Roaming South America

New web site server

December 8, 2006

New web site server.

I am in the process of moving our web site to a new server.After years of running my own server at my home, it has come tothis - moving to a hosted server. Why? Because of the reallylousy cable service I'm getting. Back in WA we had DSL and it wasnearly 100% reliable. Now here in this apartment we have cable,which is fine for TV, but not for hosting a web site. Firstproblem was I had a home service account, and the cable companydoesn't allow web servers on a home account - they block ports 80and 8080, so one cannot run a home web server. Does the phonecompany do that on DSL accounts? No. Anyway, to get the homeserver working on the web I had to upgrade from home service tobusiness service, which of course, costs more. How has theservice been? Really bad. In just 4 months the cable company techhas been here to replace the modem 3 times and I've spentcountless hours on the phone with other techs. The site hasprobably been down as much as it has been up.

So I finally decided enough is enough, and contacted a hostingcompany, and am now in the process of moving my site to a hostingcompany server. Now I have to deal with disk space limits,bandwidth limits, database limits, no shell access, no directorydeleting using 'rm -rf' (which really simplifies things whenremoving full directories). The restrictions are a bitridiculous, but they do it to make sure their servers are secure.I understand that. It's just a pain to have to deal with all thatafter years of not having any of those issues with my own webserver here at home.

Oh well, looks like I've got everything up except the gallery(photo album), which I am working on. It's just been a bitpainful because of the aforementioned restrictions. Hopefullywhen our house is built and we're finally in it, I will be ableto have my web site back on my own server, there is no cable outwhere we are building, but there is DSL.