Cumulus Support

I received a notice from my ISP, Comcast, that they are discontinuing the Personal Web Page component of Xfinity service effective October 8, 2015.

I am not dead certain that they are not planning some sort of replacement, but they are quite clear that we users won't have access to files on the existing pages after October.

I've been using my Comcast web pages service for Cumulus posting (in addition to using Cumulus to post to Weather Underground).

My inclination is to try to choose a web hosting provider which seems likely to last for some years, has a modest charge with reasonable limits for storage and bandwidth, and a good enough reputation not to frighten off people I might give the link to. Page updating by FTP is an obvious requirement. I prefer to pay if that is needed to avoid subjecting my viewers to advertising.

On a first quick look for recommendations, it seems I might hope to spend something like $3 to $5 a month, and some suggested possibilities include Arvixe and SiteGround. Perhaps Google Drive or Dropbox are alternatives.

As people here are obviously getting their Cumulus pages hosted somewhere, I am especially interested in comments (good and bad) both on these alternatives I've listed and others you happen to have experienced.

If this topic is already active somewhere on the Sandaysoft site, or there is a more appropriate forum in which to conduct it, please let me know.

Steve offers we hosting here https://cumulus.hosiene.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=11876

ashreigney wrote:Steve offers we hosting here https://cumulus.hosiene.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=11876

I'm hosted on Steve, highly recommended....
Super fast speed and 100% uptime......

First, I should say that there is material on this topic in the wiki.

See:
http://wiki.sandaysoft.com/a/Webspace

Second, as the two answers I received here both suggested, I decided to use Steve's hosting service. I've stumbled about here and there a bit, but mostly this is attributable to the experience being quite novel to me.

I have vague intentions of composing a post or posts discussing stumbles I encountered, in case they might help another person negotiating this path. But for now I'll just say that once I had the site up an running at The new LynxStoll weather site hosted by Steve I made a standard "forwarding notice" page and placed it at all the html pages of the previous site, like this:

example of forwarding from the yesterday page of the Comcast-hosted LynxStoll site

as a foretaste of how minor the issues were over which I stumbled, I spent an unconscionable amount of time making a favicon and getting it to work (success, in the end).

You can safely skip this post if favicons are of no interest to you.

Until this transition, I did not even know them by name. They are those tiny icons (16x16 pixels) which appear on many but not all locations on your bookmark lists and browser tabs.

While I was hosted by Comcast, my pages never generated favicons on my browser. But as soon as I was hosted on Steve's server, one appeared. I'm not sure what it was--perhaps a stylized head of a fox, nor do I know whether it appears for all of us hosted on Steve's server unless we specify our own, but I had a look around and learned to create and install my own.

There are lots of sites out there which offer favicon images, and fewer which offer to make one for you from an image you supply, or let you edit one of their stock.

As my street (Lynx Loop) has an animal name, which I've used in my weather web site for years, getting a Lynx-based favicon was an obvious thing to try. They turn out to be pretty scarce, but I modified one provided at faviconer.com, then subsequently found a head drawing, cropped it square, and submitted it to their "right-sizer". This gave me two alternatives, between which I am still choosing.

My means of installation was one mentioned at several of the web sources on this topic. I named my preferred favicon file (already appropriately formatted as a 16x16 pixel .ico file) favicon.ico, and copied it to the server directory where any html page I'd expect a user to display was stored. Then I edited the html (in the case of Cumulus web pages, I of course edited the template file back on my own PC where cumulus runs), adding the following:
just before the </head> tag near the beginning of the file.

The bit which caused me the most trouble was that favicons don't necessarily update the first time your browser accesses a page specifying one. As I did not know this, I thought my tests were failing, and kept on fiddling. Repeated displays may be needed, and I don't know the rules of the game, though once I had all my pages equipped with the line above, it did not seem to take more than about three page displays to pick it up.

I to had the same thing, previous hosting (ISP) had there own that couldn't be changed.
Since moving over to Steve, I now use my original Microsoft chat(I'm showing my age now) character as a favicon.

ace2 wrote:Since moving over to Steve, I now use my original Microsoft chat(I'm showing my age now) character as a favicon.

Aha, and the favicon that shows on your site is the one I was seeing on mine. This is less odd than it might seen, as at the very beginning of my service there was a typo which had the result that pointing one's browser to pastoll.info actually brought up your site--so my browser had seen your favicon, and since they are to some degree "sticky" kept on displaying it for a while.

Thanks for the clarification.

Just have to force a refresh of page "crtl F5"

Steve's offering post mentions that that it is "for web sites whose purpose is predominantly to display data from Cumulus", and that users should stay within 200 MB of disk space and 20 GB per month of traffic. He also mentions that the Cumulus monthly upload traffic for a 5 minute update interval is about 5 GB.

In my personal case, I was confident that so far as traffic is concerned that Cumulus upload traffic was the overwhelming majority of my monthly usage, but I did post some other things, and was unsure as to the total file size, and as to whether Steve would consider supporting them to be outside the intended scope.

After looking around a little for means to get total file size of a directory structure over an ftp connection, I wound up downloading Filezilla, for which people describe a slighly awkward workaround involving populating but not activating a file transfer queue. But before I used that, I belatedly noticed that my long-term FTP addon for Firefox, called FireFTP, has a right-click menu option when a set of files and/or directories is selected to display "properties (incl. contents)" which directly answers this question.

By the way, as of a couple of minutes ago, FireFTP sums my current Cumulus-related disk usage at Steve's site as involving 68 files, 2 folders, and a little under 800 kilobytes. I imagine those of you with fancier Cumulus implementations may be using quite a lot more, but that is a tiny fraction of Steve's 200 Megabyte allowance.

As a check to see that my Cumulus traffic was of the order predicted by Steve, I set a copy of Windows Performance Monitor running on a time scale to display a few hours of activity, and with no browser open, and no user interaction, observed a bit over 2 kilobytes/sec of outgoing network traffic. Very close to Steve's 5 Gbyte/month prediction, even though it surely included a little bit of non Cumulus traffic.

Lastly, I "confessed" to Steve a brief summary of my other uses, my assessment that so far as traffic is concerned they would be tiny compared to my Cumulus traffic, and that I would undertake to honor the disk space matter. In case he might want to assess, I provided the links for a couple of my other present and previous uses. In my case he assented.

I have now run on Steve's hosting option long enough to declare that since it has not yet given me an upload error, it beats Comcast on upload availability. As Comcast in recent months was giving me at least one or two upload errors on most days, and not infrequently giving me a consecutive set of upload failures spanning an hour or more, I think I can already judge this aspect of site reliability is superior. (I should add that Comcast had not always been so bad as it has been recently in this respect).

Steve's hosting has been rock solid for me and Steve is ever so helpful above and beyond.