Mr Kirkland

Apples and Lizards

I’ve just been researching the estimated cost of cloud computing on some of the various providers out there who want to absorb your servers into their clouds.

Doing this research has been like comparing apples to lizards. The providers all have their own way of billing you, and there’s a whole host of extra features offered, some free, some not. To help you on your quest I present some nice tables with the results of my investigations here.

data

I tried taking a fixed monthly budget and seeing what best value I could get for the money as I think this is a fairer and more realistic comparison. I have as far as possible searched for the best deals (e.g. using amazon’s reserved instances and GoGrid’s pre-pay plans).

* The 2Ghz is actually 1/8th of a 2xquad core 2Ghz machine
* The 4Ghz is actually 1/4th of a 2xquad core 2Ghz machine

Alas GoGrid only displays “Xeon” for the CPU, no further info seems to be divulged.

If the shoe fits

It’s become evident to me that you have to find the best fit for your needs (and future needs) in terms of price and features. It seems Amazon is the cheapest in terms of Memory and CPU, VPS.net by far the best for B/W while GoGrid throws in great freebies such as 100% SLA + Load balancing.

Here’s some quick facts to throw into the mix:

Amazon

• No persistant storage (you can use EBS or S3 for this at extra cost)
• No SLA
• Support costs $100/month or $400/month
• Lot’s of complementary services (Storage, RDB, Billing etc.)

GoGrid

• 100% SLA
• Free Load Balancer
• Free 24/7 support

Rackspace

• Free “Fanatical Support“

VPS.net

• Free Daily Backups
• Support $99/month (includes 100% SLA)

Some price comparison tools

• amazon AWS price calculator
• rack space cloud pricing
• GoGrid pricing calculator (doesn’t include bandwidth though)

Anyway, I’d be interested to hear anyone’s real experiences with hosting services in the cloud.

Following on from a previous note about Japanese and code igniter, I just found a Japanese language pack for code igniter on http://www.cilab.info/. There’s a Japanese turorial and user guide aswell if that takes your fancy.

So working on a phpbb2 -> phpbb3 upgrade this weekend and the final part was updating the script to sync my applications user table with phpbb3, so users of my application automatically have an account on the forum with the same credentials.

phpbb3 has a new password handling system so it’s not so simple to write raw queries to insert/update the phpbb database. Instead, after a little research I opted to use phpbb’s own functions to add a new user. As noted here and here you can call the user_add function from includes/functions_user.php. This works fine until you want to call the function from inside another function as noted on the above links, it’s a little tricky getting it to work.

I managed to come up with a fairly simple solution - you need to declare a number of key variables as global at the top of your function so they are in scope when you include the phpbb files.

define(’IN_PHPBB’, true);
/* set scope for variables required later */
global $phpbb_root_path;
global $phpEx;
global $db;
global $config;
global $user;
global $auth;
global $cache;
global $template;

# your php extension
$phpEx = substr(strrchr(__FILE__, ‘.’), 1);
$phpbb_root_path = ;

/* includes all the libraries etc. required */
require($phpbb_root_path .”common.php”);
$user->session_begin();
$auth->acl($user->data);

/* the file with the actual goodies */
require($phpbb_root_path .”includes/functions_user.php”);

/* All the user data (I think you can set other database fields aswell, these seem to be required )*/
$user_row = array(
‘username’ => “Username”,
‘user_password’ => md5(”Password”), ‘user_email’ => “Email”,
‘group_id’ => $default_group_id,
‘user_timezone’ => ‘1.00′,
‘user_dst’ => 0,
‘user_lang’ => ‘en’,
‘user_type’ => ‘0′,
‘user_actkey’ => ”,
‘user_dateformat’ => ‘d M Y H:i’,
‘user_style’ => $not_sure_what_this_is,
‘user_regdate’ => time(),
);

/* Now Register user */
$phpbb_user_id = user_add($user_row);