Well, so much for the green revolution I was commenting on last month. The only green host left in the top ten this month is DreamHost. I still think making a host green is an admirable ethical decision, but it may not yet be the right business decision for the rest of the pack. Of course, with the price of fossil fuels rising, that may change. Who knows?

I am not really sure how inMotion managed to pop into the top ten. inMotion hasn’t even been on my radar since 2005. Possibly it is due to their shifting to an unlimited (read: unmetered) storage and transfer model. A lot more hosts are moving in that direction, perhaps following Yahoo!’s lead. While other hosts (midPhase as early as 2005!) have played with that model before, there was always a fair amount of scoffing. But when a company the size of Yahoo! does something, it demands attention. And now four of the top ten are following this model (and HostGator is rumored to be joining them soon).

In any case, good luck and happy hosting.

This week’s contestants are Social News Sites! Digg, Reddit, Propeller, Fark, Hugg, and YCombinator, come on down!

Here are the simple scores as given by YSlow. As you can see, YCombinator wins handily with Reddit being the only other site even getting a passing grade. Below we’ll take a closer look at each category and see how things really break down.

1. Make fewer HTTP requests

This category is a no brainer. Fewer requests equals faster load. YSlow scores Reddit and YCombinator with an A each, although YCombinator has the edge with just 5 requests versus 21 for Reddit. Hugg is a little more bloated, Digg is chubby, and Propeller and Fark are downright obese with 100 requests and up just to show their homepages.

2. Use A CDN

As has been noted elsewhere, this category is pretty much a guaranteed F for any small sites, but that doesn’t really apply here. All of these are in the Alex top 100,000, most in the top 10,000. And yet almost all of these sites score an F, even after I added some of the CDNs they are using. The only exception was YCombinator which managed to get a D because it had so few other components on the page. Me, I ignore this field.

3. Add An Expires Header

Do not ignore this one. It can save you a bunch of requests for images and such for repeat visitors. Unfortunately, YSlow scores based on how many page components don’t have an expires header with a long lead time. This again gives the edge to pages with fewer components, although even that didn’t help YCombinator here. All of our contestants this week get an F. And really, why not expire your page images and styles sheets a month from load? It is not like Digg and company get regular makeovers. (Yes, I know Reddit just got a makeover, but the components that are shared with the old interface didn’t change so it still would have benefited.)

4. Gzip Components

A decade ago, this might have been questionable, although probably not an issue with the browser then. Now computers are easily fast enough to unzip things on the fly and browsers support the on-the-fly compression. There is really no reason not to gzip your HTML, CSS, and JS.

That said, let’s be a little more fair that YSlow. Reddit deserves its A. If it can be compressed, Reddit does it. Digg, Fark, and Propeller all have things that could be compressed, but most of them are ads served by someone else and thus beyond their control. Beyond those, I have to disagree with YSlow. Both YCombinator and Hugg deserve Ds in this category. Neither one compresses anything that they serve themselves, which is just wasteful. Reddit is the winner here.

5. Put CSS at the top

Another obvious optimization and As across the board. Next!

6. Put JS at the bottom

This is another point where YSlow’s optimization flies in the face of conventional wisdom. My understanding of good style is that you put all of your scripts in the header rather than scattering them here and there. Yes, it is best to run your scripts after the page has loaded, but that is what the onLoad event is for. The ones that get poor marks are the ones including stuff in the head where (I think) it belongs. Skip this one.

7. Avoid CSS expressions

CSS Expressions are a Microsoft invention that nobody else supports, so, basically, nobody uses it. This category is a no-op. Hence the string of As.

8. Make JS and CSS external

This is another BS category (hmmm, maybe I need to write an article about how to interpret YSlow results), since it just gives n/a for every page. Maybe there is a setting to turn this on, but I haven’t snooped around inside YSlow source since the latest upgrade.

9. Reduce DNS lookups

A ha! Back to the meat at last. This is one that matters, since the more servers you need to talk to, the more likely you are to encounter a slowpoke. Let’s see how many servers each page needed:

Reddit and YCombinator are the winners here. Digg, Propeller, and Hugg are worse, largely due to advertising being served elsewhere. And then there is Fark. Four different image servers in fark.net, Google analytics, and a number of different external ad servers give Fark a bloat that is 60% higher than its nearest competitor. The one possible redeeming factor here is that a number of those hosts may already have been looked up due to the prevalence of Google analytics and Doubleclick usage. But 21 lookups for one page view is a little extreme in any case.

10. Minify JS

This one surprised me when I first saw it in YSlow. Surely if you gzip your Javascript you don’t need to minify it too, right? Wrong. It turns out that even with the nice general purpose compressors we use nowadays, minified scripts still compress better than regular ones. Good to know. So, how much unminified Javascript are we talking about?

You’ve got to hand it to the YCombinator guys on this one, although Reddit is pretty close on their heels. Fark and Propeller’s problems again arise from externally delivered advertising, but Hugg and Digg have no such excuse. The bulk of their transgression comes from their own code.

11. Avoid Redirects

Everyone does pretty well on this one except for Propeller, who once again suffers at the hands of their advertising partners.

12. Remove duplicate scripts

If some of the others seem like obvious steps to take, this one should almost inspire a WTF moment. Who would include the same script twice? How about anyone using external advertising? Heck, if you have more than one AdSense block on your page, you’re guilty of this one. Again, our leaders are YCombinator and Reddit.

13. Configure ETags

ETag headers serve almost the same purpose as Expires headers. Instead of telling your browser when something needs to be rechecked, the ETag header gives it a way to tell if the thing needs to be reloaded. Personally, I think Expires headers are a better solution, since they actually reduce the number of requests made, rather than just reducing the volume of data being returned. In any case, using ETag headers is good policy and not particularly hard to do, but how well do these sites do?

Reddit wins here, although YCombinator, Propeller, and Fark do okay as well. Hugg and Digg, on the other hand, do pretty miserably. I should note that YSlow behaves very oddly with respect to ETags. It seems to only treat some of the Etags as valid when computing the score, but then on the Components page, it lists them all. As I would like to believe a browser is less judgmental than that, I go by the components page.

Conclusion

Clearly, YCombinator wins both in total score and by counting categories. To be fair, however, they do not (yet) have advertising on the site, which was the downfall of some of the others are places. Reddit, on the other hand, has done very well with their recent redesign, giving them a good YSlow score even with advertising. Digg, Fark, and Propeller could all take a page from Reddit’s book and streamline their sites a bit, although clearly their failings here are not hurting their popularity.

I must admit to being a bit disappointed with Hugg’s performance. While YSlow’s suggestions are intended to improve load time, many of them will also reduce Internet load in general. Since less load equals less average electrical usage per page view, an environmental web site should try to minimize the load they create. At the very least, compressing pages and adding expires headers is easy and helps a ton. Come on, guys.

So what does this commonality mean? Well, it means one very important thing. There is a top speed of hosting.

The form of ethernet most hosts use is 100BASE-T, which can move 100 megabits, or 12.5 megabytes, of information each second. One and a quarter megabytes per second doesn’t sound so bad, unless you are downloading something really big like Linux DVD ISO.

Unfortunately, ethernet isn’t quite as good as all that. Like everything else in life, there is overhead. Phil Dykstra did a good analysis of ethernet overhead that we can use. It is a few years old, but ethernet hasn’t changed, so the numbers are good. Phil gives us a maximum efficiency of ethernet between 93.9040% and 94.9285%. Let’s be pessimistic and use the lower number. This gives us a new top data transfer rate:

Okay, so that is our top speed of data per second. Now, we have to need to know how many seconds we get per month. Obviously, some months are longer than others, but we’ll use 30 days to make life easier.

If we multiply our top data speed by our seconds per month we get:

Now, a proper geek question at this point would be: is there any way around this limit? And the answer, of course, is yes. One way is to add more physical network interfaces to the server. If the server has twice as many interfaces, it can get twice the bandwidth, and so on. Note that these are physical interfaces, not virtual interfaces on the same hardware. Simply put, to get more bandwidth from your server, you need more wires.

A second way to break the speed limit is to have more than one server. This could be as simple as mirrored servers, your own custom distributed solution, or using one of the big content delivery networks like Akamai. In any case, the limit per server still exists.

Oh, the title? That was just putting the number back into bits instead of bytes, as that is how network speeds are generally measured. As far as using scientific notation, that was a shout out to the speed of light which is generally written that way.

Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at what this means to the typical webmaster just looking for a decent web host.

The ExpirationDate plugin lets you set a deletion date for your posts (and pages).

To set an expiration date, you add a custom field called “Expiration Date” (no quotes) with the deletion date as the value. The date should be in YYYY/MM/DD format.

Important Note: The expired posts/pages are DELETED. Be sure that you want to do this. I disavow any responsibility if you delete your entire blog because you weren’t being careful.

Example

Suppose you want to delete a post on November 18, 2008. You would scroll down to the Custom Fields section of the Write/Edit Post screen and enter “Expiration Date” and “2008/11/18″ like this:

After it is set, it will look like this:

Caveat

This plugin uses WordPress’s cron feature. This allows you to set a time for things to happen, such as deleting a post. All well and good, except that it doesn’t actually happen until someone looks at a page AFTER that time. And then it takes a few seconds to actually happen. The net result for this plugin is that expired posts will still be there for the first page view of the deletion day and possibly several more if there is a lot of traffic around midnight. The post will be deleted, but not precisely at midnight. Such is WordPress’s cron.

Another month, another popular list to analyse despite the lack of much change. midPhase and its sister-site ANHosting traded places more or less. StartLogic popped back onto the list and 1&1 departed again. BlueHost still owns the top and Yahoo! still floats around the bottom.

It is interesting to note that two of the top hosts (DreamHost and ThinkHost) are both “green” hosts, powering their servers and operations with wind and solar power. It could be that a Prius effect is spreading into the hosting world as well. If you’re looking for green hosting, other choices that pop to mind are HostPapa (wind and solar), AISO (solar), and GoGreenHosting (wind). SingleHop also puts a stake into the “green” space, but from the direction of making their data center use less energy rather than buying cleaner energy.

Often I find myself complaining here that the most popular hosts don’t change much. That is to be expected to some extent. Excellent hosts are popular for a reason and word of mouth keeps them at the head of the class. Honestly, at times my griping is simply there to fill some space. When things don’t change there is not much to say.

Then there are months like February. Things changed in February. The same hosts remained in the top 10, but they shuffled around a lot. On average they moved almost three spots. It might not seem like much, but given how static the list can be at times, it got my attention.

The biggest gainers were Lunarpages (up six), and EasyCGI and DreamHost (up three each). Lunarpages added an unlimited domains option this month, which might have helped them, but the other two are a surprise. On the losing side, midPhase and ANHosting were both down. Maybe this is a reaction to their recent acquisition by UK2. I honestly have not noticed any change in my accounts with them, but who knows? If you have had problems (or good experiences!), let me know. The other big loser was Yahoo! which was down three spots. This one is probably due to them being way overdue for an update on their review, since they just updated their plan to be much more competitive.

Time will tell if things have changed for good or if people were just bored in February. As always, good luck and happy hosting.

January is a wretched month. Just ask my wife or mother. The both have birthdays in January and both find the month irredeemably bleak. Everything is cold and barren. Frozen, if you will.

Speaking of frozen things, the top 10 list for January looks a lot like the December one. In fact, half of them didn’t move at all. The only noteworthy change is HostGator popping up to fourth place, after being out of the top five since last March. Of course, with their revamped offerings, they deserve to show some movement and it was good to see that you folks noticed their improvements.

Let’s hope Punxatawney Phil has some good news tomorrow. I am sick of winter.

Here are their cited criteria for membership:

- The blog contains unique, quality content that provides opinions, insights, and/or recommended resources that provide value to readers of the blog. Articles, videos, public domain works, press releases, and content written by others are okay to be used on the blog, but the ratio of unique content should far outweigh content from other sources.

- The blog should be updated on a regular basis (at least several times a month) and should not just go a few months between posts.

- The blog should already contain at least 10-12 quality posts. New blogs with very little content will not be accepted.

- The blog’s primary contain must be in English. BlogRush is currently not available for non-English blogs.

- The blog should not contain an excessive amount of advertising and links and very little actual content. The focus of the blog should be quality content.

- The primary content of the blog should not be “scraped” content from other sources and/or script-generated pages for the sole purpose of search engine rank manipulation. The focus of the blog should be quality content.

- The blog’s content (or advertising) should not contain any of the following types of content: hate, anti-racial, terrorism, drug-related, hacking, phishing, fraud, pornographic, nudity, warez, gambling, copyright infringement, obscene or disgusting material of any kind, or anything considered illegal.

So, any guesses as to which one bagged me?

Yep, not enough posts. Maybe I will reapply when I get up to the 10-12 range. In the meantime, I’m going to get back to hacking up some WordPress plugins, reviewing web hosts, and looking for work.

Like I said, I’m not all that broken up about it.