Birdhouse Hosting News and Updates
Note: In the event of a system outage, this News page may not be available. Our status system, however, lives on a completely independent server and will always be available. Please bookmark status.birdhousehosting.com.
ASSP spam system
We’ve swapped out SpamAssassin for a new system called ASSP, which is far more effective. Users are now receiving close to zero spam in their boxes! Read all about your shiny new spam controls. Note that desktop mail users may need to tweak their SMTP server settings to send outbound mail.
Server Upgrade Complete
Birdhouse recently completed a server upgrade that doubled the amount of memory available to our mysql databases. This upgrade has made the server much more robust when handling large amounts of simultaneous traffic. Users are already reporting better performance overall, and most importantly, better performance during high-load periods. Enjoy!
Proxying with Birdhouse
We’ve added a brief new FAQ for advanced users on using Birdhouse as a port-forwarding proxy. Advanced users only!
MySQL Upgrade
The MySQL database engines on Birdhouse have been upgraded from version 4 to version 5. Sites were offline for just a few minutes during the transition. Please let us know if you encounter any issues.
PHP Upgraded
We’ve upgraded PHP to the latest version, and have now compiled PHP against libexpat. This fixes an issue some users were having using external WordPress posting clients, as well as some XML parsing tools built into sites. Please let us know if you experience any oddities.
WordPress Uploads
We’re temporarily experiencing an issue affecting users’ ability to upload files into WordPress. We hope to have a full fix for this soon. We’ll post back here with more information soon.
Update: This issue has been corrected.
git installed
On customer request, git (client, not server) has now been installed on Birdhouse for users who have been granted command line access. Enjoy!
Carbon Balanced
Birdhouse is committed to environmentally friendly hosting – our datacenter is not just carbon-neutral, but climate-positive, and committed to offsetting the total carbon-footprint of their server facilities by at least 110 percent.
Birdhouse Adds Django Support
For experienced web developers, Birdhouse now supports web application deployment with the Python-based Django framework. While we don’t provide Django setup through cPanel, we will take care of the initial setup process for you, and create a super-fast mod_wsgi-based Django hosting environment on your behalf, ready to rock.
For more information, please see our Django FAQ.
Disk Usage Patterns
It’s not uncommon for web hosts to provide unholy amounts of disk space to users. 50GBs! 100GBs! Unlimited storage!
The truth is, the vast majority of web sites on the internet are very, very small, and never have a need for anywhere near large numbers like that. In fact, web hosts offering tons of storage would never be able to supply it to their users if their users actually decided to take them up on it. Classic overselling, on a scale that far eclipses what the airlines do.
Here’s a little data to help clarify:
Birdhouse currently hosts 90 master accounts, for a total of around 200 domains. The current average size of all data stored for all web and mail accounts is 340MBs – and the majority of that is mail, not web files. But the average is itself misleading – a small handful of sites storing a lot of audio or video grossly skew that average. To get a more accurate view of what most sites actually use, we need to calculate the median instead, and that number gives us 102MBs.
In other words, the vast majority of web sites will only ever utilize 1/500th of the 50GBs promised by the biggest overselling web hosts.
At Birdhouse, our disk quotas may look smaller than those of other web hosts, but we try not to oversell, and we provide more than enough storage room for all but the largest audio/video storage sites (and even those are now moving to storing large amounts of video on YouTube or Vimeo).
The more you know…
