai/Allanah/Vicki/web professionals

[longman]

What software do you prefer in hosting your sites?

The HA site has an awesome design & is getting better.
Seanchai you have a number of sites under you belt & I'm sure you have great experience with all of them. Allanah your site has transformed beautifully, kudos to you & the rest of the group that works on your site. I little flash on the menus, but still simple enough to not confuse the folks. I could go on & on about the great sites plus many others that I haven't listed above from of folks from the HA community

I'm starting a site & was wondering if you had any preferences towards software/hardware. I have built 5 other business sites (non-porn). & since this was a new arena for me I'd hope to get a few tips from other people in the business.

I would rather go with apache 1x but the ISP is only offering 2x.
The last time I upgraded my other business servers 2x wasn't the most stable. PHP is cool when used with PHPAccelorator. HA kudos your PHP code loads faster than 90% of other sites I know.

Do you use SQL more for preferences or another platform?
HA: I noticed that you stay away from flash? any particular reason besides decreased overhead. Too many sites are bogged down with flashy "flash" designs.

Any responses would be appreciated.
Thanks

[GroobySteven]

No idea - I pay guys to do the technical stuff.
Keep the designs simple. flash is cool the first time you see it subsequent visits you just want to get straight to the meat.
seanchai

[Vicki Richter]

haha...

Well I do all my own site work. My server is Windows 2003/IIS 6.0.

Software used:

IIS: Obviously the web server
Flicks Webquota: Provides member directory security and acct management
WebMail Server: Mail services (vicki@vickirichter.com)
Invision PowerBoard: Forum Software
MySQL w/ PGP: Support software for forum software

I can do quick updates with Front Page while remoted into the server and I can use all the basic Windows commands I am familiar with. Once it's setup it pretty much runs itself.

I get 700GB traffic a month and a dedicated server for like $129.00. Not a bad deal really. I used to own my server outright with another vendor, but they kept losing my spare parts and the server would be down for days sometimes. Total pain in the butt.

Vicki

[NYCe]

We're running Apache 1 on a freebsd server. We used to have a problem with the PHP load so we switched over to PHP Accelerator. and optimized all our php code. It runs pretty cherry now.
Apache 2? We actually ran that on a development server and it was a little too buggy for my tastes, there's a new version out now but it still is pretty incompatiable with php.

We run MySQL on the backend, it works great with php so we've never had a reason to switch, but if we did switch it would have been to postgre.

Flash? It's cool for menus and the like but we get a lot of hits from none standard browsers (safari, linux computers, mozilla, webtv) so we decided to keep it simple. Most companies use flash because they see somebody else running flash, and that usually turns out bad.

[TeeLover]

No idea - I pay guys to do the technical stuff.
Keep the designs simple. flash is cool the first time you see it subsequent visits you just want to get straight to the meat.
seanchai

The greatest addition to the onslaught of Flash sites is that one simple line:

"SKIP INTRO"

[longman]

Thanks for the comments I appreciate it.

That's what I was thinking thanks guy,
Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) PHP/4.2.2 is a nice stack to work with.
Any reason you haven't moved up to .29.
Its good you don't use openssl, way to needy on the patching side.
Accelerator is a kick ass product. Thats why I luv unix opensource is great.
I use the same setup on one of my servers that I built IMP on (great opensource product for unix folks).

Vicki is a brave woman running her site with MS/IIS.
I'm surprised that you have time to sleep, aren't you spending most of your day patching the security holes & robooting that thing
Vicki with the dedicated server who handles the upgrades? Is the maint included in the 129. Seems like your really into the tech stuff...Let me find out there's more to you than just a pretty face!
just joking

I've been moving more into Dreamweaver for editing, seems a little more evolved than frontpage. Frontpage at least when I last used it made no sense to use if you weren't running IIS.

Thanks again.