Michelle
Getting involved in the search on the web-front was an experience in itself. Got involved after seeing how hard her friends and family were looking for her and I did what I did out of hope others would do the same for other people who need help, strangers or not. Definitely learned a lot about what’s vital information in a missing persons case and about server-load management.
I just wanted to share some technical aspects of the Find Michelle site and some lessons learned.
In one day, Friday, April 20, 2012, over 55 gigs of data was transferred (first picture). This was shortly after major media outlets started linking to the site as well as many of her friends tweeting the URL to celebrities (in one case, Rick Mercer retweeted it to his ~268,000 followers). The second picture shows the average hourly transfer rate (so the spike was between 8pm-9pm; 80-100M bits/sec).
I had been hosting all of the images and documents on my host, but after seeing how much traffic was being taken, I had to move the images to Imgur.com and documents/files to Dropbox (public folder). FYI, Dropbox allows 20 gigs/day of traffic for public links, and Imgur offers unlimited bandwidth (only requirement is your image(s) must receive a hit a day or else it’s deleted).
In terms of the actual page itself, it was a simple HTML page that I had designed to be client-based. If the site was server-based, my server wouldn’t have been able to handle the sheer server load. I used Google’s API to load the latest news reports, Facebook’s API to integrate the Facebook page, and Twitter’s API for both the official Twitter account her friends had set up and for a feed that tracked the hash tag. (in short, the site centralized activity in the news, on Facebook and on Twitter)
I also learned of a tool Facebook provides: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug With this tool, I was able to refresh their cached “Share Link” copy of the site to change it from my host’s landing page to the actual site content itself.
A bit of social analysis, most hits to the site were at 6pm:
First bar is Thursday, April 19 (site was launched), second cyan bar is Friday, April 20 (things started picking up), third blue bar is Saturday, April 21 (decent amount of traffic for a weekend)
It’s not every day you are able to become a part of something of this scale: scalability, stress-testing, responsiveness and overall intuition are vital.
Dropbox is Awesome
Dropbox is a real life-saver for me; I’ve used it extensively when I was in school to guarantee I wouldn’t lose my essay or exam notes in the event my computer decided to abruptly crash.
This will be a short and sweet post on Dropbox, how to get it, and how to get as much free space as possible.
- Registration is free and easy, sign up here: http://db.tt/L7iTxBG8 (<= click on this link to register, and you’ll start off with 2.25GB instead of 2GB!)
- After you’re done, go to this page and do all of the steps to get free space: https://www2.dropbox.com/gs
- Get 768MB free here: http://www.dropbox.com/free
- Are you a student? Check this page out: https://www2.dropbox.com/edu
- Get 3GB free by testing out an experimental build (time-limited opportunity): http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=55007
- Refer your friends: https://www2.dropbox.com/referrals
That’s basically it, you should be able to get over 6-7GB of free space easily if you do the above 6 steps. Not bad eh?
Now, for how to actually use Dropbox, I use it in different ways:
- Collaboration: I share a folder with friends/colleagues and we dump files for projects we’re working on in it
- Todo List/Scratchpad: a plain text document to keep notes in that’s accessible from almost anywhere.
- Universal portable apps: check out http://portableapps.com/ for portable apps. Just download what you want (e.g. Portable Firefox), drop it in your Dropbox folder into its own folder, and use it. The benefit of having it on Dropbox is that your bookmarks and settings will be synced automatically with your other computers!
- Some other useful apps to use with this method: KeePass, Chrome Portable
- TrueCrypt: for private and sensitive files, I create a Truecrypt container file and put it in my Dropbox folder. It will automatically sync on all of your computers.
- Public downloads: you can easily share files with Dropbox => drop files in the “Public” folder and right-click => Dropbox => Copy public link and send it to your friends/family or post it on the Internet!
- Backup: and the most obvious usage of Dropbox, using it to back up your files (especially school files). Once your files are on Dropbox, you can access your files by logging into Dropbox’s site!
- Torrent Downloading: if you have a laptop and a desktop, where your desktop’s always on, you can set your torrent program to watch a folder for new torrent files and automatically download them. Set such a folder as one in your Dropbox folder, so that you can download torrent files onto your netbook and copy them into that folder, which your desktop will pick up and automatically start downloading.
- Surveillance: if you have a webcam at home and a program like Yawcam that supports motion detection image capturing, you can set the output folder for saved images in Yawcam to be a folder on your Dropbox
I hope this helps in some shape or form!
My Site5 Web Host Experience
I’ve been with Site5 for 5 years, since 2007. No problems in those 5 years; that is up until last week.
Woe is me! The server is down. What do I do? I report it.
“We’re sorry, problem has been fixed, etc.” Great, time to continue on with life.
… until 4 days later when it goes down again. I submit another ticket, slightly more annoyed this time (pretty long, feel free to read through):
Then I get an email notification that they’ve created a ticket in regards to my account. Here is the “M. Night Shyamalan twist” in this story and the grande finale (my apologies for the length, but it is quite epic):
So, even though I was a 5-year-old customer of Site5, referred their services to numerous friends, and managed to drop my resource usage levels down to “very low”, they:
- accused me of being a “top 1% resource abuser” (which may or may not be true; how can I prove I was or wasn’t?)
- took forever to reply back to me (50 hours)
- completely ignored my question about how I can track my account usage on my own to make sure the changes I was making were helping decrease resource usage
- all of the above even though I was being courteous, conservative and apologetic
- and they gave me only two options repeatedly (well, one really): leave them.
And so I did, to two companies: CrocWeb (Montreal) and StableHost (Phoenix).
And the rub?
- Site5: $4.25/month
- CrocWeb: $1.48/month for the first three years (50% one-time discount code: halfcrocweb; increasing to $2.95/month)
- StableHost: $2.85/month for the lifetime of my account (recurring 50% discount code: WHTUS).
They probably don’t know that I have quite a large network of friends on multiple social networks, am the author of several Chrome extensions with over 25,000 combined weekly users, and a person with (hopefully) at least 77 years of life left. Can they expect me to tell my good friends about the “wonderful” service they’ve shown me? You betcha.
Reputation is a fickle thing.
And in case you were wondering if I managed to find a host for the conference site, Fatbox.ca is the answer (their VPS offering). Toronto-based company with high-profile clientele and excellent customer support.
(fun fact: you’re accessing andryou.com right now which is being hosted by CrocWeb)
UPDATE (Feb. 15, 2012)
Since I made this post on Feb. 6, 2012, I’ve submitted a cancellation request, got my hosting package with Site5.com cancelled, and got a refund (!) for the 12 or so remaining months left on my package.
So, here’s a basic summary:
- The Good:
- the refund (I wasn’t expecting any)
- I’ve become quite the ninja at caching and making efficient web applications thanks to this whole experience
- in the end, I’m saving money
- The Bad:
- Site5 taking 50 hours (FIFTY hours) to get back to me DURING the weekdays (from Wed., Feb. 1 @ 12:53pm to Fri., Feb. 3 @ 3:02pm)
- the increasingly chronic server downtimes before Site5 put a “foreclosure” on my account with them
- The Ugly:
- Site5′s ”one strike you’re out” mentality, even though I was a 5 year customer of theirs with no prior “resource abuse”
- Site5 not budging on their ultimatum even after I had managed to decrease my resource usage to “very low levels”; their ultimatum being where I either had to upgrade to their VPS or move away to another hosting provider
Anyways, that’s the end of this saga. On a side note, I’ve just released ScriptNo v1.0.6.0 for Chrome, which is quickly picking up new users (around 26,360 now) and was recently featured on Security Now thanks to Steve Gibson of GRC.com and Leo Laporte.
ScriptNo: A Quick Guide
A lot of work has been put into ScriptNo, an extension for Chrome that allow for you to control what loads on pages, increasing security and decreasing the time it takes for a pages to load.
This article will serve as a guide to get you quickly running ScriptNo, and configure it to your browsing needs!
Read more
ScriptNo
This post is a quick walkthrough of the features of my Chrome extension, “ScriptNo”: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/oiigbmnaadbkfbmpbfijlflahbdbdgdf
ScriptNo is quite feature-rich, so hopefully this helps walk you through setting it in such a way where it works best for you.
Just to clarify: ScriptNo leverages the “beforeload” handler in Chrome, blocking SCRIPT, OBJECT, EMBED, IFRAME, FRAME, IMG elements before they are loaded (while APPLET, AUDIO, VIDEO, and NOSCRIPT are removed after the page has been loaded; this is a limitation in the Chrome API).