Moving on up II

We're a movin' on up, (We're a movin on up.) To the east side.(Mo-vin on up.)
To a de-luxe apartment, In the sky-.
Mo-vin' on up (Mo-vin on up.)
To the east side, (Mo-vin on up.)
We finally got a piece of the pie.

Pop quiz: without using Google or another search engine, what theme song is that? First person to get it will be rewarded with 10 asisaid points (Christopher presently holding the only other asisaid points — 10, I believe).

At any rate, welcome to the “other side.” If you are reading this you are on Cedar, asisaid.com's new home. Let me explain. This all started back in January of 2002 when I started ChristianSource FSLUG — a Christian Linux group mailing list. I was unhappy after a few months with cPanel's version of Mailman, so I installed my own copy. Unfortunately, I didn't realize how fast the archives would grow on the site. That along with other growth on my sites pushed my account to over 400 megs in size from about 100 megs previously (not counting my clients' web sites) and I realized I had two choices: upgrade my hosting plan or figure something else out.

As the exponential growth of the archives promised to eat up larger quotas fast, and even a few hundred more megs really would keep me from some things I've wanted to do for a long time, I realized “plan A” wasn't really all that great. And, my host's next upgrade in plan size would cost $20 more a month for only a little extra space unless I split up my sites into several smaller accounts, and even then I wasn't improving the situation much.

Enter an advertisement from 1&1, Germany's largest web host (and sister company to GMX), which recently started offering U.S. services. They spent the last few quarters of 2003 giving away shared 3-year hosting plans (I signed up for one I'm not presently using). That's getting off track — when I signed up, I ended up on their newsletter list and got an announcement for a $50 dedicated server. That sounded pretty reasonable — I was paying more than that for shared hosting!

Okay, but would I really be satisifed with a $50 dedicated server? Yeah the specs were great, but I sat on hold for 20 minutes to talk to anyone on the phone and sales e-mail responses took days to get replies to. Ok, so scratch that off the list. Same went for iPowerWeb's $50 server. Then there was BurstNET/Nocster's $59 server, but BurstNET seems to be just as unreliable as it was when I fled from their shared hosting facility in 2001 (and sales never responded — that's a step down from before).

By then, I realized that the benefits of a dedicated server were great and there just wasn't any turning back. Unfortunately, everything pointed in a direction I didn't want to go — a more expensive server package approaching $100/month. But, I decided maybe I could live with that.

Then I got the idea to sell a few basic hosting accounts, which inevitably lead to upgrading to a better server… all told, I signed up for a mid-grade server from ServerMatrix, a subsiderary of The Planet, a large datacenter in Dallas, TX, that had the largest percentage of growth for a good part of last year, according to Netcraft.

Cedar, as you might have guessed, is my server. You can see its uptime info here. Asisaid is the first of my sites to move to Cedar, but more will be moving over the next week or so. Eventually it will house all of my sites, my web design clients' sites and a few additional basic accounts purchased by CS-FSLUG members in recent weeks.

At any rate, for the first time, I'm leaving a hosting company that I really don't want to leave. I've spent two and one half years at HostingMatters, and I still think they are the best hosting company in the business. ServerMatrix's support is great too, but it's different — a basic managed server is quite different from a quality shared host, since you are still suppose to do most of the work (thus support surrounds a different set of issues). Plus, HM's small size allowed one to “get to know” the team. It was nice.

At any rate, enough rambling. Welcome to cedar. I'm hoping this will turn out to be a Good Thing (apologies to Martha on that).

By the way, asisaid is officially endorsing Bush-Cheney '04 in the Feedster tracking of blogs support for candidates.

I Blog For: