Sadly, I did not get my prototype done today. There were a few reasons — the most glaring is that my limited stock of willingness to debug code on a Sunday was eaten by getting an archaic VBulletin moved from its previous location to one of my VPSes, as a favor to my college buddies. Nice update interface, very user friendly — a pity about it taking 400 clickthroughs to complete installation (I kept track).
Still, its done and now the server is hardened so that we don’t get owned by every exploit on the Internet. I wanted to cry when I saw its previous state — using an outdated PHP and MySql running as root, naturally, with a four letter password the same as the name of the previous site owner. Sigh. Suffice it to say I got a lot of use out of rand() today.
On a note at least semi-related to uISVs: I continue to be amazed by how awesome it is to have a VPS over shared hosting, provided that you have some skill in Linux administration. If you do, totally amazing — I got to hack together that forum without disrupting either of the blogs running on the same machine and I can host them all with admirable performance for $20 a month. Then I use a second VPS with the same company (Slicehost) to run Bingo Card Creator. I’m probably going to get a third one to host this project and, if my expectations are correct, it may need to be a little bigger than the 256 MB $20 a month variety… Hopefully much bigger… First Prayer of Computer Programmers with Business Sense: Please Lord, send me scaleability issues.
