About Us
So, we're on the move!
Read on to learn about the origins of hostswitcher.com and the new direction we're going to take!
How hostswitcher.com started
We started out sharing our coding journey from developing websites for family and friends to building larger web apps with enterprise level frameworks.
Hostswitcher progressed over time to show developers how to setup and host start to finish database-driven projects with more complex database design using more complete and advanced frameworks such as Laravel or Django.
We also aimed to show developers the benefits of either VPS or cloud hosting for better performance, allowing developers to offer better end to end solutions for small to medium sized organizations.
Why the move to different apps?
Database VPS
Although many simple tutorials exist for setting up Django and PostgreSQL on a Linux VPS, there didn't exist a one page guide for managing the database.
I wanted to give developers a reference and resouces for all of the PostgreSQL DBA skills, django skills reference and bash scripting skills that they might need as their applications grow.
The sheer wealth of things to learn and remember prompted me to create a skills checklist application for developers that had everything in one page following 3 simple principles:
- Each topic needs a reminder explanation.
- Each topic needs clear, simple reminder code snippets.
- Each topic needs relevant links to read further.
Some of the skills in the checklist application are:
- How to setup environment variables.
- How to create a dev settings and productiion settings file for all project variables.
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How to use static in development and production.
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How to use observe queries hitting the database.
- How to use explain and analyze to optimize queries.
- How to understand and use PostgreSQL configuration files.
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How to set different roles and permissions with confidence.
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How to backup PostgreSQL using either physical or logical backup and when/why?
- How to link a VPS to an S3 bucket in AWS.
- How to run bash scripts that automate database backup to the cloud.
Database VPS will be up and running shortly!
Snowgress
Being hugely interested in database design, we began working more on data warehouses, data analytics and data engineering. Our articles on these subjects are gradually turning into full courses!
With many companies working more and more with cloud data platforms for data engineering and analytics, we felt that hostswitcher wasn't the right place for data analytics and engineering content as hostswitcher focussed more on VPS hosting, hence the birth of Snowgress!
The name Snowgress comes from a combination of the word progress and the concept of Snowflake schema design for data warehouses.
Click here to visit Snowgress!
Summary
We hope the above explanation explains why the move of content. We'd be delighted to see you over at either Database VPS (coming soon) or Snowgress in the future!