The economy trips and takes a grand fall to a messy faceplant. Little people get crushed and have their houses repossesed. I was going to have a whinge about how the rubbish exchange rate has forced me to re-locate my websites but already i’m losing the will to begin a rip off Britain tirade. It wouldn’t be accurate anyway, i’m actually moving my sites from Denmark to London. A nice discount on a dedicated (if bottom of range) server had me convinced.
It comes with the benefits of access to some tasty VPS nodes: http://vps.net/
The benefit is that as the server runs a type of software that (relatively) painlessly synchronises DNS records across 4 nameservers, 2 on this machine and 2 virtual machines acting as a nameserver each in different data centres, in theory, the email which is now outsourced to gmail, should never go down. The server may well go down as it’s just a simple dual core box but the vps nodes are hosted on two ‘clouds’ of machines. Collections of processing power and storage that share the load of all the little systems they’re split up in to. In theory, if one part of the cloud goes down, the load is shifted to the other machines in the cloud and there is no downtime. It’s definitely the future. More access to the vps could mean I enable some sort of back up regime to deposit archives there nightly.
Moving to a cheaper platform has meant standardising and Cpanel is pretty much the standard for shared hosting these days. I was on plesk previously which is fine on a dedicated server but as I was on a fully managed VPS updates where few and far between.
This also explains why I’ve moved to WordPress, something in my old e107 install needs to be checked for compatibility because I seem to have broke it, which is a shame as I really enjoy coding and themeing for e107. Something I have no time for at all any more, as I spend all my time messing around in bash prompts now, learning the Linux command line. Fingers crossed, I will fix my e107 install and still dev or theme for it. Themes are definitely lacking for it and I think that’s a shame. Finding a good WordPress theme is difficult because there is too much choice, finding a good e107 theme, the opposite.
So now it’s time to see what WP can do, digg, youtube, flickr, last.fm and facebook integration? I expect to see it all.
