Moving, Moving...

It feels good to get a move on this server migration. And, it feels good to have asisaid at its new home. For those wondering, this site (along with Ed's site, which also made the jump in the last twelve hours), are now living in Washington, DC. That provides a little regional diversity with the other server living in Dallas, TX. I like the idea of spreading things out “just to be safe.” The new server is a quad core Xeon X3220 paired with 4 GB of ram and 2×250 GB hard disks. It's a fairly robust system, I think, that I hope will keep my clients' sites, and my personal and company sites, running for years to come.

My Dallas, TX, server will be reserved for a few larger sites desiring a server with fewer sites on it, as I mentioned in my last post. This server, with its more robust specs, will house the majority of sites I host — though I still host fewer than 50 sites total, so it is really an overpowered beast. I like having room to grow.

I really like the new provider I am working with too. This server is located in SoftLayer's DC data center. SoftLayer was founded by some former employees of the Planet — the datacenter operator for my other server — and has some nifty features. For example, virtually every server comes with a private VPN to work with the server on, KVM over IP via that VPN, “virtual racks” to help manage servers and the ability to reload the OS at will. While in a hosting environment that last feature isn't so practical, it'd be a lot of fun if you had an extra “lab” box. Want FreeBSD today? Sure, have at it! Ubuntu tomorrow? Go right ahead. Need RHEL for the weekend? No worries.

Oh, and did I mention they built my server and had it online — including a few customizations — in just two hours? I'm impressed.

So here I am, beginning an exciting migration and embarking on this new idea of offering geographical hosting diversity. I think I might offer a plan that bundles accounts on both servers for a discounted price. I'm not sure who would find that useful, but the idea seems exciting to me, and I think I would have gotten such an account at some point, so I figure, “why not try it?”