Some days I bite off more than I can chew. This past week has proven to be one such day… quite a really long day, I might add (though not quite as long as some people would like the days of Creation to be!).
As a grand experiment, I signed up for a VPS with dreams of tweaking it — pimping it out, as the kids are saying — to suit my fancy.
After several days of fussing with Ubuntu, Apache, PHP, and MySQL, I finally (finally!) got to the point of being able to install WordPress. Lo & behold, it worked!
But not without grief. Managing file permissions was a nightmare, basic security measures that work on shared hosting seemed to block way too much, and getting e-mail functions to work? That wasn’t happening.
So that’s why I haven’t been blogging for the past few days. I’ve been stressing over hosting issues. I’ve decided to stay with my current host Dreamhost (although now I’m experimenting with their flavor of private servers; I’ll keep you posted).
In the process, though, I noticed just how much I had accumulated throughout the hosting account. It’s almost ridiculous how many obsoleted blogs I had sitting around — thousands of posts in the ether, unable to be accessed.
That’s all rectified. Most (not all, yet) of my blogging experience is now available right here at KingdomGeek: over 1,000 posts dating back to 2005! (Hurray, I’m an established blogger again!…)
That said, I recognize that many of those old posts require much attention — broken images, broken features provided by since abandoned plugins, broken character encoding, and even duplicated posts afflict the archives of this ol’ blog.
Oh, and many of those old posts may contain material which today I would totally disagree with. That happens over the course of five years, you know?
So welcome back to KingdomGeek, and I do hope you’ll pardon the dust.
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{ 3 responses to this entry. Add yours! }
Welcome back, Rick – Good for you.
I sympathize, I really do. I get terrible sticky sweat from dealing with hosting. You know how you exercise and the sweat is good, happy sweat? But you deal with hosting and the sweat is scary, bad sweat. All this to say, I salute you. I”m looking down the barrel of the same gun myself – moving a big blog to new hosting (though not as big as yours LOL). I doubt I’ll manage it in just a few days!
Who are you hosting with now and who are you looking to move to? The two “big” solutions for blogs would be Dreamhost & MediaTemple; both of them have regular hosting (although each with distinct spins on it) and both offer a beefed up “virtual dedicated” environment.
I’ve used both. MediaTemple’s slightly more reliable due to their cloud-based environment, but I think Dreamhost’s performance is slightly better. Also, for sheer ease of use, it’d be tough for anyone to beat out Dreamhost — their custom-built control panel is pretty much the best in the industry that I’ve ever seen.
I’m switching to Dreamhost’s virtual servers for both Web & database serving, and I’m thinking it’ll be around $30/month before whatever discounts I may or may not get — I’ll know for sure once I start seeing actual billing being racked up.