We’re Celebrating A New Home!!

After several troublesome months with our prior hosting company I finally moved this site to a new host this week. The very fact that you’re seeing this post says that DNS has changed and you’re at the new place.

This is an entirely new construction, so there may be a little dust still to be tidied up and a bit of paint yet to be applied. Rest assured that I’ll be addressing any deficiencies as I find them.

In September 2008 I made the leap from  from the free hosting at WordPress.com to a shared server account at BlueHost. Their service was fine back in the early days, but a shared host can be a problem.

As more accounts got added to that host we started to suffer regular outages. Some arose from my own mistakes, most particularly making excessive use of the “Cross-Linker” plug-in for WordPress. But more recently errors in the other accounts on the server have been causing a lot of down time.

So it was that I decided to try a new, more private hosting environment. The site now resides on a virtual private server hosted at VPS.Net.

This decision was based upon the relationship that VPS.Net has established with the developers of TurnKey Linux. TurnKey Linux is an appliance-like Linux distribution that includes a ready-to-go WordPress environment.

I have a long-stated predisposition towards such appliances, so TurnKey Linux seemed very interesting. As I am no Linux expert there’s a lot of appeal to leveraging an existing user community for help with updates and such.

Moving to a VPS means that more than ever when something goes wrong it’ll be my fault, and my responsibility to get it corrected. I’m hoping that automatic daily, weekly and monthly backups of the site will keep that relatively straightforward.

My original intention was do redesign the look of the place while the old hosting contract wound to its end on Sept 1st. However, the Blue Host server was so unstable that I simply couldn’t wait to make the move.

So what you see here is a reconstruction of the very same theme that I used over at Blue Host. I still basically like it, even it it had been unchanged for almost two years.

In the course of this migration I’ve asked many questions of friends and acquaintances around the globe. I thank them all for sharing their time and experience. Thanks especially to Tim Panton, Randy Resnick, Ward Mundy, Fred Posner and Tanner Ciganick for offering their guidance.

I’m especially pleased with myself for getting through this post without making a reference to George Carlin’s classic comedy about “A place for my stuff.” In the end that’s really what this was all about…a better place for my stuff.

Now where did I leave the broom & dust pan……