I always wondered which servers do Indian websites like Flipkart use for static content . Websites like whoishostingthis.com make it super easy to figure out where the server is hosted instead of parsing out the data from the whois records.
Check out http://www.whoishostingthis.com/img4.fkcdn.com for one of their image servers. Considering most of the visitors are from India, I assumed, they’d use a CDN from India than servers from Virginia.
2 years back : Tried out S3 with various options
3 months back : Re-enabled S3 on account and got billed unnecessarily
today : Realized that there were 40k+ log files each of size close a KB lingering in the S3 Bucket
now : running the command on the bitgeek.in assuming it would help me with the lantencies ( compared to requests from/to India to US )
s3cmd rb —recursive s3://BUCKET (via StackOverflow)
now + few hours : Free from the frustration of saving log (access) files.
What can be done better here ? : S3 Should introduce ‘Batch Calls’ and ‘Log Clean up’ mechanisms . The least I could add here is , latencies suck . There should be a way to get this done at the server side. May be its way faster for users of EC2 which might share the same geographical location.
Till date, I have been trying to get mail to all of my users ( for some, users I have not authorized ) and talk about the bloddy spam mails in Russian from Pakistani servers. Accidentally, found out that there was an option/feature to ‘add email aliases to existing users’ after using Google Apps for good 3.5 years . For one thing, I feel stupid, for the other, I feel happy. Now its just aliases and filters baby !
Sites like YouTube, Amazon Video On Demand, other sites which stream live TV shows set up this restriction based on users location. The idea is ‘Its ILLEGAL for you to see the video that is not released in your country ’ . In order to bypass this restriction, you need an IP address from that country.
If you do not want to spend a dime. The ‘free & best’ way would be to get an EC2 instance or a cheap hosting service and setup ssh on the host and run
ssh -D 12345 user@host.com # HTTP Proxy via SSH
and point your SOCKS 5 proxy in Firefox to localhost:12345 and browse the websites as a user of the country (your host) is from.
Finally got to complete my homepage at sair.am and also at kunala.com (Yup! its mine! recently acquired it) . I like making my webpage in different styles again and again all the time. In case you are looking for hosting, check out http://bigeek.in/
Maintaining four individual domains having similar content is a little pain.
So, I decided to scrape off the cc domain sairam.co.cc(which I bought for $3) after an year and so, planned to redirect it to a constructed website on Weebly.
But, there is a little problem with the way you redirect from one url to another at http://www.co.cc , You cannot redirect a .co.cc domain to another .co.cc domain which could be used by spammers. But the flaw in the concept was one could redirect links via other links. The one that is free, short, customizable, famous is a URL shortener. So I cooked up a tinyurl link for my site and got it running.
Also, checked using http://www.url.sc/ – A free anonymous proxy (since DNS usually takes few hours to get updated).
So, what’s new about sairamkunala.co.cc ?
I am making another homepage for me on a neat, good looking, customizable interaface (so customizable that you can also add javascript into it), add analytics, add links, adsense,flickr widgets etc. for free on Weebly. The Interface provided by Webbly is very intuitive and neat.
The positive points about the site
Negative points:
Actually I am bored of buying costly domains like .am which are $50 for outsiders . Of course there are more domains like .tt,.im which offers two letter and one letter/digit domain which can be considered to be costlier.
.tt [src] = $500 per year. Ex: ma.tt
.im [src] = 2 letter £495, 1 letter £995 per year. Ex: ff.im
So, the cheapest one could get it for of course free . http://www.co.cc offers big names like sairamkunala.co.cc for free and small names like sairam.co.cc for $3 per year. And also, has a nice interface for managing the free hosting for ns, cname entries. Adding to it, you get a webstore website domain.cc.cc for free.
Note: The .cz.cc, .co.cc, cc.cc & uni.cc domains are not official TLDs. They are used for free URL redirection services, though .cz.cc, .co.cc and .cc.cc can be used as a real DNS service[src]
Sairam's Blog 