What are wrongs about shared hosting? Your site is doomed when someone among the shared account owners is pounding the bandwidth. The second, you are limited only to what the shared hosting account provides. You are not allowed to mess with the operating system. And, most often than not, the hosting company will throttle your speed if they found out your using too much. Of course, all the reverse are the benefits of cloud hosting / and VPS.

Hmm… 5$ hosting per month? What’s the catch? There are. Upon signing up, you are required to choose you cloud operating system. This is daunting if you are Windows user, exciting otherwise. There is an option to have it preinstalled with the CMS platform of your choice (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and more). That’s pretty easy but I suggest never install any, choosing the desired operating system is enough. Install Apache, PHP, MySql, CMS and others that you need via command line to made your site up and keep it running. Learn the depths of it as you’ll gonna get a very limited support on troubleshooting.

From signing up up to making my new drupal site live, it almost took me five hours of tinkering and reading tutorials. More tutorials to read and more time to consume. If this is not your kind of thing and just want to focus on your writing skills and any other money making businesses, then go to more expensive with full support hosting services.

1) Get a good hosting company. Checked. It took me several jumps before I settled to one. I am currently using DreamHost VPS. I am keeping the name registration separate from the company. There was an option to get a free domain but I am more comfortable having it separate. It feels like I can move to other hosting company easily whenever I want, or the current host become terribly worst.

2) Install wordpress from scratch and import post comments and images. Checked. Yep. You heard me right. I installed it all over again, an empty WordPress install. Then imported all of my articles and comments using xml file rather than using MySql database. I uploaded the images to “uploads” folder. I know what MySql is but I am hesitant to use it. It might have traces of attack. Remember, my wordpress got hacked. I find messing with the database code too intimidating. I loose a lot of picture description though.

Simple and responsive design. Checked. I am using the open source theme by somerandomdude.com. What can I say? It is simple, fast and responsive. Viewable from very large screen, to netbook, phablet and mobile phones. Tried and tested. The pages are hitting high scores in Gtmetrix test. The was one thing I couldn’t get to work. Page insights section was always saying that I should reduce the image bytes no matter how many times I tried reducing it.

Security. Checked. I am using iThemes security plugin. Wordfence is another great and popular security plugin for WordPress. It seems too heavy when I checked it using Plugin Profiler. iThemes security is light and works well too according to testimonies. I am sticking with it for while. I am keeping a regular automated backup just in case.

Regular back up. Checked. I never know when will I be too busy to make backups. It is sure terrible when I forgot and something goes wrong. The BackWP plugin is doing the job for me. Daily database backups and weekly whole site to DropBox.

Regular write ups.. Ongoing…

However,

1) The google analytics widget they offer cannot match the real Google Analytic Dashboard. Full blown analytics data is what every SEO geek wants.

2) Akismet and other popular spam filter are able to auto purge spam comments. There are others (like reCaptcha) that completely stop comment from coming in.

3) Database optimization was rather a new thing to me. In fact I first saw it on ManageWP. Many thanks to them! I searched WordPress plugins pool and I found a very nice replacement.

4) WordPress and plugins automated update is a risky action. I might break a website or two, or all. Then I’ll feel like in the middle of World War II. I always do serious inspection, research and backing up my whole site before making any update.

5) Their automated backup seems broken. I was always clicking the manual back-up button.

6) When making new post, it cannot retrieve the list of categories. I was opening the WordPress dashboard just to check. Remembering categories is easy if you have few blogs. I was still doing the check to avoid any typos. I think typographical errors will create redundant categories.

7) I only have 3 blogsites. I am merging the two into one so I am only expecting two in the end. Two extra open tabs on Google Chrome or Firefox doesn’t really hurt.

8) I am porting one site do Drupal, which according to reviews is more secure than WordPress. Recently my sister and friend’s blog got defaced, my food blog suffered the same. It took me about a week to get them back running smooth again. I am very sure a lot of visitors got irritated.

The good things I like about VPS hosting? I can do whatever I want with it. Delete all the contents, reboot, install anything and the thing they called root access. The last seems not very familiar to me and that is what makes me feel more excited. The downside is, I have to manage it on my own. It is sure less secure if I just do a install and forget technique. I have to install security features to fend away those hackers, human spammers and spambots. The optimization should also be handled by me of course. If you never want these extra work and just wanted to create good articles then try the WordPress Optimized hosting plans like DreamPress, WPengine and SiteGround Shared Hosting Plans. There are so many reviews out there (more than you can read). Read reviews and pick a hosting company. Try it for 30 days. Close and get you money back if you are not happy with their service. Try another and another until you are satisfied. Believe me, popular companies are doing their best go get more loyal customers.

My very first hosting company was GoDaddy. There were a lots of downtime so I move immediately to HostGator. I stayed with HostGator for years. Their systems were very reliable but their customer service became very stupid recently. BlueHost? Downtime I guess! Frequent server maintenance notices in my inbox was annoying. Informing that your blogs will be down for about 30 to 45 minutes. That was nothing for occasional bloggers but a serious deal for professionals.  I found a very good customer support at SiteGround. Almost no waiting time on live chat and the tickets are answered within minutes. Their service offering did no fit my requirements however.

That’s it for now. I’ll continue testing this DreamHost VPS. I have high hope with it!  I am paying close attention to  RAM usage so I can adjust it to my website requirements.

So I decided to close one site. But before the close, I need to retrieve its articles and transfer to my another blog. I opened the web admin panel like I used to do. However, I only see WordPress menu on the left and the wide right side were all blank. I searched the net for possible fix. It was the “white screen of death”. According to them its possible cause is the installation of incompatible plugins. How came? I have never installed any. In fact I have never opened the site for long. It was probably a hack.

So I did follow the first solution they recommended. Accessed the blog folders via cPanel. Renamed the plugins folders within the wp-contents directory. Then refreshed the wordpress admin panel. Voila! It didn’t work !

The second solution. Contact the webserver support team. I think I kinda have this kind of problem before and they promptly helped me fix it. I got tired of waiting but got no response in front of live chat and support ticket.

The next thing and this was more technical. It requires a little knowledge of phpAdmin operation and great care. One little miss and it might screw one blog and other blogs to smitherens. I logged in to cpanel. Grabbed the copy of the wordpress database and the whole folder. Created a new WordPress installation to the new hosting site. Then merged the old database to new. I made sure that the new worpress database installation has the same prefix as the old DB, otherwise it won’t sync (believe me, it failed me several times). That was it! I got my old articles back on a brand new admin panel. It was a relief. I will surely study the in-depth of wordpress in the next future.

For the images. I located the uploads folder from the back up and sent it to network (inside wp-content folder) via ftp application.

The last part. I might caused broken links during transfer. I installed a plugin called “broken link checker”. I patiently did fix them as they appear on dash board.

I guess Black means – painted in black.

All the radiators I have seen before have intake near the bottom and outlet near top (those were car radiators). Such design is meant for better water circulation and cooling. This has both intake and outlet on one side. I am not sure if it is the top side or bottom side. Most people I have seen on YouTube were installing this vertically with the inlet/outlet on top.

Initially, I installed fans with the air blowing the fins. I assumed it was better than the other way. My mistake. It resulted in a very poor cooling. I reversed it, making the fan draw air from the radiator fins and throw it away. The system significantly got cooler.

Barb fittings… These are ordinary barb fittings. More secure and elegant type are much more expensive. This is different from common brass barb. It comes with O-ring serving as seal.

Dismantling it was not my intention. I only wanted to remove the belt guide assembly as I have no use for it. Both top and bottom cover were easily dismantled after removing the four screws.

I never fully understand how stepper motor works so here are the pictures just for show.

Check you gadgets, router, modem, phone lines and PC. The problem might be on your side. It is so easy to fix that it is not worth calling their hard to reach customer service representatives.

Do other important work. Do not waste time waiting for the connection to get live again. Go jogging, farming, play basketball or go to gym. Sitting all day tinkering with the keyboard is not healthy. Go out and do healthier chores.

Record the date and time of disconnection, then the date and time of reconnection. Call PLDT Customer Hotline, the billing section. Inform them of the two dates and the period of no internet connection will be deducted from your next next billing. Failing to do so means getting your full bill despite of internet inconvenience.

Why don’t they do automatic bill adjustment? There are two possible reasons! 1) They are not aware of your situation. 2) Better ask yourself about this.

I bought the Hilea immersible pump. It set me back about 1,200 pesos. It is made of ceramic and pure ABS plastic (claiming more resistant to wear, tear and deformation). It is a twin function pump. It can work under water or outside of water by removing the back cover and affixing inlet tube.

Testing time. I want it to be a immersible pump so testing the other feature does not matter. I submerged it in basin half-filled with water, then inserted the plugged to AC outlet. The water spurted up immediately, a sign that it was working fine. It was barely tested before leaving the store. They gave me one week for replacement in case it fails to do its job.

Feeding the hopper slowly with hand is fine for small batches. Lets say 500 gram to one kilogram. The thing is I usually grind a minimum of five kilograms which makes me stay beside the grinder for about three hours. The job is easy but the boredom is killing me. The time I am spending there sitting and feeding the hopper could be more useful for doing other jobs.

After long tinkering time, I finally arrived to a crude working prototype.

Materials used:

1) 3″ PVC pipe
2) Plastic formed to circle w/ Y shape or cross shaped grills for pushing the nibs outward – serve as dispensing wheel
3) Two half circle plastics to work pressure regulator.
4) Stepper motor
5) Gizduino
6) Stepper motor Driver

Working Principle:

The cocoa nibs goes into inlet (that should have a wide hopper). The pressure regulator half plates prevent the rushing of nibs straight down to outlet. The stepper motor rotates the dispensing wheel which pushes the nibs out of outlet. The flow rate could be adjusted with the help of Gizduino and stepper motor driver.

I am looking forward to make a nicer version with the use of 360 servo motor and scrapping away the stepper motor driver.