mcdruid.co.uk { web: development; }

I like to have automated daily database backups set up on my servers - for those hosting relatively small sites, the database dumps can usually be compressed down small enough to be sent as an e-mail attachment by the cron script which does the database dump. This is a really simple and cost-effective way of having offsite backups which provide daily snapshots of sites which are easy to access if anything goes wrong.

I haven't used shared hosting for quite a while, but for a few sites I've worked on recently an account on a shared host seemed the best choice in terms of how much disk space and bandwidth they'd get for a very small cost.

One obvious problem with shared hosting though is the lack of control; I was careful to choose a package which provided up-to-date versions of apache, php and mysql but subversion was not installed, and the version of vim on the server didn't have support for some basic things like syntax highlighting.

This article illustrates using the *nix commandline to chain several commands together to automate a repetitive task - in this case preparing some drupal modules into neatly labelled directories.

The example here covers quite a few different useful commands and commandline techniques, which we can't really hope to cover in exhaustive detail; there's plenty of good documentation out there for everthing we mention.