A few years ago I toyed with the idea of moving my website hosting to dreamhost, an inexpensive web host with generous bandwidth and storage limits, but found that my blog software is not well-optimized and performed poorly on the shared hosting machines at dreamhost. I toyed with caching schemes but never did get it working to my satisfaction.
This weekend I tried a new idea: host the media files on dreamhost, but run the cgi on my home system. This turns out to be really simple: from time to time, rsync all the media files from the home system to dreamhost, and update a timestamp to reflect when the last rsync was. When building the link to one of the files, check if the local file is older than the timestamp. If so, form a URL to the media site. Otherwise, form a URL to the local site.
So far the results look good; when loading a photo-heavy page from outside my house the page is complete in a fraction of the time.
Entry first conceived on 1 December 2008, 14:41 UTC, last modified on 15 January 2012, 3:46 UTC
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