trisweb.com

Yep, that’s right, trisweb.com, zenphoto.org, and the rest of my sites have been moved to another new web server.

The previous moves were all opportunistic. Back in the day, I hosted on I was hosted on Berkeley’s Open Computing Facility, which was cool until I ran out of space. I moved and stuck with wha.websensei.com for a long time, who had a great deal going with a hosting “alliance” (same webmaster as caedes.net, highly recommended if you have some kind of artistic site).

Then I got in on a “startup,” and moved all my sites to their new dedicated server we got for “development.” I say “development” because no “development” actually happened, and in fact nothing ever happened. Great. They notified me that they were taking the server down in three hours, and that I should probably back it up if I wanted to keep anything. Bye guys!

From there I scrambled to find a host. I searched reviews and forums and settled on PolurNET, mostly because they had a 30-day money-back guarantee. Turns out these guys were great! I super-highly recommend them if you need any kind of general hosting, they really are a great company with reasonably-priced and feature-complete service. I spoke to the president, Anand, personally in a support chat, and he was surprisingly open and responsive to my problem.

But then I found slicehost a month later. Because, of course, you can never find what you’re looking for when you look for it—it has to be discovered when you least expect it.

Slicehost is awesome. Period. It’s a developer’s dream come true. Brand new servers with highly featured VPS plans designed for developers by developers. As soon as I saw the site, read the description, got the overall feel of it, I signed up. That’s marketing at its best, my friends. And no one was lying—they get it. My VPS server (“slice”) has been great from day one, except for a series of hardware-related crashes that I’m ignoring entirely for two reasons: one: they were on top of it immediately and kept everyone updated, and two: they refunded my payment for that entire month. I’ve had no problems since and only great experiences. Jason and Matt (owners/developers) really get it and it shows in their company. Thanks guys!

So I’ve been setting up my slice for the last month or so, off and on. It’s been fun and educational… it’s the first Linux server I’ve ever set up from scratch. I’ll post a couple of articles in the next couple days about the server configuration problems and solutions I encountered.

Also, now that I have my own server, Zenphoto will get Trac this week. It’s not JIRA or Confluence in usability, but it will work (and it won’t eat gigabytes of memory in the process… stupid Java… when will you learn…). SVN will move yet again so Trac can have access.

The bottom line: this should be solid for a long, long time. I’ve got full control over this server and my hosting now, no longer at the mercy of shared servers or bad sysadmins—except myself, of course ;-).