Shared hosting, no matter how their packages are painted, have limits. Staying away from hogging too much CPU, memory, and other resources can ensure the longevity and performance of your shared hosting account. If you are just looking into how to build a site, or if you already have a very busy site on shared hosting, these guidelines can help you get the most out of your shared hosting account before making the switch to more expensive hosting. One of the goals in this post is to encourage "good neighbor" practices that will ensure you aren't disrupting fellow users on the server that hosts your account. This also ensures that you won't get any of these principles also apply to other types of hosting, but this is written with shared hosting in mind.

Common bottlenecks

With modern shared hosting, you generally have plenty of available disk space and ...

Something I've had on my todo list for a very long time now was to get my notes from School published automatically on my website. They are already stored in ReStructured Text, and they are already stored in git repositories, so my use of smug already had me 95% of the way there. (I have a write-up about my note taking method: here)

I spent my day off, and finally found some better approaches to the problems I had, and I now have automatic sharing of my notes on my website.

The thing that was holding me back was the fact that smug couldn't do everything I wanted it to. I also store other things, such as homework, papers, and other assignments in the same git repository. Also, the way that I would organize a website is different than I would organize my personal files.

Here is an ...

I never thought that my personal blog would be useful to anyone except myself. I've not put a lot of effort into attracting traffic, but it's been trickling my way.

I never really finished the templates and CSS for programmerq.net, so I spent a little time here and there over the past few days and added some CSS, and updated the templates to make the blog experience a bit nicer.

I haven't added the template tags to turn on the calendar view in the sidebar, but I don't know how useful it would be anyway.

I really enjoy the Django templating language. I was able to add the gravitar functionality to the comment system without modifying the source of the blog app that I use. All I did was create an app that had the template tag snippet, and a template for rendering. To get ...

So I've had a slice with slicehost for about a year and a half now. I love all the things I can do with my very own relatively cheap server on the Internet. I started out with a 256 slice, and then I talked my wife into upgrading to a 512. I kept putting more things on my server because it was so convenient, and fun to have a 100% static IP on the internet. I've started running my own mail server, and slowly I've been moving all my personal sites to Django. I even host a website on my slice for a small fee.

After a little while, I was curious as to why all my Django apps seemed to run so slowly. I don't use my own website very often, so I didn't notice the slowness creeping in. Running top revealed that I ...

I recently read about django-webalizer http://github.com/arneb/django-webalizer/tree/master

I decided to set it up. I'd never really cared to analyze my log files before. I set up webalizer, and it was great. The django-webalizer app provides a good interface for my statistics. I'll definitely include it for any freelance work I might do in the future.

When I ran webalizer on my site for the first time, I realized there were a couple broken links, and I noticed there were some things I could do to better my site. I don't use a favicon, so I had several hundred 404s in my log. I also analyzed logs for a public facing site at work, and fixed quite a few things.

This was good, but all those errors that happened at the beginning of the month have been taken care of. webalizer doesn't ...