You can read why you should always use a source control system like Trac/Subversion in Ronald Widha’s post.

For a cheap and easy to set up hosted Trac solution, all you need is a DreamHost hosting plan. It is extremely cheap (I have a discount code for you). You also get some other notable benefits including:

•    Virtually unlimited bandwidth
•    Virtually unlimited disk space
•    Links easily to Amazon’s CloudFront content delivery network so you can have your content mirrored at servers all around the world (blog example)
•    Free Google Adsense credit (usually $50)
•    Option to have a virtualised server with root access, with memory configurable to the megabyte instantly, and Railscrapetc
•    97-day refund guarantee
•    One free domain name registration
•    Option to host your email and documents with Gmail and Google Docs for free (this is usually chargeable for businesses)

I’ve hosted my personal sites and projects with DreamHost for years, and found them to be reliable. There have been some downtimes here and there but nothing serious. For the price I pay and the amount of resources I use (I use over 1TB of bandwidth a month) it is a fantastic deal. Ed Eliot agrees. I have also found the support to be very friendly and generally quick, and there is an option to have telephone contact (often unavailable with cheaper web hosts).

I also designed an application using DreamHost’s API and won their competition (prize money $$$ ).

You can get $10 off an already cheap hosting plan using the code JONH10. You’ll also get one free domain name registration. There is a 97-day refund period so you don’t risk anything giving it a go. Click here to sign up.

In summary, the cheapest DreamHost account will give you a one-click Trac and Subversion hosted solution.

And yes, I do get a reward if you sign up

After using both for the past few months, I have found that the DynDNS Spring Server is much easier to get started with initially, but Amazon’s EC2 is much more flexible.

Pingdom response times for Amazon EC2 server

Pingdom response times for DynDNS Spring Server

I switched from using the Panosaurus panoramaic tripod head to a Nodal Ninja 3, and am having good results. I’m sure the Panosaurus is perfectly adequate, but I couldn’t for the life of me assemble it!

Some technologies that I have been experimenting with recently include Amazon Cloud Services, including the Cloudfront, S3 storage, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. I have also made use of the Amazon Mechanical Turk, and have plenty of ideas for how it could be used. The Mechanical Turk allows you to request tasks to be done by a huge human workforce of around 100,000. As an example, you could ask for 1000 voicemails to be transcribed, the workforce would transcribe them, and the result could be returned. All these services that Amazon offer are opening up many horizons.

One such horizon that perhaps shouldn’t be opened, is the fact that with just a credit card, a nefarious programmer could spawn hundreds or thousands of high-powered virtual servers, and launch Internet attacks, break encryptions etc. I hope Amazon have a strategy in place for such events so they can be avoided. Such an attack could be on something like the weakness found in MD5 SSL certificates which may be exploited using a large amount of computing power.