Goals:

1. Canonicalize the URLs. I chose www.jbspartners.com over http://jbspartners.com because it is what people expect, it is easier to type and I like it. Others may choose to drop the www before the domain name.
2. Apply the above consistently throughout the site.
3. Force the Home page to resolve to www.jbspartners.com, rather than to www.jbspartners.com/index.php, which is the default for WordPress

Here is what the regular expressions look like.

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.jbspartners\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.jbspartners.com/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ http://www.jbspartners.com/ [R=301,L]

RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

How it works:

The first RewriteCondition deals with resolving the URL to www.jbspartners.com

The second RewriteCondition deals with resolving index.php to www.jbspartners.com

The last two RewriteCond come with WordPress

The # (number sign) is used for comments, which the parser ignores.

The % is the variable symbol

The ! means Not for pattern matching. As in when the URL is not www.

The ^ means start of string.

The L stands for Last and tells Apache to terminate the rewrite rule and rewrite condition. Notice the L is used at the end of each paragraph.

The R stands for Redirect. 302 is temporary and 301 is permanent. This redirections is visible in the URL window of the browser.

-f matches an existing file name

-d matches an existing directory name

To Read more visit http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html

In the room with one way mirrors and multiple cameras and microphones we talked about hosting. There was a range of experience in the room – from someone that has nothing whatsoever to do with hosting (I think she stayed because she was too embarrassed to leave) to folks with co-located, dedicated and host-your-own hosting solutions.

In the end they pointed us to a “fictitious” company that offered platform independent hosting. That means that you do not have to choose either Windows or Linux / Unix for hosting. Instead they offered both, in one account. A novel idea for sure.

I host on Linux and have turned away websites written in .asp, which is a windows only scripting language that is not meant to work on a Linux server, only Windows (repress commentary). So, this idea intrigued me.

I did a bit of searching that evening and found that just such a company exists. It is called Mosso.

I called and spoke with Mike in sales back in July, 2007.

Mosso offers a virtual server solution that is clustered. Music to my ears. That means for a typical account, you can’t run out of disk space or through-put. If you land a story on the front page of Digg your web site won’t go down because of all of the visitors. Mike said they could handle 100 million database hits per month without taking your account to the limit.

Clustering means that hardware issues are not a problem.

The data center is located 182 miles from the Texas coast in San Antonio – which is geographically stable. They feel that they have the most stable network on the planet.

One difference if you are used to having root access, is that you don’t have root access, since it is a virtual server. So, you can’t install whatever you want. The admins allow about 10% of what is requested for installation. So, they run a tight ship and intend on keeping the network and your site up.

They offer a full service model, so no email only support.

So, why haven’t I moved? Migration. Moving is a pain. It is a time consuming inconvenience that clients will not pay for. Besides, the company that I host with has provided great service by phone or email and helped me with ever issue that has come up.

For those that are not stuck, check out Mosso. A Rackspace company.